This has been making the email rounds - maybe you've seen it?
Moe Berg: A second-rate baseball player but a first-rate spy.
When
baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig went on tour in baseball-crazy
Japan in 1934, some fans wondered why a third-string catcher named Moe
Berg was included.
The answer was simple: Berg was a US spy. Speaking 15 languages—including Japanese—Moe Berg had two loves: baseball and spying.
In
Tokyo , garbed in a kimono, Berg took flowers to the daughter of an
American diplomat being treated in St. Luke’s Hospital--the tallest
building in the Japanese capital. He never delivered the flowers. The
ball-player ascended to the hospital roof and filmed key features: the
harbor, military installations, railway yards, etc.
Eight years later, General Jimmy Doolittle studied Berg’s films in planning his spectacular raid on Tokyo.
Catcher Moe Berg
Berg’s
father, Bernard Berg, a pharmacist in Newark, New Jersey, taught his
son Hebrew and Yiddish. Moe, against his wishes, began playing baseball
on the street aged four. His father disapproved and never once watched
his son play. In Barringer High School, Moe learned Latin, Greek and
French. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton—having added
Spanish, Italian, German and Sanskrit to his linguistic quiver, During
further studies at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and Columbia Law School he
picked up Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Arabic, Portuguese and
Hungarian—15 languages in all, plus some regional dialects.
While playing baseball for Princeton University, Moe Berg would describe plays in Latin or Sanskrit.
Tito’s partisans
During
World War II, he was parachuted into Yugoslavia to assess the value to
the war effort of the two groups of partisans there. He reported back
that Marshall Tito’s forces were widely supported by the people and
Winston Churchill ordered all-out support for the Yugoslav underground
fighter, rather than Mihajlovic’s Serbians.
The parachute jump at age 41 undoubtedly was a challenge. But there was more to come in that same year.
Berg
penetrated German-held Norway, met with members of the underground and
located a secret heavy water plant—part of the Nazis’ effort to build an
atomic bomb. His information guided the Royal Air Force in a bombing
raid to destroy the plant.
The R.A.F. destroys the Norwegian heavy water plant targeted by Moe Berg.
There
still remained the question of how far had the Nazis progressed in the
race to build the first Atomic bomb. If the Nazis were successful, they
would win the war.
Berg
(under the code name “Remus”) was sent to Switzerland to hear leading
German physicist Werner Heisenberg, a Nobel Laureate, lecture and
determine if the Nazis were close to building an A-bomb. Moe managed to
slip past the SS guards at the auditorium, posing as a Swiss graduate
student. The spy carried in his pocket a pistol and a cyanide pill. If
the German indicated the Nazis were close to building a weapon, Berg was
to shoot him—and then swallow the cyanide pill. Moe, sitting in the
front row, determined that the Germans were nowhere near their goal, so
he complimented Heisenberg on his speech and walked him back to his
hotel.
Werner Heisenberg—he blocked the Nazis from acquiring an atomic bomb.
Moe Berg’s report was distributed to Britain’s Prime Minister,
Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and key figures in the team developing the Atomic Bomb.
Roosevelt responded: “Give my regards to the catcher.”
Most of Germany’s leading physicists had been Jewish and had fled the Nazis mainly to Britain and the United States.
After
the war, Moe Berg was awarded the Medal of Merit— America’s highest
honor for a civilian in wartime. But Berg refused to accept, as he
couldn’t tell people about his exploits. After his death, his sister
accepted the Medal and it hangs in the Baseball Hall of Fame, in
Cooperstown, N.Y.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once described Moe Berg as “a most unusual fellow”.
When
the war ended, Moe Berg found himself unemployed. He did receive
occasional intelligence assignments, including a visit to the Soviet
Union, where his ability to speak Russian was valuable. Traveling with
other agents, when asked for credentials, by a Soviet border guard in
Russian-dominated Czechoslovakia, he showed the soldier a letter from
the Texaco Oil Company, with its big red star. The illiterate soldier
was satisfied and let them pass.
He
lived with his brother Samuel for seventeen years and, when evicted,
spent his last final years with his sister, Ethel. A lifelong bachelor,
he never owned a home or even rented an apartment. He never learned how
to drive. When someone criticized him for wasting his talent, Berg
responded:
“I’d rather be a ballplayer than a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
A sports cartoon about Moe Berg
He
would often drop in, unannounced, at friends’ homes—expecting to be
fed. He always wore a black suit (he had eight), a white shirt and a
black tie. His interest in baseball continued throughout his life.
Moments before he died (aged 70), Berg asked his nurse:
“How are the Mets doing today?”
His remains were cremated and his sister spread them over Mount Scopus in Israel.
