Moe Berg is a real-life James Bond who went from being a professional catcher for teams like the Red Sox to catching German scientists as a spy in WWII. Instead of wearing a suit and holding a martini like James Bond, Moe Berg wore a uniform covered in grass stains and had a catcher’s mitt in his hand. Berg’s story of a baseball player turned spy sounds too strange to have happened, but it did.
Moe Berg was born in 1902 in New York City to a family of Jewish immigrants from what is today Ukraine. He loved baseball from a young age and had a lot of talent. He was also very smart, so he was able to get into Princeton University where he excelled on the field and in the classroom. He graduated in 1923, and though his professors pushed him to pursue a career in academia, he decided to continue playing baseball. He eventually played 15 seasons as a professional ball player and also coached before becoming a spy.
As a professional baseball player, he was a catcher and shortstop for the Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, and the Washington Senators.
Becoming a Spy
Japan and the United States had a tense relationship that ended up leading to war in 1941, but for years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the two nations tried to keep the peace. The U.S. sent cultural missions to Japan, which included baseball players to spread the love of the American sport. Only the best players such as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were sent to represent the United States. Moe Berg was a mediocre player at best, but he was sent to Japan too.
While the other baseball players toured the country, Berg would disappear from time to time with his camera to film things he saw. He wasn’t filming tourist sites but Japanese infrastructure, especially transportation hubs and military installations. Though Berg was not the best ambassador for baseball, he was a polyglot who spoke fluent German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. One other language that he had become fluent in was Japanese, which he used while traveling in Japan to make contacts and get information about the country.
Later on, after Pearl Harbor, it is said that the footage Berg took on his trips to Japan was used by American military intelligence to plan bombing raids on Tokyo and other high-value targets. There is no way to know if Berg was sent to Japan on purpose to spy for the U.S. or if he took it upon himself to pass on information that he learned.
When war finally broke out, Berg was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the intelligence agency that eventually became the CIA. His first assignment was to work the Balkan desk in Washington D.C., where he recruited and trained Slavic Americans to become commandos to drop behind enemy lines in occupied Yugoslavia.
Catching Scientists
Berg was good at his job, but he wanted something more exciting than riding a desk in D.C., so he was sent to Europe for his next assignment. Since he spoke so many languages he was tasked with gathering intelligence on scientific advancements by Germany and Fascist Italy. He would gather intelligence, and either convince European scientists to join the Americans or, if they refused, he kidnapped them and turned them over to the U.S. Army. He went from catching balls as a pro baseball player to catching scientists to help the American war effort and derail the Axis advancement in rockets and bombs.
Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker were the two main physicists in charge of Germany’s attempt to build an atomic weapon. Berg’s next mission was to find them and learn about the progress being made. The OSS told Berg that if it seemed that the Germans were close to getting the atomic bomb, he had orders to assassinate the two physicists. Moe concluded that the Germans were years behind the Americans, who were working on the Manhattan Project, so he didn’t use his license to kill.
When the war ended, Berg is said to have worked with the CIA on other secret missions, but for the next 20 years, he seems to have lived quietly in New Jersey. Moe Berg doesn’t fit the profile of a spy as we would imagine, but maybe that’s why he was so successful at his job working in the shadows.
Read more:
The Inspiring Life Of The First African American In Major League Baseball
