Boris Pash
One of the more curious of White Russian tales was that of Boris Fedorovich Pashkovsky. Born in San Francsico in 1900 to a Russian Orthodox preist (the future Metropolitan Theophilus) invited to America six years prior and returned there in 1906, the young Boris joined his father back in the Motherland during the Great War and, while his father served with various YMCA groups, the teenage Boris fought with a Tsarist artillery regiment and then with the Whites in the Ukraine– leaving with Wrangel’s fleet in November 1920. Both returned to America following the Civil War in 1922 and, while his father became Orthadox Bishop of Chicago, Boris, changing his name to a simpler Boris Theodore Pash, would attend college and become a teacher, joining the Army Reserve as a natural for the intellegence branch. During WWII, he would become chief of counter-intelligence at the IX Corps Area headquarters at the Presidio of San Francisco, and as part of that have a hand in investigating Dr. Robert Oppenheimer’s ties to the Reds. He would go on to become the head of the Alsos Mission in Europe from 1943-45, the operation unpeeling the Axis nuclear weapon program that concentrated on seizing facilities, materiel, and scientists related to program. Accused of having sort of easy morals when it came to “wet affairs” like kidnappings and assassinations, he later shuffled among the CIA and other agencies in the post war era and left government service in 1963 and later inducted into the U.S. Army’s MI Hall of Fame. Pash was played by Casey Affleck in Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film “Oppenheimer.”