“Pitchers and Catchers” is dense with such detail, sharp testament to Berg’s enthusiasm for baseball and the amount of time he spent thinking about it. After all, who else would discuss probability and pitch sequences, compare testy pitchers to recalcitrant judges, and then add the cheerful disclaimer “Judges, if you are reading, please consider this obiter.”
Of course catching was a real and very specific interest, and the catching portion of the essay is perhaps the best. Berg’s model catcher does not just possess, as he says, a good pair of hands, grace, rhythm, bent knees, and a straight back. He also “has to be able to cock his arm from any position, throw fast and accurately to the bases, field bunts like an infielder, and catch foul flies like an outfielder. He must be adept at catching a ball from any angle, and almost simultaneously tagging a runner at home plate. The catcher,” says Berg, “is the Cerberus of baseball.” The physical requirements set forth, Berg discusses the mental side of the job—calling the game, disguising signs, remaining alert to anything that will lend an advantage, for “the catcher is an on-the-spot witness,” the only defensive player with a view of all that happens on the ball field. Finally, displaying grace that would have been a credit to any catcher, Berg explains that “pitchers help catchers as much as catchers do pitchers,” and thanks his old White Sox teammates Red Faber, Ted Lyons, and Tommy Thomas for teaching him to catch. For a largely unsentimental man, such an essay, ending with such an acknowledgment, takes on the qualities of a professional summing up, with a few notes borrowed from a dirge.
For Berg seemed to be aimless, drifting through the seasons. It was now four years since he’d really done much of anything. The Boston Globe sports columnist Arthur Siegel asked him about it. “Arthur,” said Berg, “I seek no other man’s shoes. If I’ve misdirected my priorities, and I’m confident that this is not so, I’ve had a pretty fair time in lost country.” Berg meant exactly that. As a man with choices, he had decided to spend the first part of his life in pursuit of a good time, and he knew of nothing that pleased him more than the rituals of a ballplayer’s summer. Sam Berg, who despaired over his talented brother, knew him well enough to shrug and say that “he was happy in that he lived the life he loved.” Another time Sam said, “All it ever did was make him happy.” But Williams, who spent three summers with Berg and was famous for possessing the sharpest eyes in baseball, noticed something else. “I don’t ever remember seeing him laughing,” he says.
9
Southern Junket
Moe Berg was an intensely proud man and privately found it dismaying to be perceived as a curiosity. As a coach, Berg didn’t have to worry any longer about wearing the embarrassing mantle of the catcher who never caught. Yet from catcher to coach, the job description hadn’t changed, and much as Berg liked baseball, watching 154 ball games a summer from his perch in the bull pen must at times have made him restless. Coaching also carried with it less cachet, for no matter how sparely a man plays, “baseball player” is a far more impressive title than “baseball coach.” Not that he was complaining. This was the existence he’d chosen, among many possibilities. But now a bit of the polish was rubbed from the Berg mystique.
With the war came something better. Much better. Berg was leaving baseball behind for a career so well suited to his personality that it would make him a star: espionage.
When he was a baseball player, Berg’s strong throwing arm, quick instincts, and savvy understanding of a complicated game made him a competent professional, nothing more. Only because of personal traits ancillary to baseball did he become famous. But that intelligent, eccentric personality was exactly what made him an unusually successful intelligence operator. Because he was a man who found it easy to make other people talk about themselves while keeping himself a secret, and because he was a loner with a penchant for disappearing, Berg was the perfect spy. It was one of the ironies of his life that he won considerable fame during a largely inconsequential career as a ballplayer, while the truly valuable intelligence work he did for his country he was forced to keep as classified as he kept himself.
AS EARLY AS 1934, when he carried a movie camera to the top of Saint Luke’s Hospital in Tokyo, and perhaps long before that, Berg had known the pleasure of pilfering secrets under risky conditions. At the time, the United States had no central institution dispatching agents to gather intelligence in foreign countries. That changed with World War II.
Months before the American entry into the war, it became clear to President Roosevelt that the U.S. needed to know more about what was happening abroad than military and naval intelligence, the FBI, and the State Department were providing. Roosevelt appointed a New York lawyer and World War I hero, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, as coordinator of information, authorizing him to create an American version of England’s famous intelligence corps, MI-6, which had been sending the world’s secrets back to London since the sixteenth century. A year later, Donovan’s organization became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the first American intelligence agency.
