Boris Theodore Pash (20 June 1900-11 May 1995), born Boris Fedorovich Pashkovsky, was a White Russian emigrant who served as a US Army colonel and military intelligence officer during World War II.
Biography[]
Boris Fedorovich Pashkovsky was born in San Francisco, California in 1900, the son of a Russian Orthodox priest who had been sent to America in 1894. His family returned to Russia in 1912, and Pashkovsky and his father served in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I; the younger Pashkovsky served in the White Russian navy in the Black Sea from 1918 to 1920. Pashkovsky served as a Russian-English translator in meetings with the British, and, after the Bolsheviks seized power, Pashkovsky found employment with the YMCA in Berlin, Germany and moved to the United States in 1923. Pashkovsky changed his surname to Pash while attending Springfield College in Massachusetts, and he taught at Hollywood High School in Los Angeles from 1924 to 1940 before joining the US Army reserve. Pash served as chief of counter-intelligence at the Presidio of San Francisco in 1940, investigating the possibility of the Japanese establishing a base in Mexico during World War II, and interrogating J. Robert Oppenheimer and other Berkeley Radiation Laboratory personnel about their continued connections to the CPUSA. Pash did not believe that Oppenheimer was a spy, viewing him as a man of honor and with concern for his reputation, and he had Oppenheimer accompanied by counter-intelligence agents rather than removing him from the Manhattan Project. After the war, Pash served under Douglas MacArthur in Japan from 1946 to 1947, preventing the Soviets from gaining a foothold in Japan through a local Orthodox church. He served as a military representative to the CIA from 1948 to 1951, as a special forces planning officer in Austria from 1952 to 1953, as Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence of the Sixth Army from 1953 to 1956, and in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Guided Missiles in Washington DC from 1956 to 1957. He testified at the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing, where he recounted the misgivings that he had about Oppenheimer in 1943. He left the Army in 1947 and retired from the civil service in 1963, and he lived to see the end of CPSU rule over Russia in 1991 and visited post-communist Russia. He died in Greenbrae, California in 1995.