By Joe Spier
CALGARY, Alberta, Canada — In 1934, the United States sent a team of baseball all-stars to Japan to play a series of exhibition games. On the team were the likes of baseball hall of famers, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Also on the team was Morris “Moe” Berg, a mediocre utility ball-player who was a pretty awful hitter with a paltry lifetime batting average of .243. So, what was Moe Berg doing on this team of all-stars?
Moe Berg was born on March 2, 1902 in a cold-water tenement flat in Manhattan, the youngest of 3 children, to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family. Within a few years, the family moved to Newark where Moe grew up.
Moe Berg was intellectually brilliant. Graduating from high school at the top of his class, he went on to enroll at NYU where he spent two semesters before being accepted to Princeton, an unusual accomplishment at that time for a Jewish boy of poor means. There, he obtained a degree in modern languages graduating magna cum laude. Following graduation, the University offered Moe a teaching position with its Department of Romance Languages. He declined. Thereafter, Moe studied history, linguistics and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. Moe could speak eleven foreign languages in all, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish, taught to him by his father, as well as Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, German Italian, Japanese and Sanskrit. Later Moe obtained a law degree from Columbia Law School and in 1928 passed the U.S. bar, although he never really practised law.
However, Moe Berg’s greatest love was baseball. He would say, “I’d rather be a ballplayer than a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Moe began playing baseball at the age of seven for a Methodist Church team using the less ethnic alias of Runt Wolfe. He starred in high school and went on to play shortstop for Princeton’s varsity team, its captain in his final year.
In 1923, one of the early Jewish players to crack the major leagues, Moe was signed by Brooklyn. He played in the minor leagues the next two seasons and then was called back up to the majors by the Chicago White Sox. While with the White Sox, Moe, originally an infielder, became a catcher by accident after three Chicago receivers became injured in a matter of days. He remained a catcher for the rest of his playing days mostly as a substitute backstop. Moe played for the White Sox until 1930 and then for the Cleveland Indians, Washington Senators and Boston Red Sox until his retirement in 1939 when he called it quits at the age of 37. Following Moe’s retirement, he coached for 2 years with the Boston Red Sox
During his career, Moe was known as the “brainiest guy in baseball.” He was a good defensive catcher with a strong arm but a dismal hitter. In his 15-year major league career, Moe hit but 6 home runs. Legendary New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel once commented, “Berg could speak in 8 languages but couldn’t hit in any of them.”
Moe’s father regarded baseball as a useless American frivolity and despite Moe’s pleadings, never saw his son play a game.
How did unexceptional baseball player Moe Berg in 1934 come to be playing in Japan on a major league team of all-stars? At a time when the United States was seeking intelligence about Japan, what attracted the American authorities to Moe Berg was his intelligence, his facility for languages, his ability to speak Japanese and his knowledge of Japan. He had been there two years earlier to teach baseball seminars and had stayed on to tour the country. And Moe had the perfect cover. He was a baseball player and baseball players were going to Japan. The U.S. government recruited Moe as a spy and at the last minute had him join the team of all-stars. Moe took with him to Japan a 16mm Bell and Howell movie camera.
In Tokyo, Moe skipped his team’s final exhibition game, claiming to be ill. Instead, he donned a Japanese long, black kimono, purchased some flowers and went to a hospital, one of the tallest building in Tokyo, ostensibly to visit the daughter of the U.S. ambassador who had just given birth. Speaking Japanese, he got her room number, but walked past her room, threw the flowers in the garbage and rode the elevator up to the top floor from which he climbed some stairs and snuck onto the roof. There he extracted his movie camera that he had secreted in his kimono and shot film of military installations, the harbour, shipyards and industrial complexes. Moe’s film would later be used during World War II to help determine bombing targets of Tokyo.
Following Moe Berg’s retirement from baseball in 1941, he was hired by the Office of Inter-American Affairs to travel through Central and South America to monitor the physical fitness of U.S. troops stationed there and as a goodwill ambassador. While in South America, he obtained intelligence on the Nazis in Brazil. Moe also, during this time, aired a broadcast directed to the people of Japan via short wave radio in which, in fluent Japanese, he pleaded “as a friend of the Japanese people for the Japanese to avoid a war you cannot win.”