Donovan wasn’t the only prominent New York Republican to extract an intelligence franchise from a Democratic president. Among the most vital U.S. national security concerns during the world war were its borders to the south. Oppressive poverty, mercurial politics, and the local perception that Americans were plundering imperialists made many South and Central American countries seem vulnerable to fascists bearing sacks of money and ill will toward Washington. With that in mind, shortly after the fall of France in the summer of 1940, Nelson Rockefeller, the youthful scion of the billionaire Manhattan petroleum family, proposed an organization that would fan U.S. representatives throughout South and Central America to further the national defense by encouraging close bonds of friendship between neighbors. This idea appealed to President Roosevelt, and by July 1941 the organization had developed into the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA). During the war, Rockefeller would cede some of his turf to the grasping FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. As things turned out, the FBI was responsible for all secret intelligence in Latin America; the OIAA handled political and economic intelligence and propaganda in the region; and the OSS contented itself with as much of the rest of the world as the British and Douglas MacArthur would permit.
IN A SPEECH he delivered at the 1940 Boston Book Fair, Moe Berg concluded, “Montaigne said a few hundred years ago, about Paris, what I feel strongly about our way of life, our country—‘I love her so tenderly that even her spots, her blemishes, are dear unto to me.’ ” The reference was a touch maudlin, but the characterization was true enough. There was never any doubting Berg’s loyalty. He learned it from his parents, who, like so many other grateful immigrants, bred a patriotism in their children that was unwavering and absolute.
In Boston during that summer, the newspapers were full of ominous stories from foreign places where Berg had once been very happy. What he read left him uneasy, disquieted with the world and with himself. It was probably then that he told Arthur Daley, “Europe is in flames, withering in a fire set by Hitler. All over that continent men and women and children are dying. Soon we too will be involved. And what am I doing? I’m sitting in the bull pen, telling jokes to the relief pitchers.”
In November Berg arranged an interview with officials from Rockefeller’s office through an old friend, the Guatemalan diplomat Enrique López-Herrarte. Nothing much came of it for a while, but in June 1941 Berg was invited to a discussion on the role of sports in the hemisphere defense program, and by autumn, one of Rockefeller’s assistants was telling him that they were “anxious” to hire him as a cultural ambassador to teach sports throughout South and Central America. By Berg’s account, the lobbying was so intense that one Rockefeller aide even came to the ballpark and went out to the bull pen where Berg was warming up Lefty Grove; Berg had to field job pitches between tosses from Grove.
Berg’s angst increased as the U.S. entered the war. Hearing over the radio that Japanese Zeros had bombed Pearl Harbor, he sat down
with a pen, paper, and a sense of righteous indignation to sketch out his thoughts. At 4:30 PM, writing in not very cogent English, he notes that most Japanese people are “kindly, hospitable, cheerful, and kindly disposed towards Americans,” and that the hope of the world is “a charitable regard for others, live and let live—an aristocracy of the intellect, i.e. of people who think and not live by the sword—there is room for all—there must be a league of nations—an international police force.” At 5:00, this time in perfectly legible katakana characters he writes, “I don’t like to appear to be a soothsayer but I predicted in the year 1922 that there would be a war between two philosophies, fascist and democratic.” Fifteen minutes later, back in English, he snaps, “It is now here and all the pseudo-patriots will have to shut up.” Then his tone softens. “I feel sorry for the Japanese, as well as Italians and Germans who see as we do; Matsumoto, Takizo must be having a bad time today.” That was as close to fond sentiment as Moe Berg got. Japan had meant a lot to him, and so had Matsumoto.
Grim as he said the war made him feel, Berg had yet to leave baseball and make a commitment to Rockefeller. Initially the idea of sponsoring sports programs in Latin America pleased him. He wrote enthusiastic letters to Washington and prepared a three-page memo in which he extolled the democratic virtues of sports. But Rockefeller’s interest in him had set Berg to thinking that he might have better options. Doing some lobbying of his own, he managed to get an interview with the FBI, which he hoped would give him work. They would not. Rockefeller, however, seemed willing to permit Berg plenty of flexibility, so on January 5, 1942, he finally accepted a revised OIAA assignment, agreeing to travel in the South and Central American republics to monitor health and fitness, at a salary of $22.22 per day. Technically he was taking a position as a propaganda official, a virtual flack for the U.S. government. But as Berg had discovered in Japan, a nervy man out on his own can improvise.
