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.
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.
Email from Hyung Hwa Lee
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