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Great
Story
INTERESTING
...A FASCINATING READ
Here
is history few ever knew...
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. Although he played with 5 major league teams from
1923 to 1939, he was a very mediocre ball player. He was regarded
as the brainiest ballplayer of all time. In fact Casey Stengel
once said: "That is the strangest man ever to play baseball."
When all the baseball stars went to
Japan
, Moe Berg went with them and many people wondered why he went with
"the team" . . .
Lou
Gehrig and Babe Ruth
The
answer was simple: Moe Berg was a Unites States spy working undercover
with the CIA.
Moe
spoke 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. Moe read at least 10
newspapers every day.
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.
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 Freedom -
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
,
March
2,1902-----May 29, 1972
Presidential
Medal of Freedom (the highest award to be awarded to civilians during
wartime)
Moe
Berg's baseball card is the only card on display at the CIA
Headquarters in
Washington
DC
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