Catcher, Spy : Moe Berg
In December 1944, a small crowd of professors and graduate students gathered in a Zurich auditorium to hear Germany's top physicist, Werner Heisenberg, lecture on something called matrix theory. Most were there to expand their scientific knowledge. But one attendee, armed with a pistol and a cyanide caplet, had an altogether different purpose.
Posing as a Swiss student, he was in fact Morris "Moe" Berg, an American sent by the Office of Strategic Services. His mission: to analyze Heisenberg's speech and determine how close the Nazis were to building an atomic bomb. If Berg thought they were too far along, he was authorized to assassinate Heisenberg. If captured, he could take the cyanide pill.
Berg, the son of Jewish immigrants, was an unlikely spy. Just five years earlier, he had been a coach and occasional catcher with the Boston Red Sox. "It was just so extraordinary," says Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The Catcher Was a Spy. "A professional athlete cast as an international man of mystery."
Yet he was the perfect man for the job. A polymath with degrees from Princeton, Columbia Law School, and the Sorbonne, Berg could converse on virtually any topic--including theoretical physics. And after 17 spotty seasons in baseball, Berg was respected more for his erudition and charm than his prowess at the plate. "He can speak 12 languages," said one teammate, "but can't hit in any of them." So after the war started, Berg was tapped for his intellectual abilities. "He was . . . elusive, coupled with a large dose of charisma, making him a great clandestine accumulator of information," says Dawidoff.
Berg's most valuable contribution came near the end of the war when U.S. officials worried that a retreating Germany could turn the tables if its nuclear program bore fruit. Berg traveled Europe in high style, charming physicists into telling him what they knew of the activities of their German colleagues. "Berg provided the first substantial accounts about what the Germans were doing and thinking on a nuclear bomb," says Thomas Powers, author of Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb. As it turns out, the Germans weren't close to building a bomb, so Berg never drew his gun.
Berg spent the last 25 years of his life as a vagabond, showing up at friends' houses unannounced, expecting to be fed. He never owned a house, rented an apartment, or learned to drive, and he held no job after the OSS. "I don't think we'll ever have the complete Moe Berg story," says Berg historian Linda McCarthy. And that's just how he would want it. -Matthew Benjamin
This story appears in the January 27, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.