If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I’ve been cleaning out our collection of books. The other day I ran across one that was given to me a few years ago because “it should be right down my alley.” I’m not sure about that, but I did find the book very interesting and I recommend it. The book is The Catcher was a Spy by Nicholas Dawidoff. It’s a biography of Moe Berg — a baseball player and a WWII spy.
The back cover of the book says Moe Berg was one of the most confounding men that ever donned a glove in Major League Baseball. I’d say that’s probably true….
Morris “Moe” Berg was born in New York City in 1902. He was the son of Russian immigrants and graduated from high school with honors and was accepted to Princeton University. His father wanted him to be a lawyer, so he eventually got a law degree.
Moe studied languages at Princeton, including ancient Indian Sanskrit and Egyptian hieroglyphics, along with other “ordinary” ones. While at Princeton, Berg played shortstop for the Princeton baseball team. It immediately became obvious that he was a different kind of ballplayer — instead of the usual hand signals, he communicated with his second baseman in Latin.
After he graduated in 1923 — to his father’s horror — Moe joined the Brooklyn Robins (the team that later became the Brooklyn Dodgers) as a backup catcher. The salary he made playing baseball paid for linguistics study at the Sorbonne in Paris and put him through the law program at Columbia University.
Moe Berg played for five different major league teams during his 16-year baseball career. When he played for the Washington Senators, he broke an American League record in the 1932-33 season by playing 117 consecutive full games without an error. But his lifetime batting average was .243 — so bad that it inspired the line: “Moe Berg can speak 12 languages, and he can’t hit in any of them.”
In 1934, an American League all-star team was put together for a tour of Japan. There were some pretty impressive players picked for the team — including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The team also included Moe Berg. Some say that Berg was put on the team because he spoke Japanese, and he also understood Japan’s culture better than the average American did. That made him very popular with the Japanese.
Moe used some of his time in Japan to take movies of Tokyo from the rooftops of buildings — including the harbor and shipyards, industrial sites, and military installations. In later years, some sources claimed that Berg was working for U.S. intelligence, but others say he did the filming on his own. His home movies, even to this day, generate disagreements. According to a popular story, they were used in 1942 to help plan General Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing raids on Japan. Other historians don’t believe the pictures would have been of much use.
But no matter — making those movies steered Berg toward a new career. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the forerunner of the CIA and was run by William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, and he thought Moe Berg would make a good spy. Berg spoke a number of languages, was exceptionally intelligent, and he had a knack for getting people to talk to him — all good spy qualities.
When Moe’s baseball career was over in 1939, the OSS offered him a job. He didn’t get off to a particularly good start — he couldn’t even figure out where to carry his gun. He apparently tried to tuck it into his jacket, his belt, and his sock — but it kept falling out. According to the book, one time he just had a friend hold it for him. He traveled the world — to Casablanca, Rome Algiers, Yugoslavia, and Norway. And he always wore that traditional spy-wear — the trench coat.
In 1944, the Manhattan Project (the effort to build an atomic bomb before the Germans) was underway. Berg was sent to Zurich, Switzerland, to attend a conference of scientists. His job was to find out how far along the Germans were in building their bomb. His instructions were if he determined the Germans were close, to kill Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s leading atomic physicist, right then and there. Moe, posing as a Swiss physics student and caring his trusty gun (that he had finally learned how to carry) and a suicide pill (just in case) listened as Heisenberg gave a lecture on basic physics — a ho-hum kind of talk. Berg would have to do more digging. After the lecture the opportunity presented itself. At a dinner party later that night, Moe had a chance to chat with Heisenberg. The physicist spilled the beans — he complained that the German project was lagging behind the Allies. He supposedly told Berg, “It’s a shame, Germany has already lost the war.”
So Moe didn’t have to use his gun or his suicide pill. He sent a message with the good news to the OSS in Washington, who passed it on to President Roosevelt. The President responded with “My regards to the catcher.”
Obviously Moe Berg did other work for the OSS but a lot of it isn’t detailed in the book. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom, but he refused it. He said he respected “the spirit in which it was offered.”
After the war, Moe apparently became something of a vagabond. But he still went to baseball games as often as he could and he was an entertaining storyteller who sometimes expanded on the facts.
Because of that, it made it hard for historians to sort out the actual events of his life. He died in 1972 and left no estate — only his legend — and a few mysteries……
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What an interesting story!