In ‘Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away,’ former Wall Street Journal reporter Ann Hagedorn provides a captivating account George Koval, who was born in Iowa and died a Soviet hero.

Malcolm Nance, the onetime National Security Agency cryptographer and current Brookings Scholar, once observed, “nothing in the world happens by coincidence.”

But when it came to George Koval, the Soviet sleeper spy carefully embedded into the Manhattan Project who, with his all-American background and scientific training, revealed key American nuclear secrets to his Moscow patrons, the U.S. national security establishment seemed all too willing to overlook as mere coincidences the unlikely concatenation of events leading to Koval’s betrayal.