Boris Pash

Boris Pash (1945)

Boris Theodore Pash (born June 20, 1900 in San Francisco , † March 11, 1995 in Greenbrae , California ) was an officer in the United States Army . During World War II he was initially responsible for investigating potential security holes in the Manhattan Project . As the military director of the Alsos mission , towards the end of the war, he was responsible for uncovering the German nuclear program . After the war, he incriminated the scientific director of the Manhattan Project Robert Oppenheimer in a security hearing.

education and profession

Pash was born the son of a Russian Orthodox priest Theophilus Paschkovsky , who was sent to California by his church in the 1880s . His mother was of Serbian descent, but she was also born in the United States . When Pash was ten years old, his father was called back to serve in Russia , taking his family with him.

During the Russian Civil War , Pash served in the Belarusian Navy on the Black Sea . At the age of 19 he held the rank of signalman and served on the flagship of the fleet. As he was fluent in Russian and English, he was used as a translator in meetings between the British and Russian Admiralty . For his services he received the Russian Order of St. George .

When the Bolsheviks gained the upper hand at the end of the civil war , he joined the YMCA and fled to Paris . There he taught in Russian refugee camps until he was able to return to the United States, where he began training as a physical education teacher at the YMCA School in Springfield , Massachusetts . After completing his training, he was employed as a teacher until the beginning of World War II , most recently at Hollywood High School in Los Angeles .

Military career

Manhattan project

Leslie R. Groves and Robert Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project

In the interwar years he joined the United States Army Reserve , where he was assigned to military intelligence and further qualified in this area. In June 1940 he was called up into active duty and seconded to the Presidio in San Francisco as head of counterintelligence in the IX Corps . After the United States entered World War II , he was responsible for investigating potential security vulnerabilities at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , through which Soviet spies could have obtained classified information about the Manhattan Project . He drew attention to himself through unorthodox security measures and his energetic interrogations of the project staff about their communist contacts.

In particular, he was involved in the incident known as the Chevalier Incident . The scientific director of the Manhattan Project Robert Oppenheimer was taken aside at a dinner party in the winter of 1942/43 by his friend and literature professor Haakon Chevalier . Chevalier informed him of an offer from George Eltenton , a mutual friend, to forward technical information about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union . Eltenton himself had been contacted by the Russian spy Peter Ivanov. Oppenheimer clearly declined, but initially did not report the episode to the security authorities out of consideration for Chevalier.

It wasn't until six months later, on August 25, 1943, that he mentioned Eltenton's attempted contact to a security officer. The following day, Oppenheimer was interrogated by Pash and the questioning was secretly recorded. During this interrogation, Oppenheimer refused to give the name Chevaliers, and after a trick question from Pash, he accidentally spoke of several attempts by Eltenton. This refusal of Oppenheimer led to the fact that the military director of the Manhattan project Leslie R. Groves asked him again privately to give the name. Oppenheimer continued to resist. Only when Groves later gave him the military order to mention the name, he had to reveal Chevalier. While Chevalier lost his job, the episode initially had no consequences for Oppenheimer, as he was too important to the Manhattan Project at the time.

The Alsos Mission

Groves was deeply impressed by Pash's expertise and drive. After successfully completing his assignment, he was appointed to Washington, DC . Groves commissioned Pash, now with the rank of lieutenant colonel , to organize the Alsos mission under his leadership . The aim of the mission was to expose and destroy the German nuclear weapons program. The physicist Samuel Goudsmit was appointed scientific director of the company during the course of the mission .

Alsos I

In the Alsos I mission he landed in Italy in mid-December 1943 and first reached Naples , where he was able to interview Italian naval officers and university professors. However, these could not give him any significant information about the German nuclear program. In the course of the winter he moved on to Rome , where he was able to free the Italian physicists Edoardo Amaldi and Gian-Carlo Wick , but they too could not give him any further information. On February 22, 1944, he had to return to the United States without success.

Alsos II

Shortly after landing in Normandy Pash entered in June 1944 in the Alsos II mission France . On August 25, 1944, he reached Paris , where he met the French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie , who was waiting for him on the steps of the university. But even this could give him few useful facts about the German nuclear program. Only after the liberation of Brussels on September 9, 1944 was he able to find evidence of larger uranium deliveries to the German Auerwerke and Degussa in the premises of the Belgian uranium producer Union Minière du Haut Katanga . In the Philips factory in Eindhoven he learned about high-voltage equipment that had been supplied to the German physicists Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Karl-Heinz Höcker at the University of Strasbourg on behalf of the Reich Research Council . When Strasbourg fell at the end of November 1944, he immediately went to the university there, but the two scientists had already left. However, in von Weizsäcker's office, which had been left hastily, he found letters from and to other members of the Uranium Association . From the letters one could conclude that Germany did not have an atom bomb and would not be producing one in the foreseeable future.

