At the beginning of November, President Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded a Hero of Russia medal to the American-born spy George Koval, who was the only KGB man to infiltrate the Manhattan project. Koval, who worked under the codename “Delmar”, died in Moscow back in 2006, and there has been no other official reason for the timing of this posthumous award. According to the Kremlin press release, despite his position on the top secret project, “Mr Koval managed to send descriptions of the sites back to Moscow, along with information on their areas of work and the processes and production volumes of the elements in question.” The most information about Mr. Koval has been collected by the New York Times (see excerpts after the jump), and many other news agencies have picked up on it, including the AP which carries the headline: “In time of raised tensions, Moscow honors its Cold War spies.” Here’s another strange coincidence: according to the Times piece, at one point Koval was assigned to a top secret Dayton facility which oversaw the production of Polonium 210. What is Moscow trying to say to its people and to the world by celebrating a long dead Iowa-born atomic spy? Perhaps the kneejerk reaction would be to assume that the Kremlin wants to play the nationalism card as much as possible before the elections, or simply wanted another jab in the eye of the Americans, who have known about Koval for years but have not disclosed the breach. One blogger I just found sees it a different way: “The Soviets went to great lengths to present themselves as the orgininators of their own bomb. By admitting that the bomb had been acquired through espionage, the status of Soviet science is somehow diminished, and with that the entire concept of having a bomb being correlated with a scientifically advanced society is tarnished. … it is becoming more evident that the ability of the Soviet Union to develop a nuclear weapon in such a quick span of time is largely due to espionage, rather than scientific activities.”