Sleeper Agent is the chilling, little-known story of a successful American-born, Soviet-trained spy in the U.S. atomic bomb project during World War Two — a real-life thriller right out of “The Americans” TV series.  The spy, code name “Delmar,” was the only Red Army intelligence officer, known thus far, to have full U.S. security clearance at America’s highly secretive Manhattan Project.George Koval was born in Iowa and lived there until 1932 when his parents, Russian Jews who had emigrated years earlier to escape anti-Semitism, moved their family to the Soviet Union to live out their socialist ideals.  After earning a chemistry degree in Moscow, Koval was recruited by the Red Army as a spy and sent to the U.S. in 1940. He quickly enrolled at Columbia University where he would have the opportunity to meet scientists who would be part of America’s atomic bomb program.  

He lived in the Bronx and his main cover shop was in Manhattan.  After being drafted into the U.S. Army, he used his scientific background and connections to secure an assignment at the Oak Ridge site, where uranium and plutonium were produced to fuel the atomic bomb. There, and later at a second top-secret location in Dayton, Ohio, he had full access to all facilities and passed classified information to Moscow.

As American as baseball, “Delmar” did not stir suspicions; and the FBI did not identify him until several years after he had returned to the Soviet Union. By then, the damage was done. In 2007, Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded Russia’s highest civilian honor to Koval for his contribution to the making of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb. That year William J. Broad, in the New York Times, called Koval “one of the most important spies of the 20th century.”

 Drawing on extensive new research, this revelatory, fast-paced narrative delves into the mind of a spy, unveiling the moral complexities of an intelligence agent born in America, trained in the Soviet Union, lured by political ideologies, and committed to scientific research.  Though his self-designed tapestry of lies and half-truths depicts a traitor, Koval was also a dedicated scientist and a rugged survivor of anti-Semitism in both Russia and America: someone who knew the human cost of oppression.

To be sure, while the daring work of Koval and his fellow spies presents a page-turning story, it is also a glaring reminder of the backlash of bigotry.  So too, Sleeper Agent transcends debates about the scale of Soviet espionage in wartime America, focusing on the facts that show how politics and opportunism blurred the view of the spy hunters, allowing someone like Koval to get away.