He wasn’t. On July 17, Seymour Houghton of the OSS thanked Berg for “making it possible to view your film and for your untiring efforts during the screening of it. Mr. John F. Langan, a member of our staff, reports your film to be of strategic importance.” A week after that, Berg dispatched a memorandum to Rockefeller, inviting his boss “as my guest” to a July 28 screening of the films. “All the interested personnel of the intelligence services are attending.” Berg sent copies of the memo also to Clark, McClintock, and seven other OIAA officials. The interest in his films had Berg ecstatic. Writing to his mother, he said, “I’m going to show my moving pictures to all the intelligence officers of all our armed forces—that means the officers of Army, Navy, Marines etc. who put together all information and give it to the fliers who bomb Tokyo or Berlin, or the army that attacks—I’ll tell you what they say—I think I have pictures nobody else in the world has.”
On the thirtieth, in a letter to his sister, Berg reported the reaction to the screening. “The movies were received triumphantly,” he said. “They wondered how I got them—now they can make pinpoint recognition of warehouses, gas tanks, docks, factories, etc.” Berg had seen Rockefeller that day, who by this time had enough experience with him to know how well he responded to flattery. “He told me some nice things,” Berg reported. “That I was the only one in the office who could handle police chiefs, newspaper editors, local people [Spanish speaking] etc. in the other Americas to see how our troops were being received etc.” Rockefeller invited Berg to dinner on August 11, which meant Berg’s mission was again delayed. Berg didn’t care. He was in the thick of things, providing his government with crucial information.
Or was he? Just how important to intelligence, people were the seconds of footage Berg had recorded from the roof of Saint Luke’s Hospital and elsewhere around Japan? Berg had last been in Tokyo in 1934. When U.S. intelligence needed information about Tokyo, rather than rely on an eight-year-old film made by an amateur, they were much more likely to go to intelligence experts who had been in Japan more recently, which, in fact, they did. For the surprise B-25 raids on Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and Nagoya, led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle from the aircraft carrier Hornet on April 18, 1942, Doolittle says, all bombing targets were plotted by Captain Steve Jurika, a former assistant U.S. Navy attaché in Tokyo who spoke fluent Japanese and had been in Japan for seven years, as recently as 1941. Beginning in 1939, Jurika spent two years preparing meticulous bombing maps for every neighborhood in Tokyo, highlighting gun batteries, political buildings, factories, barracks, highways, and railroad tracks. In 1944, when the Japanese learned what Jurika had done, they murdered his mother, who lived in the Philippines. There were plenty of published sources readily available as well, because Tokyo’s topography had not changed significantly since the American Charles Austin Beard had helped to rebuild the city after the great earthquake and fire of 1923. Similarly, photographs were on hand. Jurika himself had taken a great many. He also had a movie camera. Except for a persistent but almost certainly apocryphal story that has Berg’s film being used to plan the Doolittle raids, no archival or trustworthy published evidence has emerged to suggest that Berg’s films were put to any use during World War II.
So why did Berg attract so much interest in July 1942? For several reasons. In a time of war, no intelligence officer turns down a prominent man who claims he has valuable footage of the enemy capital. Japan was a distant, mysterious place, and just because there was abundant information about the country didn’t mean that more was unnecessary. Berg, no doubt, made his film sound intriguing. He was a terrific storyteller, a vivid embellisher, who took himself very seriously. When he recounted the lengths he’d gone to, in order to get to the top of a building that was undeniably a terrific vantage point, he made people curious. But the generals and admirals who, according to Berg, described the film as “essential” did so on the basis of what Berg told them about it. They had yet to see it for themselves. When they did, they would have taken the films for what they were: brief, amateurish panoramas made by an adventurous person using a movie camera for the first time.
The enthusiastic notes Berg received following the screening must be ascribed to decorum. How else to respond to an eager, well-known man who had gone to so much trouble? Berg worked for the OIAA, and was extending himself by arranging screenings for other agencies. He deserved the thanks and appreciation. Afterward, his films were probably filed away with the burgeoning monograph on Japan and forgotten.
But just because the screenings were not of military importance does not mean that they weren’t useful to Berg. The early months of the war were a frenetic time in Washington. Military people were besieged by businessmen from New York, bankers from Cincinnati, insurance salesmen from Omaha, all eager to join the war effort and certain of their own utility. Amidst the thirsty mob of prospective dollar-a-year men, Berg had been noticed. Less than a year before, he’d been a bull pen catcher. Now he had commanded a powerful audience in Washington.
Rubbing shoulders with so many people whose business was secrecy made Berg, in Washington, more secretive in public than ever. In the months following the publicity blitz that accompanied his joining the OIAA, Berg was conspicuously reserved or, as John Kieran put it, “Always a mysterious bird, Professor Berg has become even more mysterious since he joined up with the forces of Nelson A. Rockefeller, the coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.” Berg was rarely seen at Griffith Stadium, even when the Red Sox were in town, and when he ran into anyone on the sidewalk who knew him, Kieran said that “he would put up a warning finger across his closed lips, nod solemnly, and move off mysteriously without saying a word.” One day he did stop for a long chat with the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, but Winchell was the exception. On August 22, Berg boarded a plane in Miami, flew to Panama, and began his assignment.
