Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away by Ann Hagedorn

Author:Ann Hagedorn [Hagedorn, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, 20th Century, Military, World War II, General, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies)
ISBN: 9781501173967
Google: 7M8DEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-07-20T23:49:11.946812+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE ESCAPE

From the point of view of his landlady, George Koval could be best described as an earnest student and a “true loner.” Since his move to Valentine Avenue in 1946, Mrs. Gardner had observed his daily routine of leaving early each morning, returning several hours after dinner, and quietly walking up the four flights of stairs to his apartment. She assumed he would spend the rest of the evening doing all that good students do. The fact that he earned his CCNY degree in two years did not surprise her, largely because his studies were the center of his life—from her point of view, that is.

To Mrs. Gardner, Koval was a timid, remote man who appeared to be burdened by a sad past. This was likely because, as he told her, he had lost both parents at a very young age and was raised in an orphanage in Cleveland, Ohio. “He supposedly had one aunt who never took much interest in him,” she later said, “and he appeared to be very poorly fixed financially.”

However, when away from Valentine Avenue Koval was no melancholy introvert bordering on poverty. As one of his CCNY friends would later say, “He was very popular at school. Everybody liked George.” And because he was older than most of his classmates, he had “a moderating influence in virtually all forms of discussion.” He also had a reputation for being “quite the ladies’ man,” as one of Jean Finkelstein’s brothers later pointed out, adding, “Before he dated Jean, he would bring exotic looking, attractive, refugee-type women from Manhattan to parties. Always someone different.”

Though his grades were consistently good and his class participation noteworthy, it was not uncommon for Koval to skip classes, or even occasionally to fall asleep in class as if he had been up all night. But this, like many things about him, easily slipped into the fabric of student life, almost unnoticed. A former classmate would later comment that he didn’t think twice when he first saw Koval smoking a cigarette down to the last visible speck, pressing the stub to the point of burning both fingers. “I thought, not exactly the typical American way of doing it. More European or somewhere.”

Another of his CCNY classmates described Koval as “a rather mysterious person.” On the one hand, he was quite gregarious, but on the other “nobody knew much about him at all, very little about his background.” And though he averted questions about himself, he did share his political views. “Koval was very conservative politically and he would let you know it. On one occasion when the American Youth for Democracy (AYD) gained control of the Student Council, Koval led a group of engineers in opposition to the tactics and policies of the AYD in the council,” said the classmate. The AYD, formerly known as the Young Communist League, was an avid promoter of communism and actively involved in working-class struggles. It was on Hoover’s hit list.

But whatever was even slightly enigmatic about Koval never scared away friends, of whom he seemed to have many.

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