Recognizing his ability to speak multiple languages with little or no accent, in August 1943 Moe was recruited into the OSS, America’s World War II intelligence agency, as a civilian agent. The OSS would later morph into the CIA after the war. Moe learned the tradecraft of espionage at training camp then passed his final test by sneaking into a heavily guarded U.S. defense plant and pilfering classified material.
Moe’s first wartime secret mission, at the age of 41, was to parachute into Nazi occupied Yugoslavia to access the relative strength of two competing anti-Nazi resistance groups for the purpose of determining which should receive the most American aid. Moe reported that the partisan fighters under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito were the most effective and had the support of the Yugoslav people. His report swung the greater aid to Tito’s partisans. Following the war, Tito would become Prime Minister of Yugoslavia.
Thereafter Moe was placed on a special OSS team tasked with discovering the enemy’s progress in developing nuclear weapons and with seeking out Axis physicists and engineers to endeavour to convince them to abscond Europe for America. Studying textbooks, Moe taught himself a great deal about nuclear physics. He entered German occupied Norway as part of an Allied effort to destroy a heavy-water plant that could be used in the development of nuclear weapons. Moe spent parts of 1944 and 1945 in Italy and Germany helping convince several prominent Axis atomic scientists to defect to the U.S. before the Russians could get their hands on them. Upon hearing of one success, U.S. President Roosevelt is reported to have said, “I see Berg is still catching pretty well.”
The highlight of Moe’s career as a spy came in December 1944. German scientist Werner Heisenberg, at that time the world’s greatest theoretical physicist, was giving a lecture at the university in Zurich. Moe was sent to attend the lecture in the guise of a student, albeit an elderly one, to listen for anything that would indicate if Germany was on the verge of developing an atomic weapon. Moe carried with him a pistol and a potassium cyanide capsule. The pistol was to be used to kill Heisenberg if Moe determined that the Germans were close to becoming atomic bomb ready and the capsule was to kill himself to avoid capture by Nazi soldiers who were guarding Heisenberg. Moe heard nothing that warranted him to use the pistol. Both he and Heisenberg were to live another day. Through Moe Berg, the U.S. became satisfied that the Nazis were not close to detonating an atomic bomb.
Moe Berg stayed on with the OSS until the organization dissolved in 1945. Following the war, he worked for a time with its successor, the CIA. Moe begged the CIA to send him to Israel. “A Jew must do this,” he wrote in his notebook. The CIA declined. The Agency did dispatch him on a couple of assignments behind the Iron Curtain to the Soviet Union and to satellite countries under Soviet influence, to discover how far along the Russians were to having atomic weapons. On one occasion when asked for credentials, Moe bluffed his way through a Russian checkpoint into Czechoslovakia by holding up a paper with a big red star on it. It was the Texaco Oil Co. letterhead. The CIA did not find Moe’s intelligence particularly useful and cut him adrift in 1954 when his contract expired.
Moe never married and spent the last 25 years of his life as a drifter with no real job or home, living off the largesse of friends and family.
Moe Berg passed away on May 29, 1972, at age 70, due to injuries suffered from a fall at his sister’s home. His final words were, “How did the Mets do today?” He died before learning that the Mets had lost. Moe’s remains were cremated and the ashes taken to Israel by his sister where they were spread over Mount Scopus.
Following his death, the President of the United States bestowed upon Moe Berg, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest decoration awarded to an American civilian. The medal was accepted by Moe’s sister.
Morris “Moe” Berg never made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame but is the only baseball player to be honored by having his baseball card on display at CIA headquarters. That is because (to borrow language with slight modification from award winning author Dwight Jon Zimmerman) “Moe Berg batted a measly .243 for the White Sox but 1.000 for America.”
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Spier is a retired lawyer with a keen interest in Jewish history. You may contact him via joe.spier@sdjewishworld.com