Groves, however, was not convinced, because the documents found in Strasbourg pointed to a suspicious research laboratory in Hohenzollern Hechingen out where the uranium project to Werner Heisenberg of Berlin from had been relocated. In order to forestall the French troops, Groves and Pash planned to attack the facilities in Hechingen with paratroopers from the air or to destroy them by bombing them. However, the physicist Goudsmit was able to convince Groves that the German uranium project was not worth the effort, and so it was decided to undertake a land operation.

Boris Pash (right) during the Alsos III mission in Hechingen in April 1945

Alsos III

On March 6, 1945, Pash was promoted to colonel . In the Alsos III mission, he entered Germany with the 6th Army Group on March 23, 1945 . In Heidelberg on March 30, 1945 he was able to pick up the physicists Walther Bothe and Wolfgang Gentner , who were working there on their cyclotron . There he also learned that another part of the uranium project had been relocated from Berlin to Stadtilm in Thuringia under Kurt Diebner . Since Stadtilm would be in the Soviet occupation zone after the planned division of Germany , Pash hurried to Thuringia to pick up Diebner there. Although he managed to arrive there shortly before the Russian armed forces, Diebner had already fled towards Munich with his staff and materials .

Between April 22 and 26, 1945, he was finally able to uncover the secret research laboratories of the German uranium project in Hechingen and the nearby towns of Tailfingen and Haigerloch . It turned out that the German research with the Haigerloch research reactor had not even reached the point of producing a critical nuclear chain reaction . Pash ordered the facilities to be destroyed (which did not happen), the scientists involved were arrested, and the valuable materials flown to the United States. The mission was ultimately successful.

Pash published the experiences from this time in his book The Alsos Mission in 1969 .

post war period

After the war ended, Pash was awarded the Army Distinguished Service Medal for outstanding service and was inducted into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame . From 1946 to 1947 he served as head of the International Relations Department under General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo .

From 1948 to 1951 he was the US Army representative at the CIA . There he was the head of the controversial Program Branch 7 (PB / 7) department , which was responsible for the detection of double agents within the CIA. From 1952 to 1953 he then served as a planning officer in the Special Forces in Austria . From 1953 to 1956 he was sub-department head of intelligence in the staff (Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence) of the 6th US Army .

In April 1954, Pash testified about the Chevalier incident in a security hearing against Robert Oppenheimer (see also In the J. Robert Oppenheimer case ). The recordings of Pash's first interrogation weighed heavily on Oppenheimer, as he had subsequently given different versions of the events at that time. After this hearing, Oppenheimer lost his clearance certificate and his political influence.

From 1956 until his retirement in 1957, Pash worked in the US Department of Defense .

Publications

• Boris T. Pash: The Alsos Mission . Award House, New York 1969 (English, new edition: Ace Books 1980, ISBN 0-441-01790-8 ).

supporting documents

literature

• Per Fridtjof Dahl: Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy . Institute of Physics, Bristol / Philadelphia 1999, ISBN 0-7503-0633-5 (English).
• Samuel Goudsmit : Alsos. The failure in German science . Sigma Books, London 1947 (English).
• Leslie R. Groves : Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project . Da Capo Press, New York 1962 (English).
• Klaus Hoffmann: J. Robert Oppenheimer: Creator of the first atomic bomb . Springer, 1995, ISBN 3-540-59330-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} William H. Allison: Colonel Boris T. Pash - a portrait by WH Allison. (No longer available online.) City of Haigerloch, June 24, 2001, archived from the original on February 27, 2014 ; accessed on September 29, 2009 . 
2. ↑ Hoffmann: J. Robert Oppenheimer: Creator of the first atomic bomb , pp. 113-114
3. ↑ Hoffmann: J. Robert Oppenheimer: Creator of the first atomic bomb , pp. 118-122
4. ^ Groves: Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project , p. 193
5. ^ Dahl: Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy , pp. 247-248
6. ^ Dahl: Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy. Pp. 250-251.
7. ^ Dahl: Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy , pp. 252-253
8. ^ Dahl: Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy , p. 259
9. ^ Dahl: Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy , p. 262
10. ^ Hoffmann: J. Robert Oppenheimer: Creator of the first atomic bomb , p. 247f.