One of Russia's biggest Cold War spies graduated from Sioux City's Central High in 1929.
Let that sink in.
A Sioux City native infiltrated clandestine U.S. nuclear facilities and sent secrets about building the atomic bomb back to Moscow. On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin posthumously presented the Hero of Russia medal to George Koval, a Little Maroon noted in his high school yearbook for holding office in a group that cherished loyalty and democracy.
Shirley McCloud found the 1929 Central yearbook and flipped to a page containing Koval's portrait. The saying next to it: "A Mighty Man is He."
"Don't that get ya?" asked McCloud, the gift shop manager for the Castle on the Hill, the old Central campus.
Koval, it appears, duped the United States throughout the 1940s as he worked with the military on the top-secret Manhattan Project, which resulted in construction of the first atomic bomb.
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Putin's office released a statement this week hailing Koval as "the only Soviet agent who infiltrated secret U.S. nuclear facilities which produced plutonium, enriched uranium and polonium for building atomic weapons."
His work apparently sped up the Soviet Union's ability to develop a bomb of its own. The Russians detonated their first atomic weapon in 1949, surprising leaders in the West and escalating Cold War tensions.
Why Sioux City?
Koval's parents, Abraham and Ethel Koval, fled Czarist Russia before the birth of son George in 1913. While the Jewish couple ran a small shop here, he attended Woodrow Wilson school and then Central. He took part in debate and served as a secretary for the school's literary society.
"I was told he was a good baseball player, but the school didn't have a baseball team at that time," McCloud said. "He wasn't listed as participating in any sports."
In 1932 his family emigrated back to Siberia, to a city that, according to the New York Times, Joseph Stalin promoted as a secular Jewish homeland. Young Koval graduated with honors from the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology in Moscow. He was then trained and sent back to the United States to study electrical engineering at City College in New York. He enlisted in the Army in 1943, using his own name, and was directed to the atomic bomb project at a plant in Tennessee.
It isn't known how he communicated with Moscow, or the frequency of his reports. But they reached Russia. "Despite the top-secret regime at the facilities and strict control over staff, Mr. Koval managed to send descriptions of the sites back to Moscow," Putin noted.
He returned to Russia after World War II, presumably after American agents found Russian literature at his home.
Koval died last year in Moscow at age 93, teaching until his death at Mendeleev Institute in Moscow. Putin may have bestowed the honor on Koval this week as a way to bolster patriotism in Russia on the eve of Dec. 2 elections. The award also comes as Putin expands spy efforts, The Associated Press reports.
McCloud walked past the Central High Hall of Fame display Tuesday, saying no such citation is in the works for this "infamous" Little Maroon. She read of Koval's involvement with the school's Chrestomathian Literary Society and noted the society was known for its "ideals, uprightness, loyalty and democracy ..."
She shook her head and let the words uprightness, loyalty and democracy sink in. "He failed on that," she concluded.
-- The Associated Press contributed to this story.