BERG’S ENTHUSIASM FOR improving the lives of American soldiers was so evident, his desire to please so sincere, his pedigree (ex-ballplayer) so attractive, and his funding from Rockefeller so generous, that any skepticism from military base commanders and embassy diplomats evaporated in the tropical sun. Berg would arrive at a base, look up the commanding officer, and explain that he was “just trying to help the boys in their dislocation.” Dressed in a white shirt and khakis—a sartorial concession to the climate, and one he would never make again—and setting his own itinerary, Berg went everywhere that airplanes, Jeeps, and his feet could take him; he had a high time and managed to carry off his work with aplomb.
He stayed a week in Panama, consulting with the American ambassador as well as various generals and admirals, touring gun batteries and other fortifications designed to protect the canal, and concluding, in the journal he later submitted to Rockefeller, that beyond “a natural bit of griping,” morale was high. Then he was off, flying first to Costa Rica. To get to an isolated aircraft warning station, he rode a Jeep through jungle bristling “with bushmasters and coral snakes, baboons, jaguars and wild cats.” Two days later Berg was on the arid, coastal plain of Talara, Peru, in far western South America, where a dusty runway faced Japan. He pronounced the soldiers’ drinking water “excellent,” and described a beach covered with wooden crosses put up in memory of natives killed by sharks. There were plenty of other fish in the Pacific, and Berg recommended that the barracks be supplied with six sets of deep-sea fishing tackle. Other diversions he thought the men could use included a movie theater, athletic equipment, radios, a Victrola, and a series of books on Peruvian archeology, geology, history, and folklore (Berg felt that American soldiers and sailors should take an interest in local culture). He bought all of the requested recreational equipment that he could, and promised to order the rest from the U.S. He also commented on the shortage of condoms and widespread venereal disease in the town of Piura.
Berg’s journal for Rockefeller is as much a literary travellog as a morale evaluation. In his Galápagos entries, he takes time to explain that the islands are named for lar
ge turtles, describes the soldiers singing and drinking beer beside the ocean at dusk, tells Rockefeller how pleased the soldiers were with the Victrola records he’d brought them, urges the purchase of fishing equipment here, too, and since there were no women on the island he visited, relates that he told the commanding surgeon that he had a “great opportunity to write a definitive report on man without woman.”
September brought him to Salinas, Ecuador, “the venereal Utopia,” where Berg discouraged a colonel who wanted to ban his men from the syphilis-infested town of Salinas, since that might “reflect on the hospitality of the Ecuadorian people, as well as the lack of restraint on the part of our boys.” Nazis, meanwhile, were warning the local people to “keep their ‘nice’ girls away from our ‘bad’ boys,” which, said Berg, “Ecuadorians take in stride.” By mid-September he’d been to Guatemala and Honduras. Back in Panama, he wrote to his mother and sister: “Never felt better—working all the time, but it is a great pleasure to me—I like it—the Embassy here thinks I’m doing a great job. Nobody has been accepted by the military like me. I talk their language and they know I am for them.” Then it was off to Trinidad, with stops at bases in Colombia, Aruba, Curaçao, and Venezuela en route. Besides sampling tomato omelettes and seeing tarantulas and centipedes, he presented gold baseballs to the winners of the Trinidad softball championship.
For Berg, the work was tantamount to a wonderful holiday adventure. Life was dull for American troops in this mostly peaceful part of the world. When the exotic former catcher appeared out of the mists, it was a rare break in the monotony. Wherever Berg went, people were delighted to show him the sights. So it was that, between post inspections, he lay face down with a pair of binoculars in the glass nose of a British B-18 bomber during an unsuccessful hunt for some of the German submarines that were taking a heavy toll on Allied shipping. He was also treated to dinner at the best Chinese restaurant in Aruba, and he began October with “a fascinating journey through the heart of the Dutch Guiana jungles—tigers, jaguars, wild cats, snakes, alligators, dense bush, Indian villages and unique, au naturel, ‘bush nigger’ Djuka villages, and seeing the ‘bush niggers’ come out to shore in their homemade pointed canoes, both men and women, mostly naked.” There were fully clothed American soldiers in Guiana too, and sitting with them, Berg learned that the Yankees had won the first game of the World Series.
Thousands of miles from Broadway, Berg was still bumping into people who’d met him, or had wanted to. Just before he left Belém, Brazil, for the port of Natal, Berg was asked to delay his departure and greet Navy Secretary Knox, which he did. The next day, Berg cheerfully awakened hours before dawn to see Knox off. In Natal, Berg encountered Don Griffin, his former Princeton classmate, serving in the air transport command. Griffin he ignored, giving him the hush sign as he passed. Elsewhere about town, Berg visited dance halls, where enlisted men “of good family” hired out prostitutes. “Perhaps if these service men had an alternative they might curb their indulgence” was his thinking. Berg did his best. By the time he left them, the soldiers at Natal had ice-cream freezers, a boxing ring, and new furniture and lamps for their recreation center.
