George Koval (1913–2006) was a Soviet intelligence officer. According to Russian sources, Koval's infiltration of the Manhattan Project as a GRU agent "drastically reduced the amount of time it took for Russia to develop nuclear weapons". Koval was born to Jewish immigrants in Sioux City, Iowa. Shortly after reaching adulthood he traveled with his parents to the Soviet Union to settle in the Jewish Autonomous Region near the Chinese border. Koval was recruited by the Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate, trained, and assigned the code name DELMAR. He returned to the United States in 1940 and was drafted into the US Army in early 1943. Koval worked at atomic research laboratories and, according to the Russian government, relayed back to the Soviet Union information about the production processes and volumes of the polonium, plutonium, and uranium used in American atomic weaponry, in addition to descriptions of the weapon production sites. After the war, Koval left on a European vacation but never returned to the United States. In 2007 Russian President Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded Koval the Hero of the Russian Federation decoration for "his courage and heroism while carrying out special missions". (more...)
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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1910:
Aviator Eugene Burton Ely performed the first takeoff from a ship, flying from a makeshift deck on the USS Birmingham in Hampton Roads, Virginia, US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Burton_Ely
1940:
Second World War: Coventry Cathedral and much of the city centre of Coventry, England, were destroyed by the German Luftwaffe during the Coventry Blitz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz
1971:
NASA's Mariner 9 reached Mars, becoming the first spacecraft to orbit another planet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_9
1984:
Cesar Climaco, mayor of Zamboanga City, the Philippines, was assassinated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesar_Climaco
1990:
Germany and Poland signed the German–Polish Border Treaty, confirming their border at the Oder-Neisse line, which was originally defined by the Potsdam Agreement in 1945. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oder-Neisse_line
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
salacious (adj): Promoting sexual desire or lust http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/salacious
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
The world of today has achieved much, but for all its declared love for humanity, it has based itself far more on hatred and violence than on the virtues that make one human. War is the negation of truth and humanity. War may be unavoidable sometimes, but its progeny are terrible to contemplate. Not mere killing, for man must die, but the deliberate and persistent propagation of hatred and falsehood, which gradually become the normal habits of the people. It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life's course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving truth. --Jawaharlal Nehru http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru