My books center on causes and injustices and my quest is always to find the compelling narrative that will bring alive for the reader the people and issues at the core of the cause.  But this time I discovered a remarkable story first, without realizing its true meaning until the research deepened.

It all started with a 92-year-old man I was interviewing for a book idea that seemed to be going nowhere.  Perhaps he sensed the futility.  He knew that I had grown up in Dayton, Ohio and thus toward the end of the interview, he asked if I knew about the secret site tied to the Manhattan Project in Dayton.  It had something to do with polonium production and the trigger of the atom bomb, he said. A decade or so ago, someone had told him that a Soviet spy worked there toward the end of WWII and  lived nearby – which happened to be barely a mile from where I had spent my childhood years.

For a week or so after the interview, I continued my pursuit of the other story, but then, with curiosity brewing, I took some time off to explore what the gentleman had told me.  Though somewhat skeptical, I was curious enough to make a few calls and check some details on the Internet.  I was impressed by the two feature articles, one in the New York Times in 2007 and one in Smithsonian Magazine in 2009, about Koval in the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s awardVery quickly, I became nearly obsessed with what would become a marvelous research adventure. 

My connection to Dayton made it all quite interesting, of course, especially considering that two of my childhood friends had lived close to where one of the polonium facilities had operated, a building razed after the war because of potential radiation contamination – barely a mile from the house where I grew up.    But it was the piecing together of the spy’s life that was most exciting, as the new and often surprising facts began to surface.   After all, George Koval was a Red Army intelligence spy — GRU not KGB — and thus his story is part of the Soviet espionage history yet to be fully exposed.  Though I knew that not all of the long lingering questions could be answered, I was determined to solve a few mysteries about the man and his double life.

Initially, I was most fascinated with discovering the details of what he did on his “business trip” in America and how he got away with it – especially how he slipped through the Manhattan Project security. Also, having lived in NYC for nearly 20 years, I became equally intrigued with the process of tracking his “fellow travellers” in the NYC spy networks and mapping out the Manhattan cover shops and banks tied to his handler.   Koval’s overall chronology and how it overlapped with major events of the period, in both the USSR and America, was quite engaging as were the details of J. Edgar Hoover’s hunt for him and the challenges of his 1948 return to the Soviet Union.  Most enlightening, though, was the research into the unrelenting anti-Semitism in Russia, America and the Soviet Union during the first half of the 20^th century – and what an impact it had on Koval’s life.

In short, I was fortunate that my initial doubts were swiftly put to rest and replaced by hard-driving determination that resulted in barely missing a day of work throughout the years of creating the book.  Hopefully my dedication to this rather fascinating story has resulted in a page-turning experience for many readers.