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Weekend columnists

THE SPORTSMAN SPY
By Simon Kuper

Financial Times (London)
March 7, 2008

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7de271bc-ec7e-11dc-86be-0000779fd2ac,s01=1.html

Moe Berg would have been 106 last Sunday, which makes this as good a time as any to recall the most remarkable sportsman I have heard of.

In a second-hand bookstore in South Carolina, I recently chanced on an old biography: *Moe Berg: Athlete, Scholar, Spy* [Little Brown, 1974]. Reading it, I kept thinking, “No way!” My apologies to any American readers who already know all about Berg but everyone should hear about him.

Born to Jewish immigrants in New York in 1902, Berg grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Though poor, he graduated magna cum laude from Princeton. The university offered him a teaching job but, instead, he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. On road trips Berg would sit in bed in a Japanese kimono and straw hat, engulfed by newspapers in many languages. “Don’t touch them! They’re alive,” he would instruct puzzled team-mates.

After his first season he went to the Sorbonne to study philology. His Dodger room-mate thought it madness: “Hell, Moe, don’t you know what Paris is for?” But the evolution from medieval to modern French always fascinated Berg. He also practiced as a Wall Street lawyer in off-seasons and wrote an essay on baseball that Albert Einstein admired.

Within baseball, Berg usually hid his erudition. He enjoyed speaking as ungrammatically as his team-mates, with their double negatives. He joked: “I spend years attempting to master a number of foreign languages, and what happens? I turn out to be a catcher and am reduced to sign language on the ball field.” He was an excellent catcher too -- “good field, no hit,” in one coach’s semi-literate verdict. From 1931 to 1934, Berg went 117 games without an error, while also contriving to be in Berlin the day Hitler became chancellor. He saw then there would be war.

Perhaps he was already spying then. Perhaps he began in 1934, while touring Japan with Babe Ruth and other major league players. Tall, dark, handsome and a great dancer, Berg excelled at diplomatic receptions, and he chatted to Emperor Hirohito in Japanese. He also made a secret film of Tokyo that years later would aid American bombers. But he loved Japanese, which he worked to equip with an “L” sound.

It saddened Berg that in his 16 years in the major leagues, his father never once watched him play. The old man despised his main career. Indeed, Berg was often asked why he played baseball when he could have done anything. “Even grandmothers,” he replied, “should experience the pure excitement of covering home plate with an ape charging home, cleats flying high.”

Most players had a baffled fondness for Berg. Ted Williams, a team-mate in Boston, said: “I never saw a show like that and Moe never knew he was performing.”

“A mysterious guy all his life,” recalled the pitcher Lefty Gomez. “He was always coming from some place or other. No one knew where he lived or what he did with his time.” Suddenly he’d pop up discussing Sanskrit verb forms with the British politician Anthony Eden.

Berg stopped playing in 1939, after 663 games, just in time for war. In 1942, he addressed Japan on the radio in Japanese, urging peace. “What basis is there for enmity,” he asked during a personable yet erudite talk, “between two peoples who enjoy the same national sport?” Some Japanese wept to hear him.

He began spying for the Office of Strategic Services. The authors of *Moe Berg* had wonderful access to OSS documents and his former colleagues. They describe Berg infiltrating Yugoslavia, occupied France, or Norway, carrying cyanide to swallow if captured. But gradually he grew obsessed with the German atomic project. Only if Germany got the bomb could Hitler still triumph. When Berg discovered that Congolese uranium ore had reached Duisburg in Germany, Allied bombers flattened the town.

In wartime Italy and Switzerland, he interviewed physicists on Germany’s atomic progress. One Italian physicist, tight-lipped at first, finally spoke after Berg spent three days with him discussing the poet Petrarch. In Florence, Berg visited a munitions plant dressed as a German officer. Eventually he pinpointed the exact spot of Germany’s main atomic facility.

In December 1944, he lured Werner Heisenberg, leader of Germany’s atomic project, to give a talk in Switzerland. Berg attended, armed. The man who couldn’t bear the sight of blood was to shoot Heisenberg if he learnt that Germany was near to producing the bomb. In conversations, Berg overheard Heisenberg make remarks such as: “We’re losing this war but how nice it would have been if Germany had won.” It seemed Germany wouldn’t get the bomb. Churchill and Roosevelt were briefed.

Postwar, Berg refused America’s Medal of Merit and even refused to claim his expenses from the OSS. After that he either barely worked or just took secret missions. Certainly he spent weeks on end living with friends or years with siblings, filling their houses with books and “live” newspapers until they kicked him out. He never married nor apparently had girlfriends.

His brother compared him to the medieval dons who founded Oxford and Cambridge: “Their sole objective was to gain knowledge for knowledge’s sake without intent to apply it.”

In old age Berg studied Mandarin. He met President Kennedy, who said, “Moe, baseball hasn’t been the same without you.” He died in Newark in 1972, just after asking: “How did the Mets do today?” They won.

Moe Berg: Athlete, Scholar, Spy by Louis Kaufman, Barbara Fitzgerald, and Tom Sewell (Ballantine)

simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com