This is Morris “Moe” Berg, and he was probably the most interesting baseball player of all time.
Moe was born in New York City in 1902. He was fluent in English and, being Jewish, knew Hebrew and Yiddish, too. He went to NYU and then Princeton, where he learned Latin & Greek, and became a fluent speaker of French, Spanish, Italian, German and Sanskrit. He got a degree from Columbia Law School and attended the Sorbonne in Paris. After college he learned Japanese and Portuguese “for fun”. He read 10 newspapers a day and was an occasional guest panelist on Information Please, a popular NBC Radio quiz show.
But Moe is mostly remembered as a baseball player, with stints with the White Sox then the Red Sox with stops in Cleveland and Washington along the way. He was a pretty good catcher, but was a horrible batter. In 15 years of major-league baseball, Moe only hit six home runs and six triples, and ended up with a lifetime .243 batting average. Teammates joked that Moe “can speak 10 languages, but he can’t hit in any of them”.
Although Moe loved baseball, he wouldn’t let it dictate his life. He’d take off after a season ended just to go to Italy for a few months. He skipped spring training one year to go to Paris… where he decided to just stay and start classes at the Sorbonne.
In 1934, a man named Herb Hunter put together a bunch of baseball all-stars – Babe Ruth, Jimmie Fox, Lou Gehrig and, for some reason, Moe Berg – to go on a goodwill tour of Japan. Berg flattered his hosts at a welcome dinner by delivering a speech in perfect Japanese. He floored fans by signing autographs in Japanese.
To the Japanese government Moe Berg was “just a baseball player”. So they didn’t bother to put him under surveillance. Berg visited Saint Luke’s Hospital in Tokyo, officially to visit the American ambassador’s sick daughter. Which he did. But he also used his new movie camera to film the city and its ports from the roof of the hospital, “in case war broke out later”. For years there were rumors that this footage was used to plan the famous Doolittle Raid, although it later came out that Doolittle was being planned months before Berg turned his footage over to the government.
If “filming Imperial Japanese Navy ports” sounds like something a spy would do… well, that’s because Moe Berg was a spy, too. In fact, Berg is one of the very few spies the American government has ever acknowledged.
After Pearl Harbor, Berg got in touch with a friend, who arranged a meeting between Berg and William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the WWII predecessor of the CIA. Donovan liked Berg, and eventually put him on Project Larson, in which Berg was parachuted into Italy, and where he and fellow spies would follow the retreating Germans as closely as possible and kidnap Italian physicists before the Nazis could kill them or take them back to Germany.
But that was only half of it: Berg was also part of Project AZUSA, in which he was to interview as many scientists as he could to determine if Werner Heisenberg – of “uncertainty principle” and Breaking Bad fame – was actually working on a nuclear bomb or was just stalling for time until the war was over. Berg was to get as close to Heisenberg as possible, and if Berg believed he was developing a bomb, he had orders to kill him. Berg was apparently willing to do this, but in the end he didn’t have to: he determined that Heisenberg was mostly trying to protect as many German scientists as possible, and that even if he was, the Germans almost certainly didn’t have the resources to actually build one.
But Berg was, first and foremost, a baseball player. When US Army officials were given the names of the OSS agents in Project Larson, an aide – clearly not a baseball fan – asked his boss: “Do you know what they gave us? A ballplayer named Moe Berg. You ever hear of him?”, to which the general replied, “Yes, the slowest baserunner in the American League.”
One last mystery: President Truman awarded Berg the Medal of Freedom for his actions during WWII… but Berg turned it down. And we’ll probably never know why: he went to his grave never telling anyone why he turned it down. After he died in 1972, his sister requested the award, which she then donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.