Moe Berg: Catcher, patriot, soldier, spy
By most accounts of the era, he was not a terribly good ballplayer, Moe Berg, but his durability as a backup catcher somehow earned him a 15-year career in the major leagues with five teams.
When he was last seen by baseball fans, wearing No. 22 for the Red Sox in 1939, his most enduring achievement seemed to be getting called “the strangest man ever to play baseball,” by Casey Stengel, who was probably and thusly the second strangest man ever to play baseball.
Five years later, Berg was
in Zurich, Switzerland, consorting with a foreign intelligence operative in a plot to assassinate a German physicist suspected of developing a nuclear bomb.
Nothing strange about that.
In last year’s seriously underrated film “The Catcher Was A Spy,” the foreign spy says to Berg, played by Paul Rudd, “So what did you do before the war?”
“I was a baseball player,” Berg replies. “You know baseball?”
“Yes, like, DiMaggio?” “Right, DiMaggio.” “Tell me Mr. Berg, did DiMaggio ever kill anybody?” “Not that I know of.” Last week’s wave of D-Day coverage, compelling as ever around the 75th anniversary of the invasion that liberated Western Europe from Nazi control, sent me back to this Moe Berg story, where I found myself fairly appalled at my own ignorance.
A new documentary about him, “The Spy Behind Home Plate,” by Aviva Kempner, is opening this month everywhere but Pittsburgh it seems, so until it’s available locally, I commend “The Catcher Was A Spy,” which can be caught on cable, a dark and satisfying cinematic ride with a strong cast that includes Rudd, Paul Giamatti, Jeff Daniels and Tom Wilkinson.
Though Morris “Moe” Berg apparently was perceived to be homosexual inside of baseball and out, “strange” as it is deployed above by Stengel more likely meant “brilliant.”
Educated at Princeton, Columbia Law and the Sorbonne, Berg spoke seven languages fluently and several more passably. He read newspapers voraciously, front to back. He read every paper he could get his hands on, including the Journal of Oriental Society. On a radio quiz show called Information Please, he was cleaning up like a 1930s version of Jeopardy ace James Holzhauer, but reportedly walked off because the host was asking too many personal questions.
Enigmatic and withdrawn, Berg seemed to stew in his very special intelligence.
“How do you know all these things?” he’s asked in “The Catcher Was a Spy.”
“It’s common knowledge,” he replies flatly.
Common knowledge? That’s a mouthful in 2019, isn’t it? What passes for common knowledge in an American century where we can’t agree on mere facts?
But I digress.
That the world seemed about to explode on multiple continents in the 1930s sparked a typically intense interest in Berg, who on a baseball All-Star tour of Japan that included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, spoke to his hosts in Japanese and addressed the legislature. He also, from the roof of a Tokyo hospital, filmed the city and its harbor with a Bell & Howell movie camera, which he turned over to American intelligence.
After Pearl Harbor, a fellow Princeton alum put Berg in touch with the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Services (later the CIA), where he quickly tired of doing research and writing reports, yearning to make a more tangible impact on the war effort.
Deadly smart, multilingual, and still in good physical condition, Berg was judged to be the perfect operative to kill Werner Heisenberg, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics. The OSS had convinced itself that Heisenberg was the one man on earth who could enable the Nazis to develop the atomic bomb before the United States. It did not know how far along Heisenberg was in that process.
In 1944, five years after his most difficult daily task was deciding whether to signal for a fastball or a changeup from Lefty Grove (DiMaggio was probably going to hit either one about 400 feet), Moe Berg fought his way through Northern Italy with the 5th Army and got smuggled across the Swiss border, going the last 30 miles on foot, to stalk Heisenberg at a conference in Zurich.
He was aware that wherever Heisenberg went, undercover Gestapo agents would be there to protect him. He very likely would have to kill Heisenberg with one shot.
And, oh yeah, one other thing — he could not be captured. If capture seemed even a remote possibility, he was to poison himself.
Heck no, I’m not spoiling it. There are now two films and a book by the estimable Nicholas Dawidoff.
So call Moe Berg anything you like — strange, brilliant, enigmatic, weird, heroic, maybe a little crazy, maybe more than a little — but don’t call him anything less than a great story and a great American.