Acclaim for
Nicholas Dawidoff’s
The Catcher
Was a Spy
“Dawidoff’s superbly researched presentation of Moe Berg is one of the year’s most compulsively readable biographies.”
—USA Today
“I defy you to put it down once you pick it up.”
—Boston Globe
“In this enthralling, intelligent biography … Nicholas Dawidoff has cut through the myth and revealed a coherent version of Moe Berg.”
The New York Times
“With fresh research, some 200 interviews and unqualified affection … the spirited and diligent writer Nicholas Dawidoff … document[s] the oddball legend of Moe Berg.”
—Time
“[An] excellent and merciless biography … poignant and original.… Dawidoff brings the full arsenal of the modern-day journalist to bear on Berg.”
The New York Observer
“A careful, scholarly and sympathetic biography of a brilliant and troubled man.”
Chicago Sun-Times
“A well-written biography of a fascinating enigma.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Here is a story that is dark and funny, unsettling and true, gloriously revealing and ultimately inscrutable.”
—Ken Burns
Nicholas Dawidoff
The Catcher
Was a Spy
Nicholas Dawidoff graduated from Harvard University and spent a year in Asia as a Henry Luce Scholar. He has written for Sports Illustrated, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. He lives in New York. The Catcher Was a Spy is his first book.
FIRST VINTAGE EDITION, JUNE 1995
Copyright © 1994 by Nicholas Dawidoff
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1994.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Dawidoff, Nicholas.
The catcher was a spy : the mysterious life
of Moe Berg / Nicholas Dawidoff
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80709-0
1. Berg, Morris, 1902–1972.
2. World War. 1939–1945—Secret Service—
United States. 3. Spies—United States—Biography.
I. Title.
D810. 8B4693 1994
940.54’ 8673—dc20 93-41324
Author photograph © Jerry Bauer
v3.1
For my mother and
my grandmother
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: Who Was Moe Berg?
1 The Public Berg: Professor Moe
2 Youth: Runt Wolfe
3 The Stiff Collar
4 Robin in Paris
5 Good Field, No Hit
6 You Never Knew He Was Around
7 Strange Foreigner with Camera
8 Mr. Berg, You’ve Been Brilliant
9 Southern Junket
10 Remus Heads for Rome
Photo Insert
11 A Perfect Spy
12 Always Good Company
13 A Life Without Calendar
14 The Secret Life of Moe Berg
A Note on the Sources
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Prologue:
Who Was Moe Berg?
The Headquarters Building at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, is a grim maze of identical corridors flanked by blank, color-coded office doors that are always shut tight. Only deep within the Headquarters Building, in the CIA Exhibit Center, is there any evidence of the dash, the violence, and the sangfroid of professional espionage. Displayed in glass cases like a collection of Han Dynasty relics are devices for flattening automobile tires, a sensor in the guise of a dung pile, a letter from Joseph Stalin’s daughter requesting asylum in the West, an undetonated bomb discovered at a U.S. government facility in the Middle East, a miniature camera masked as a box of matches, a battered beacon used in the disastrous Cuban Bay of Pigs operation, and a bust of Hermann Göring that the future CIA director Allen Dulles hustled out of Germany at the end of World War II.
There is as well a glass case devoted to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which preceded the CIA as America’s first national intelligence agency. On a shelf above a pistol and silencer that once belonged to the OSS director “Wild” Bill Donovan are two worn cardboard baseball cards. Beside them is a placard that says,
MORRIS (MOE) BERG BASEBALL CARDS.
Following his 15-year career with five different major league teams, the Princeton-educated Berg served as a highly successful Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operative during World War II. Among his many missions on behalf of OSS, the former catcher was charged with learning all he could about Hitler’s nuclear bomb project.…
Because of his intellect, Moe Berg is considered the “brainiest” man ever to have played the game. He spoke a dozen languages fluently and often autographed pictures in Japanese. These cards are from his playing days with the Washington Senators (1932–34) and Boston Red Sox (1935–39).
