Did You Know;? Moe Berg Baseball spy

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LRP1
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Did You Know;? Moe Berg Baseball spy

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Baseball Spy Moe Berg

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.


The answer was simple: Moe Berg was a United States spy working undercover with the OSS forerunner to 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Americas 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, NY.


Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest award to be awarded to civilians during wartime) Moe Bergs baseball card is the only card on display at the CIA Headquarters in Washington DC.
Last edited by LRP1 on September 6th, 2014, 6:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Did You Know;? Mo Berg Baseball spy

Post by Jim »

I heard the story many times. Wikipedia has a more detailed tale.
Morris "Moe" Berg (March 2, 1902 – May 29, 1972) was an American catcher and coach in Major League Baseball who later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Although he played 15 seasons in the major leagues, almost entirely for four American League teams, Berg was never more than an average player, usually used as a backup catcher, and was better known for being "the brainiest guy in baseball" than for anything he accomplished in the game. Casey Stengel once described Berg as "the strangest man ever to play baseball".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_Berg
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Re: Did You Know;? Mo Berg Baseball spy

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and still another from ESPN:
Moe Berg: Catcher and spy
By Nick Acocella
Special to ESPN.com
"He [Moe Berg] bluffs his way up onto the roof of the hospital, the tallest building in Tokyo at the time. And from underneath his kimono he pulls out a movie camera. He proceeds to take a series of photos panning the whole setting before him, which includes the harbor, the industrial sections of Tokyo, possibly munitions factories and things like that. Then he puts the camera back under his kimono and leaves the hospital with these films," says Nicholas Dawidoff, a Berg biographer.
Moe Berg has long enjoyed a reputation as the most shadowy player in the history of baseball. Earning more notoriety for being a frontline spy than for being a backup catcher, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction in Berg's undercover career. Just Berg being a spy begs the question: How much of the fiction might have been used as cover

http://espn.go.com/classic/biography/s/Berg_Moe.html
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Re: Did You Know;? Moe Berg Baseball spy

Post by hobbit »

America has spies? Get out of here. We don't do that kind of thing. The OSS? I used to have one of their original WWII handbooks for American spies. It was quite rare. They didn't print that many. I traded it to a guy at a gun show for a used Glock.

Anyway, they had infiltration instructions for all manner of situations for our spies in Nazi Germany & France. It was pretty interesting. The one thing that sticks in my mind, is that they said if a dog was any part of an infiltration target, to forget it. They weren't worth the risk and the potential noise of killing the animal. And they said "you'll never get past him anyway". So they were instructed to choose an alternate target.

I wonder how many OSS spies we lost in the war? What a lonely death, to be captured, tortured, and executed, and probably never to be entered on any MIA list. They had to be a little crazy. That job took cast iron balls.
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Re: Did You Know;? Moe Berg Baseball spy

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Only a few of the OSS heroes survive. One is an old friend, MG (Ret) John K. Singlaub.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_K._Singlaub

http://www.osssociety.org/pdfs/donovan2007.pdf
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Re: Did You Know;? Moe Berg Baseball spy

Post by LRP1 »

Yes he is. One of the Original Jedburg members.
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