Sleeper Agent · Police Misconduct · The Stocking Mask
Your weekend longreads are here
the true crime that's worth your time
Let’s continue our look at the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award nominees and whether the 2022 contenders for Best Fact Crime are worth adding to your reading list.
This week’s nominee is Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away by Ann Hagedorn.
George Koval was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who settled in idyllic Sioux City, Iowa in the 1920s. His parents were loyal socialists who saw the political mindset as the only path to end the systematic oppression of Jews, and eventually returned to Russia in 1932 with the hope of a better life there than the one they’d left decades before.
George went on to become a gifted student of chemistry in Moscow. Soviet intelligence then recruited him as a “science spy,” having him enroll first as a student at Columbia University. Later, they had him enlist in the U.S. Army, where he was assigned to the secretive nuclear weapons facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee where work was under way to build an atomic bomb.
Sleeper Agent chronicles the unusual and relatively unknown tale of Koval, an avowed communist who, because he spent his youth assimilating into American culture, was able to remain undercover even as he fed information to the Russians — including on U.S. efforts to develop the technology that would lead to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The book also details the vast network of underground sites across the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom involved in various aspects of this highly secretive military initiative. Of particular interest was the Dayton Project — a network of safe houses and production facilities in Dayton, Ohio where work on developing the polonium trigger for the atomic bomb went undetected.
I can’t recall other spy craft-focused Edgar true crime nominees in the past, and at first glance, Sleeper Agent seems like a bit of an outlier. Where I think it works best as true crime is in its detailing of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s failure to identify atomic espionage as a real and significant threat.
While McCarthy was preoccupied with chasing down communists in Hollywood, Soviet spies were feeding information on America’s efforts to weaponize nuclear energy back to Russia, which would use this information to build out its own nuclear program.
By the time the U.S. caught on, Koval had fled back to Moscow and taken up a quiet life as a university professor — in fact, a number of years passed between the time he left the U.S. and our intelligence pinpointed him as a potential spy.
I also appreciate how Sleeper Agent weaves in an exploration of xenophobia and anti-Semitism in Koval’s life story. Anti-Semitism in Russia initially led Koval’s parents to immigrate to the U.S., but the U.S. wasn’t perfect: allegations that Jews were responsible for the Russian Revolution resulted in the red scare of the 1920s and deep discrimination against Russian Jews in America. This anti-Semitism sent Koval’s family back to Russia on the cusp of World War II.
Still later, Koval faced discrimination in Russia when he returned from his stint spying on the U.S. As Koval bounced back and forth, assimilating between Russia and America, his identity as a Russian Jewish socialist always charted the course.
Sleeper Agent isn’t straightforward true crime, but fans of Cold War spy craft and mid-century American military history will find a lot to dig into. — Susan Howard
Another Friday, another day I’d like to send you off to your weekend with some longreads. Here are some good ones! — EB
How The Atlanta Spa Shootings—the Victims, The Survivors—tell A Story Of America [Vanity Fair]
This wide-ranging piece from May Jeong isn’t simply a retelling of the year-old mass homicide, it’s a sensitive look at the victims, the Asian community in Atlanta, the role of massage professions as a way for immigrants to stay afloat, and much more. Snip:
One Saturday afternoon in June, I drove over to the suspect’s parents’ house, a late ’70s single-story slate-gray ranch house surrounded by maple, red oak, and white pine, at the beginning of a dead-end road. It had been three months since the shootings, before the suspect would plead guilty to the first four murders and before he would plead not guilty for the other four, charges for which he still awaits trial. The plea deal lets the suspect avoid the death penalty, which continues to be pursued for the remaining charges. The D.A. has called the killings hate-related crimes—acts that further exacerbated well-founded fear among Asian Americans. The suspect has told authorities he was motivated by, in his words, sex addiction.
I rang the bell at the family’s home. No one answered. Before I could decide what to do, a police cruiser showed up. An officer who introduced himself as Sergeant Clement explained that the neighbors—multiple people—had called to report “suspicious activity.”
“The one good thing about Cherokee County,” he told me, “is that we look out for each other. It’s like how it used to be in the ’70s.”
I asked Clement what, specifically, the neighbors were worried about. “To be honest,” he said, “what they are worried about is…they are afraid of revenge.”
The Stocking Mask [Staunton News Leader]
This is a two part series (part one, part two) on the Staunton "Stocking Mask Rapist," who terrorized the city in the 1970s — but whose capture was delayed by a botched investigation. The story is behind a paywall, but, two things: 1) You can get a six-month subscription for $1 (that’s one dollar) and 2) you get a nice behind the scenes story on the investigation for free. Here’s a snip from that:
I saw a police force that botched an investigation by assigning a predator’s crimes out to multiple detectives and patrol officers as unrelated incidents, and agreed to withhold incident reports from the press for months in some cases. To protect the victims? To protect the city’s reputation? What about the women who were leaving their windows open at night, unaware a threat was roaming their streets at will in the evenings?
And when the pressure came to take action, they responded by arresting multiple Black men. At one point, two Black men were incarcerated while the man in the stocking mask struck yet again.
I saw the police and the city — and my newspaper — respond to the threat to women by publishing “commonsense” tips for how women could avoid becoming a victim. These tips included, of course, how women dress and walk and behave in public.
It’s a good read on its own! But if you have a dollar to spare, the whole series is worth that Washington.
The hidden billion-dollar cost of repeated police misconduct [Washington Post]
The Washington Post “collected data on nearly 40,000 payments at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments within the past decade” for this extremely lengthy interactive piece. The piece doesn’t have the greatest flow: in a lot of ways, it feels like a laundry list of bad cops. Here’s an example:
In the D.C. region, more than 100 officers have been named in multiple claims that led to payments.
In Prince George’s County, Md., 47 officers had their conduct challenged more than once, resulting in at least two payments each accounting for $7.1 million out of $54 million paid within the decade. Two in five payments involved an officer named in more than one claim. The totals are skewed by a $20 million payment to the family of 43-year-old William Green, who was fatally shot while his hands were cuffed behind his back in the front seat of a police cruiser.
Cpl. Clarence Black was the subject of four settled cases, the most in the department. In 2010, the county paid $125,000 to a husband and wife who alleged Black assaulted them. In 2013, a Temple Hills family received $60,000 after alleging Black and four other officers illegally entered their home. In 2014, a woman got $10,000 after alleging Black punched her shoulder. And in 2019, a man collected $190,000 after alleging that Black illegally handcuffed him as he retrieved a bottle of water.
I don’t mean to Monday Morning quarterback this remarkable effort from the Post, not at all. But its litany of police misconduct incidents has a numbing effect after a while. “Oh, he just punched him?” I found myself thinking, “Well, that’s not as bad as the guy who got show several scrolls ago.”
(Hmm, maybe that’s how Tom Colicchio got to “this certainly didn’t rise to the occasion of some of the other chefs, some of the stuff that they were doing or allegations of rape and things like that” when talking about the claims against Gabe Erales. I take it all back!)
I don’t know if there’s another way the Post could have run at this data to make it have more impact — would another format have worked better? Anyone who wants to workshop an adaption of this, you can find me in the comments.
Next week on Best Evidence: Sarah makes her triumphant return, Candy gets a trailer, and whatever’s left on our budget doc will be delivered to your (virtual) doorstep.
What is this thing? This should help. Follow Best Evidence @bestevidencefyi on Twitter and Instagram. You can also call or text us any time at 919-75-CRIME.