The Iowa Boy Who Loved Baseball, Leaked Atomic Secrets to the USSR, and Jump Started the Cold War

History Unplugged Podcast · Oct 26, 2021 · 52m

Of all the WW2 spies who stole atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project, none were as successfully, or as unassuming as George Koval. He was a kid from Iowa who played baseball, and loved Walt Whitman’s poetry. But he was also from a family of Russian immigrants who spent years in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and was trained as a spy for the proto-KGB.

A gifted science student, he enrolled at Columbia University, and befriended the scientists soon to join the Manhattan Project. After being drafted into the US Army, George used his scientific background and connections to secure assignments…