When Linda McCarthy, the CIA museum curator, talks about Moe Berg, her face flushes sanguine and her conversation comes in breathless, staccato surges. Moe Berg is her passion. “People think I’m making him up,” she says. “I idolize Moe. He did it for the right reasons. He joined OSS with a purpose in mind. He knew he’d be useful to this country. He knew what the Germans were doing with the atomic bomb. That’s what intelligence is all about. You have to know what the other side’s doing.
“As a ballplayer he was a gentleman,” continues McCarthy, who drives a utility vehicle—“for a utility catcher,” she says—adorned with MOE BERG license plates. “I admire Renaissance men. I’d love to sit down and talk with him. In the evening when I close up my museum, I go over and say good night to Moe. I think his spirit is here. I think I do know him.”
ALLAN SIEGAL IS an assistant managing editor at the New York Times. Over time, Siegal has developed correspondences with, as he puts it, “people who feel an obligation to police the language.” Many of these are elderly readers, retirees with ample time on their watches, but others are simply grammar mavens, and they include—Siegal begins ticking them off—“prominent lawyers, a prominent real estate man who nobody would suspect was concerned with this sort of thing, a well-known Columbia professor; there are people who have been corresponding with me for ten or twenty years.” In recent years, Siegal has received several letters on a variety of syntactical subjects from Moe Berg. There is never any return address, so Siegal hasn’t been able to reply, but he has taken Berg’s diffidence in stride.
Berg’s latest piece of mail came in response to an article about the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who American military staff feared was building an atomic bomb for Adolf Hitler during the Second World War. It was Berg’s job to find out whether or not Heisenberg was really doing this. The offending sentences in the Times article describe Berg’s only encounter with Heisenberg, at a lecture in Switzerland. “But if Heisenberg seemed to suggest that a Nazi atomic bomb was eminent, Berg was instructed to kill him on the spot. Berg watched and listened. He decided that Heisenberg’s eyes were sinister.” The Times writer had, of course, written “eminent” when he meant “imminent,” and, sure enough, a few days later Siegal received a note that said, “If a German bo
mb were eminent, small wonder Heisenberg’s eyes were sinister.” It was signed “Moe Berg.” Siegal thought it was nice that Moe Berg was monitoring his appearances in the newspapers, and he said as much to a colleague. As he did, a look of anxiety spread across the colleague’s face. “Al,” said the colleague, “I think Berg has been dead for a long time.” Siegal checked, and it was true. Moe Berg died in 1972. The identity of whoever it is who thinks he—or she—is Moe Berg remains a mystery to Siegal. Moe Berg was always a very private man.
CHARLES OWEN IS a beer and Scotch drinker, but he has stocked his one-bedroom apartment in suburban Maryland with Pouilly-Fuissé, a white Burgundy. Pouilly-Fuissé was Moe Berg’s favorite wine. On Owen’s walls are three copies of Berg’s life mask, two made of bronze, one in white ceramic. Owen has commissioned artists to paint Berg’s portrait on the surface of baseballs. At holiday time he sends out Moe Berg greeting cards of his own design. For more casual correspondence, he relies upon the Moe Berg postcards he gets printed up by the hundreds. Moe Berg’s baseball cards are worth as much as $150 apiece. Owen owns over one hundred of them. In his wallet, he carries a few of Berg’s business cards. Berg was an avid reader of newspapers; he bought as many as ten a day. Whenever Owen visits an old Berg hangout—the Mayflower, say, which was Berg’s favorite Washington hotel—Owen leaves a fresh copy of the day’s Washington Post on a side table in the lobby.
Owen, fifty-eight, completed high school, did a stretch in the air force, and has since worked in a variety of jobs. He is a bachelor, so his spare time is his own, or, rather, it is Moe Berg’s. During his weekends and vacations Owen travels the world learning all he can about Moe Berg. He does not consider himself a writer or a historian. He wants only to know. In this spirit he has been to England and to Florida, he has met former spies and faded lovers, ranking generals and retired ambassadors, old-time ballplayers and elderly Princetonians. Berg was a Princeton graduate, Class of 1923, and Owen refers to the university as “the place where the legend began.”