Ten days later, on January 15, newspapers around the country reported that Berg was retiring from baseball to go to work for Rockefeller as a special consultant. For sportswriters, this was yet another chance to reheat some old Moe Berg stories while joining the jingoistic clamor that had seized a country still reeling from the Japanese sneak attack. Jerry Nason, describing Berg’s assignment in the Boston Evening Globe, said, “The Brain, so styled, won’t be on the business end of an antiaircraft gun or nipping a Jap warship off first base with a torpedo, but the kind of work he will be doing will be just as vital, maybe more so, right at this moment.” Nason also mentioned, among many, many other things, that Berg could “ask directions of a Greek shepherd … or even lecture in Sanskrit.” These were signal accomplishments, no doubt—especially the lecturing, since Sanskrit is not a spoken language—but what use they would be in Panama or Brazil was more dubious. Berg himself was at pains to emphasize the importance of his assignment with Rockefeller, telling the Newark News, “I have no intention of making a so-called goodwill tour in the hemisphere countries to the south. This program goes much deeper. It may take in, for instance, health and athletics, nutrition and diet, and a study of the best means of promoting goodwill between the hemisphere countries. It is a long-range program that must go on for centuries.” This was pretty heady stuff for a ballplayer, and editorial interest went beyond the press box; Time and Newsweek carried Berg stories too.
Amidst all the hoopla, Berg’s excitement at beginning a new career was tempered by an unsettling family development. Bernard Berg had been in poor health for some time, and on January 14 he died. He had slipped away before anyone could tell him that Berg was off to war.
BERG TOOK HIS oath of office on January 21, and then went to see John Clark at the OIAA headquarters in the Commerce Building. Tall, with gray-blue eyes and a long, narrow face, Clark had gone to Dartmouth with Rockefeller, worked as an editorial writer for the Washington Post, and studied Latin American affairs on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. Now he was chief of the Division of Basic Economy, and Berg’s superior. Clark may have suggested Berg’s name to Rockefeller and, in any case, knew all about him, right down to what he carved on the walls of Florida restaurants, as he demonstrated with his first question. As soon as Berg sat down, Clark asked, “What’s the past participle of comer?” Berg was horrified. He and Clark would become friendly—they went to a Senators game together, where Berg cupped a hand over his mouth, lowering his voice an octave so that the players on the field could hear him below the noise of the crowd—but around this boss, Berg was always wary.
Berg joined the OIAA at a hectic time. With long-range radio broadcasts to Latin Americans from Berlin, describing Hitler’s triumphs and promising them that expelling the Yankees would lead to a better life in the barrio, and with Abwehr agents busily promoting the cause in person, many U.S. observers of Latin America, right up to President Roosevelt, feared that Nazi-backed putsches or even German invasions were imminent. The OIAA fought back with its checkbook, strewing money and favors across the region.
Brazil was of particular concern, primarily because its squat, cigar-puffing dictator/president, Getúlio Vargas, was a shameless opportunist. “I never had a friend who couldn’t become an enemy or an enemy who couldn’t become a friend” was Vargas’s mantra, and he abided by it with impunity. In the late 1930s, while proclaiming his loyalty to the pan-American friendship cause and permitting Washington to finance, among other things, a new Brazilian steel industry, Vargas was conducting a brisk trade with Germany, exchanging coffee, rubber, and cotton for weapons. The U.S. wanted to make Jeep tires of the Brazilian rubber crop, and with a large German expatriate population in Brazil, and rumors of beachheads that were supposedly being scouted by Nazi submarines, it needed Vargas’s cooperation to other ends. Perhaps the most crucial interest was the so-called Trampoline to Victory. As the U.S. contemplated entering the war in Europe, an ideal alternative to the Newfoundland-Iceland-Scotland transatlantic air route was a southern cross, bouncing from the hump of northeastern Brazil over to Africa.
