Abram, a carpenter, settled in Sioux City, Iowa, which, at the turn of the 20th century, was home to a sizeable Jewish community of merchants and craftsmen.

[2]: 43 The Koval family worked on a collective farm and were profiled by an American communist daily newspaper in New York City.

The journalist Paul Novick wrote that the family "had exchanged the uncertainty of life as small storekeepers ... for a worry-free existence for themselves and their children.

"[2]: 43  While Isaya became a tractor driver, George Koval improved his Russian language skills in the collective and began studies at the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology in 1934.

[6] According to Arnold Kramish, an American colleague he befriended and with whom he re-established contact in 2000, it was there that Koval assumed deputy command of the local GRU cell.

[7] During the beginning of World War II, Congress had re-introduced the draft (conscription) in September 1940, and Koval registered for it on January 2, 1941.

According to historian Vladimir Lota, Koval's handlers wanted him to steal information about chemical weapons and felt that he would not be able to do so while drafted.

His CCNY classmates looked up to the older Koval as a role model and father figure who never did homework and was a noted ladies' man, never knowing about his Soviet education and wife.

[7] Koval enjoyed free access to much of Oak Ridge;[7] he was made a "health physics officer" and monitored radiation levels across the facility.

At the time, project scientists discovered reactor-produced plutonium was too unstable for the intended bomb designs, and that polonium initiators (urchin) were needed for the necessary chain reactions to occur.

[2]: 44  Koval was charged by his handlers with watching Oak Ridge's polonium supply to transmit information about it through a Soviet contact named "Clyde".

[2]: 45 Koval was transferred from Oak Ridge to a top-secret lab in Dayton, Ohio, on June 27, 1945, where polonium initiators were fabricated.

Telling his friends he was thinking about taking a trip to Poland or Israel, Koval secured a passport for six months' travel to Europe.

Eventually, Koval managed to obtain a teaching job there; his students often laughed at his foreign pronunciations for technical terms.

[2]: 47 While other spies such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs were caught after the war, Koval apparently went unscrutinized for years.

Among the reasons given for his maintained cover was that inter-service politics undermined efforts to perform proper security checks on employees.

[7] In 1999, Koval was living on his small pension in Russia and had heard that U.S. war veterans like himself could apply for Social Security payments.

In 2000, the Social Security Administration's Office of Central Operations, Baltimore, Maryland responded with a one-sentence letter: "We are writing to tell you that you do not qualify for retirement benefits.