Owen first heard about Berg a dozen years ago when he read a brief article about him in the Washington Post. “I said to myself, ‘No man could have done all this,’ ” he remembers. He began writing letters and making telephone calls. In time, he met Berg’s older brother, Samuel, a Newark doctor. Berg lived in Newark with Samuel—who went by “Dr. Sam”—for nearly twenty years, until Dr. Sam threw him out in 1964. Dr. Sam took a liking to Owen. He gave him the run of Berg’s papers, photographs, and possessions, which were stored in the attic, and then Owen says Sam presented them all to him before he died in 1990, at the age of ninety-two. “I’ve almost been compelled to try and understand this mysterious man,” says Owen. “Moe opened up a new world to me. I did it because I wanted to know who Moe Berg was. A lot of people knew parts of Moe Berg. Moe was a different person to different people. He was complicated and he was simple.” Owen shakes his head and smiles. “I don’t know him now. I don’t know if anybody knows Moe Berg. He kept secrets from everybody. Nobody’ll ever know him.”
IN 1989, DURING his sophomore year at Princeton, Lou Jacobson, a writer for the Daily Princetonian, was driving back to school from a college newspaper convention in Washington, along with three other Princetonian writers. Seated behind him was Sharon Katz, whom he’d never met. “To kill the time,” says Jacobson, “I told her the story of Moe. The long version. From Washington well past Delaware.” Some time later, back on campus, he bumped into Katz again, and soon the conversation turned to Moe Berg. Jacobson remarked that he had some photographs of Berg up in his room, and wondered if Katz would like to come up and see them. Katz would, indeed. They have been together ever since.
Jacobson likes to tweak himself for what he calls “my obsessive interest in Moe Berg.” So did his friends on the Princetonian, who tacked a sheet of paper to his door outlining the seven tenets of “Ritual for the Worship of Moe Berg (The Moeslem Religion).” Jacobson wrote about Berg for a confirmation project, again for a Princeton seminar, and once more for the Princetonian, and he admits, “I’m still fascinated by him. So many unanswered questions in my mind. I try to be detached from the Moe mystique, because I just want to understand the guy. Why did he stay in baseball so long when he played so little? Why did he suddenly go into spying? What happened after he finished law school? Why did he never marry? Why did none of the Bergs ever marry? Why were their relations so strained?”
“MOE BERG WAS a fraud!” says George Allen, his voice rising as it always does when Berg is the subject. Allen is the proprietor of the William H. Allen antiquarian bookshop in Philadelphia. He met Berg in the late 1960s. Berg walked into the shop one day, asked to be directed to the linguistics section, and spent the day there, perched on a stool, reading. He refrained, even, from breaking for lunch. Berg returned for several more days of reading, always appearing to Allen as though “he had slept in the railroad station the previous night.” Only once did Berg buy a book; it cost $1. “I never took him seriously,” says Allen. “He wasn’t a nice man. He was a professional liar, a layabout who lived on his brother, a lecher, a charlatan. Just why the OSS took him I can’t see. He didn’t speak any foreign language well enough to be a spy and he was rather the parody of a spy. Berg was a self-invented mystery, a charming chap, but an outright fraud. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
IRWIN BERG IS a Harvard-educated, New York City lawyer. He saw his first cousin once removed Berg only twice, but he thinks about him constantly. “In 1939, I wasn’t yet six years old,” he says. “My father took me to see the Yankees play the Red Sox. We went because Moe was playing for the Red Sox. My father left a message for Moe, saying that we’d meet him by the players’ entrance after the game. After the game my father took me and my cousin David there and then my father walked away halfway down the block. We waited forty minutes and then Moe walked out. He shook hands with me, said ‘Hello,’ and then he shook David’s hand. Somebody in a car said, ‘Hey, Moe! Come on!’ He jumped into the car and that was it.