He got to Rio on October 19, and there he encouraged the wives of naval officers to think of ways to keep the servicemen out of the bars. Bounding about town, he met Mrs. Vargas, who was “very pleased and showed great interest” in his work. Three days later she dispatched a messenger to ask Berg if he would set up similar programs for Brazilian soldiers. Berg couldn’t do that, but he happily shared “my ideas on the subject.” He also attended a luncheon of the American Society of Rio de Janeiro, where he encouraged sending Christmas presents to the servicemen and stressed the pleasure the men got when personal notes were enclosed.
In Washington, nobody had any idea of what Berg was doing with himself, as Ethel Berg discovered when she wrote to John Clark asking for information about her brother. “There isn’t much that we here in Washington know of Mr. Berg’s trip,” he responded. “We feel that Mr. Berg himself does not know very much in advance his own plans.” A letter Ethel had sent care of Clark had not gone out because, it was explained, “we did not know where to send it.”
Through December, Berg stayed in Rio, where, after receiving word from Rockefeller that the last installment of equipment for the troops stationed in Brazil was on its way, his business changed. Now he was nosing around, taking meals with Brazilian coffee and newspaper barons in places like the Jockey Club and the Lobby Grill at the Copacabana Hotel, trying to get a sense of how the quicksilver Vargas and other Brazilian political leaders were feeling about the Nazis. He was a little late. By this time most of the German spy rings in Brazil had been smashed, and Argentina had become the Latin American center for German espionage. Still, it was important to keep abreast of Vargas. A year earlier, when he had finally renounced Brazilian neutrality and signed on with the Allies, Vargas had simultaneously sent word to the German ambassador that he wanted to be on good terms with Hitler.
In January, Berg went down to Sao Paulo, where local lawyers and professors told him that “the naziphile element still exists high up in Brazilian military circles.” Back in Rio on January 17, an ex-consul from the Brazilian embassy in Italy passed along word that Mussolini was in poor health. Three days later, Arturo da Silva Bernardes, a former president of Brazil, told Berg that Brazil was no longer a democracy. Although this hardly constituted a revelation, Berg urged him to write about Vargas for the Atlantic Monthly. February took him to Recife, where he heard about assassination plots within the Brazilian military ranks. Describing his various meetings to Rockefeller, Berg noted, “In all my visits and talks with the above Brazilians I made clear that although I was making an official trip my status with them was unofficial and off the record.” By poking around in this way, Berg had turned his soft propaganda assignment into a secret operation and delicately imposed himself on a new profession. He was acting, more or less, as a spy.
Berg filed this Brazil portion of his journal under separate, “confidential and secret” cover from the rest of his reports, which resumed on February 9. It seems unlikely at this or any other time on his trip that he also sent a report to the FBI, but if he did, it remains classified.
Berg returned to Natal on February 11, for President Roosevelt’s visit, as well as for consultations with doctors about prostitution. At 3:30 A.M. on Valentine’s Day he was awake to watch the A-20 bombers load up and take off for sorties in Asia and the Middle East. Gazing at the pilots and bombardiers, Berg noticed “among these boys some anxiety, even fear, but on the whole, magnificent courage.” On February 17, he was back in the U.S.
At the Commerce Building, Berg prepared his reports for Rockefeller. He had finished the Brazil section by February 27, and the rest was complete a month later. In all, it totaled close to sixty single-spaced typed pages. “At times,” admitted Berg in the cover letter accompanying the report, “I felt obliged to enter into details that may seem excessive.” That was putting it delicately, but Rockefeller didn’t chastise him. Instead, four days after he received Berg’s materials, the coordinator wrote him a letter of praise, thanking him “for all you’ve done.… Only someone with your experience and knowledge of international as well as human problems could have handled this situation with such tact and effectiveness.” Clark, however, was responsible for Berg’s official evaluation, and he was a more rigorous critic. On a scale of one to nine, he gave Berg a five. In almost every performance category Berg received “good” marks, although Clark said that Berg’s “effectiveness in meeting and dealing with others,” his “initiative,” and his “physical fitness for the work” were all “outstanding.” This was fair. If Latin America had proved anything about Berg, it was that he was willing to go anywhere, that it was as easy for him to befriend people in foreign places as it had been in Boston or Washington, and that when it came time to leave, he was gone without warning or remorse.
Now, however, he was in Washington with n
o job. Certainly, he didn’t want to work for Rockefeller anymore. Not many ambitious people did. Clark, writing to his brother-in-law, explained, “We are all uncomfortable, perversely, over the growing realization that Latin America becomes more and more of a back eddy as the war moves east and north … there is a glaring headline that papas are to be drafted and I think I shall not accept a deferment unless someone can think up something a little more significant for me to do.” The logical alternative was to move from the Commerce Building to Q Building, where the OSS offices were, and that is what Clark, and an OIAA employee named Charles O’Neill and Berg all did. “Berg left for the same reason Clark and I did,” says O’Neill. “There wasn’t the fear there had been in the first year or two. There was no more alarm in Peru that the Japanese were coming. We thought there was more necessary work elsewhere. The OSS was looking for people like us. They knew something of what we were doing and they contacted us.”
The Catcher Was a Spy Page 14
