A Russian spy once lived on this block in the Dayton View Historic District. I read about it in the new book “Hidden History of Dayton Ohio” by Tony Kroeger.
George Koval was born in Iowa but moved to Russia for several years. He was trained in the 1930’s by the GRU, the Russian Military Intelligence Agency. This group has a long history of spying in the U.S. and ran illegal operations here in both the 2016 and the 2020 presidential elections.
Koval moved back to the U.S. in 1940 and was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was eventually assigned to the Manhattan Project and moved to this block in Dayton in 1945. In Dayton he worked in a top secret lab that eventually learned how to make polonium and how to use it to detonate an atomic bomb.
The U. S. thought Russia was far behind America in atom bomb technology, but thanks to Koval and a few other spies they quickly caught up. The Russians surprised the world when they had their first atom bomb test in 1949.
After the war, Koval told friends he was leaving on a European vacation. He never returned to America and died in Russia in 2006. His Dayton spy project became public knowledge in 2007 when Putin awarded him a posthumous title of Hero of the Russian Federation.