“The second time was in Sam Berg’s house. Moe was living there, and Sam invited me and my mother to dinner. Sam told us to wait in his office. He had a few things to do, he said. In the meantime, I heard somebody walking back and forth upstairs. It wasn’t Sam. Then the person came down and went outside. This was around 1955, I think. My mother said to me, ‘That’s Moe.’ What was happening was that Sam was giving him time to get out of the house. Moe didn’t want to meet anyone. Moe brought his mother to my grandmother’s funeral. And then he sat outside, waiting for her on a bench with an open newspaper covering his face.”
1
The Public Berg:
Professor Moe
John Kieran created the public Moe Berg. At heart, Kieran was a naturalist, happiest when crossing a rocky headland below a flock of migrating seabirds. But Kieran could also discourse at length upon Rossini’s librettos, Jefferson’s journals, Virgil’s translators, or Manet’s politics. Or Lou Gehrig’s strength. For Kieran earned his living by writing “Sports of the Times,” the New York Times’ first signed daily column of any kind.
Kieran wrote “Sports of the Times” from 1927 to 1942, a period when the sports section was not yet a place for investigation, opinion, or quotation. Reporters covered the games, not the personalities, while columnists specialized in diversion rather than revelation. Most of the best early sports columnists—Lardner, Runyon, Kieran—were humorists, and much latitude was permitted them in the name of entertainment. They needed it, for the columnist’s relentless obligation is to find something worth writing about when the news is dull. Kieran wrote a daily column for his newspaper, and whenever events, temperatures, or inspiration were wanting, “the most erudite sports writer of this, or any day,” according to Runyon, simply turned to Moe Berg. Over time, Kieran all but invented a persona for Berg, spinning installments in the life of his beloved “Professor,” the bookish ballplayer.
Kieran produced Berg columns at the slightest provocation. News out of
Ohio that Cincinnati Reds pitcher Johnny Vander Meer had recently submitted to his third tonsillectomy, for instance. “As soon as Professor Moe Berg of the Boston Red Sox Department of Languages and Obscure Sciences can be located, this observer plans to consult him about an obscure item that popped up in the recent baseball news,” Kieran begins on December 8, 1938. “It may be hard to catch the learned catcher. He moves mysteriously.” Kieran alludes to the most recent Berg sighting, “in the audience down at Princeton University a week or so ago when Doctor Thomas Mann, the eminent exile, was delivering a lecture on Goethe’s Faust.” Berg is then trailed to an appointment in Princeton with Albert Einstein, with whom he discusses Professor Archibald Henderson’s musings on the internal bisector problem in Euclidean geometry, which “Professor Berg has had on his mind since he read Professor Henderson’s monograph in the bull pen during a doubleheader between the Red Sox and Detroit Tigers in Detroit one day late last summer.” Vander Meer’s third tonsillectomy is finally mentioned, in passing, as another conundrum suitable for Berg’s consideration.
In a January 27, 1938, column, entitled “When the Bookworm Returned,” “Catcher Moe Berg” is off for a visit to Princeton in the company of his bosom friend, the perpetually aggrieved Al Schacht, a Red Sox coach, better known to baseball enthusiasts as “The Clown Prince of Baseball.” Berg intends to show students at his alma mater some movies of Russia and Japan that he made during a tour of those countries in 1934. Driving duties fall to an overwrought Schacht. “He speaks eight languages—he has sixteen degrees from universities—and he can’t drive a car,” moans Schacht. “He can’t do anything in a car—refuses to touch a thing—wouldn’t turn on the radio—wouldn’t turn on the lights—wouldn’t put his hand in his pocket for gasoline.” The journey begins inauspiciously. Berg is an hour and a half late for their rendezvous in New York, and when he finally does show up, he delays the trip further by insisting that they make a stop at his house in Newark. Schacht is awed by the Berg residence. He has never seen so many books in so many languages. “The living room is lined with shelves—French. The dining room is lined with volumes—clear up to the ceiling—German. There’s two other rooms down there—one lined with Italian books—the other with Spanish. So we go upstairs. There’s nothing on the walls but bookshelves filled with books—astronomy books in one place—chemistry in another.… No wonder he can’t hit a curve ball! A guy who read half of those ought to be stone blind.”
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