A Major League Baseball player made a surprising career move by trading his catcher’s mitt for a dangerous life of deception as a spy during World War II.
While Moe Berg may not have been a star on the field, he still managed to become one of the most notable names in baseball thanks to the unorthodox line of work he went into afterward.
After more than a decade on the baseball field, Berg was recruited by the US government to be an undercover agent investigating Germany’s progress in building an atomic bomb in the 1940s.
He even found himself face-to-face with the enemy’s top physicist Werner Heisenberg while carrying a loaded gun with which he was expected to commit murder.
Berg’s heroism and the unlikely path that led up to his spy career is being brought to the big screen this month in The Catcher Was a Spy starring Paul Rudd, premiering on June 22.
After more that a decade as a forgettable baseball catcher, Moe Berg made a surprising career move by taking a job as an undercover agent during World War II
Berg’s life has now been made into a major motion picture called The Catcher Was a Spy. The film starring Paul Rudd is set to be released on Friday, June 22
Berg’s early life was fairly unexceptional. He was to a Jewish family in Harlem, New York, in 1902 and grew up in West Newark, where he played baseball in high school before heading to Princeton University.
There played catcher for the Tigers baseball team while pursing a degree in classical and romance languages.
He was known for being a strong student in the classroom and an oddball on the baseball field, raising eyebrows by practicing Sanskrit, an ancient Indic language, behind home plate.
In 1923 he joined the Brooklyn Robins, kicking off a rather unremarkable career.
Over the next ten years he moved between several teams in the minor and major leagues, picking up a law degree from Columbia University along the way.
According to a biography called ‘The Catcher was a Spy’, written by Nicholas Dawidoff, Berg’s life took a turn in 1934 when he was visiting Tokyo on a goodwill baseball tour.
While in Tokyo he is said to have dressed in a kimono and gone to the roof of the tallest building in the city, where he used a movie camera to film military installations from above.
Berg joined the Brooklyn Robins in 1923, and over the next ten years he moved between several teams in the minor and major leagues, picking up a law degree from Columbia University along the way
Berg’s life took a turn in 1934 when he was visiting Tokyo on a goodwill baseball tour with stars Lefty O’Doul, left, Sotaro Suzuki, right, and others . While there he used a movie camera to film military installations from the tallest building in the city
A few years later when World War II was in full swing, Berg brought the footage to Bill Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, now the CIA.
Historians have said Berg believed his footage was used in planning America’s first aerial attack on Japan, the Doolittle Raid in 1942.
Whether or not that’s accurate, there’s no doubt that his ambitious impressed Donovan, who at the time had been recruiting high-profile civilians such as Julia Child and film director John Ford for undercover jobs.
There were a few different traits that made Berg an ideal candidate for spy work.
First, he was intelligent, with a vast knowledge of languages.
Second, he was known for having a secretive side. Most notably, he was able to hide his Jewish heritage and his alleged bisexuality.
After going through a crash course in lock-picking, killing and pyrotechnics, Berg was sent out on his first assignment in 1944, which was to collect information on Germany’s progress in creating an atomic bomb.
He traveled across Europe on missions, including one where he pretended to be a Nazi officer to gain access to a munitions plant.
Berg’s main goal as an undercover agent was to collect information on Germany’s progress in creating an atomic bomb, namely by spying on lead physicist Werner Heisenberg
Berg traveled across Europe on missions, hiding the fact that he was Jewish and allegedly bisexual. Paul Rudd is shown playing Berg in the film out on Friday
Berg’s intelligence and his secretive nature made him an ideal candidate for spy work
In 1994 he was sent to a conference in Zurich where Germany’s lead physicist Heisenberg was giving a lecture.
He infiltrated the conference by pretending to be a student, and was tasked with evaluating how close the German’s were to success with their nuclear program.
If he got the impression that they were a serious threat, he was instructed to shoot Heisenberg with the gun in his pocket before killing himself with a cyanide pill.
One night during the conference Berg attended a dinner for Heisenberg, where he heard someone say that Germany had no hope of winning the war.
Heisenberg agreed, saying: ‘Yes, but it would have been so good if we had won.’
Berg ended up leaving the dinner at the same time as Heisenberg and the two chatted on the walk home.
Despite having been handed the perfect opportunity to kill the physicist, Berg decided that if Germany wasn’t close to creating the bomb, there was no reason to murder Heisenberg.
The war ended the following year, and Berg remained with what was then the CIA for about a decade before retiring in 1954.
He spent the next two decades living a quiet life with financial help from firnds and family.
He was never very secretive about his time undercover, even letting people believe he was still a spy until his death at age 70 in 1972.
Berg has received multiple nominations to the Baseball Hall of Fame, but has also been widely criticized by people who believe he wasted his intelligence by playing the game.
Nearly four decades after Berg’s death, documentarian Aviva Kempner is bringing his story to the big screen beginning June 22.