While the proximity of the U.S. military was the most certain means of keeping Vargas in line, petting a reluctant neighbor was preferable to pulverizing him, and so the OIAA sought to ingratiate itself with Brazil by coddling the golfer Mario Gonzales on his U.S. visit, mounting an exhibition of the painter Cándido Portinari’s pictures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and hiring him to paint murals at the Library of Congress in Washington. Versions of Hollywood films bound for Latin America were edited so that lovers were now always traipsing off to Rio instead of, say, Paris. A less flashy but more meaningful OIAA Brazilian venture was sponsoring a nationwide sanitation project.
The OIAA made gestures of this sort all across the region. To protect the Panama Canal, and the many American battle and supply ships that went through it, from possible Japanese attack, the U.S. wanted to mount defenses on the Galápagos Islands. The Galápagos belonged to Ecuador, which, at the time, was quarreling with Peru, so the OIAA cleared out the Peruvians and, in exchange, the U.S. was granted use of the Galápagos. The Peruvian refugees were then supplied with rice, beans, machetes, and cooking oil to help them get started at home. In Honduras, when United Fruit sent its ships to the Pacific to carry troops, Honduran banana workers were thrown out of work. The OIAA appeased the situation by hiring the banana workers to build new Honduran roads. Free food was sent to Venezuela, where the U.S. coveted iron ore; Bolivia received tin-mining technology; and the Chilean ski team was invited to Joe Louis’s training camp.
Moe Berg, meanwhile, was in Washington, waiting. His original travel orders were to depart on a six-month trip, beginning on January 7, but that hadn’t happened, and for months nobody could quite seem to find anything for him to do. So he amused himself. By February, he’d met with officials at the OSS, who either asked him to make a lengthy radio address to Japan or accepted Berg’s proposal to do so. In any case, Berg did speak to Japan, over short-wave radio, on February 24. Almost certainly Berg did not write his lines in Japanese, but the
text was his, and once it was translated for him, he delivered it in Japanese. Mixing history and personal anecdote, Berg portrayed Japan’s longstanding friendship with the U.S. “I ask you,” he said at one point, “what sound basis is there for enmity between two peoples who enjoy the same national sport?” Later he remonstrated, “I know your glorious history, about your Samurai, the Cult of Bushido, your love of Confucian classics. I was impressed by your hospitality and customs—all these things I still admire. But you betrayed your friends—you made a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor while your Ambassadors Nomura and Kurusu were carrying out diplomatic conversations with us; you have lost face and are committing national seppuku.” The speech, of course, had no effect upon the war, but for Berg’s purposes, pleasing Donovan was something to put in his pocket for later.
One more export the U.S. had sent to Latin America was troops, installing many thousands of them in bases from the Caribbean to the Pacific coast in what was, in effect, a vast protective shield. By April, it had been decided that Berg would serve as a roving civilian inspector, charged with looking for ways to improve the life and living conditions of the U.S. soldiers stationed in the bases. If the terms of the assignment sounded vague, that was fine with Berg. He was to leave in midsummer, and before that he moved about Washington, consulting with agencies of every stripe, from the Army to the Red Cross to the OSS to the FBI. He described this activity in a memo to Rockefeller as necessary preparation for his mission, and maybe he saw it that way, but it’s also true that Berg was quietly making his services available to agencies other than the one that employed him—agencies that conducted real espionage.
In a meeting with an FBI Foreign Funds official, Berg asked if he could be of any assistance to the Bureau while in Latin America, and the coy response was that “the Bureau would always appreciate receiving information which would be of interest to the Bureau.” Berg concluded the meeting by saying he’d be back in touch before leaving the country, to make arrangements for transmitting information. During at least two of his conversations with officials from other offices, Berg described the films of Japan he had made back in 1934 and offered to screen them, much as he had in the past for friends and teammates. On July 11, Medical Corps Captain Robert Rutherford sent Berg a note that said, “We were able to get more good from your movies than would have been accumulated over several months of looking through texts and travel magazines.” Two days later, Berg was writing to John McClintock at the OIAA to explain that the Pictorial Records Section of the OSS was “interested” in his films, which Berg would screen as soon as copies could be made of the portions “that were considered essential to the generals and admirals and interested persons in the intelligence service.” Berg was due to leave on his mission the following week, and he promised that he would be ready.
The Catcher Was a Spy Page 13
