The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  Rather, they sent him on two more important errands. On January 23, he was in Zurich for Joliot-Curie’s lecture at the Zurich Physical Society on atomic disintegration. Joliot-Curie had been fulminating against the U.S. and its atomic secrecy everywhere he went, and nothing in the Zurich version of the diatribe came as much of a surprise to Berg, who had heard it all before in Paris. As he had been doing for months, Joliot-Curie proposed that European countries form an atomic bomb bloc against the United States. Before the lecture, Joliot-Curie bragged to Scherrer that the French government provided him complete autonomy in his work, and in a conversation with Gregor Wentzel afterward, the French physicist made no effort to conceal his pro-Communist feelings. Berg sent in a report to Washington, recording all this and warning that Joliot-Curie could be expected to “continue his demagogic tactics all over Europe.” Yet Berg wasn’t worried, and neither was Washington. The feeling was that Joliot-Curie was more of a nuisance than a threat and that his talk of a European bloc wasn’t worth the candle. Scherrer, for one, had promptly told Joliot-Curie that Switzerland wasn’t interested. And neither, it seemed, was the Soviet Union. Berg learned that when Joliot-Curie attended the jubilee meeting of scientists in June, he was not permitted to visit the Moscow Physics Institute.

  January ended, and February began for Berg with eight days in Copenhagen, where he paid a hasty call on Niels Bohr. An emissary of Peter Kapitza, a leading Russian physicist, had been seen leaving Bohr’s house, and this concerned Groves, who knew that Bohr was a dreamer who believed that the best way to keep the world safe was to keep it free of atomic secrets. Two days after Nagasaki, Bohr had published an article in the Times of London, calling for “free access to full scientific information” and the “abolition of barriers hitherto considered necessary to safeguard national interests but now standing in the way of common security against unprecedented dangers.”

  Groves also knew that in 1944 Kapitza had sent a letter through the Soviet embassy in London inviting Bohr to the Soviet Union in 1944. He suspected that Kapitza’s emissary was a Russian agent. This led the ever-paranoid general to imagine that Bohr was taking it upon himself to encourage the sort of nuclear openness he was advocating by sharing his considerable fund of atomic knowledge with the Russians. But the only things Bohr had given to the Russians were some American physics journals. Berg got something better. Bohr’s younger brother, Harald, inscribed a copy of one of his own books to him. Then Berg checked out of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, leaving behind his usual magnificent bill.

  Berg’s work with Meitner and Bohr pleased Dix’s military replacement, Lieutenant Colonel S. M. Skinner. Skinner recommended that Berg be given a raise in salary, on the grounds that his work “has been of the highest caliber and exceptional importance. It has involved the necessity for unusual discretion, tact and fidelity to purpose. It has also required an exceptional degree of technical competence as well as personal courage.” All this netted Berg an increase in salary, to the still nowhere near princely sum of $5,600 a year. It was a gesture of approval more than anything else, and Berg took it in hand and disappeared.

  Throughout the war, Berg could be counted on to show up unannounced in London every few months. Since the German surrender and the foreclosure of the London OSS office, Berg had taken to using the army’s Manhattan Project liaison office at 31 Davies Street behind the U.S. Embassy as his temporary base of operations. Generally this meant that he would ride up the erratic elevator to the liaison office when he was looking for someone to join him for supper at the Savoy Hotel. “He always liked the best places and had special tastes,” says Lyall Johnson, who was executive officer of the liaison office. “He made himself very comfortable and made the people who served him tell him their life history, standing up there stiffly, telling him about themselves.” Now, however, when an inquiry came into London from Washington asking for Berg’s whereabouts, nobody at the liaison office had any idea. Through the rest of February, March, and April, yet another series of increasingly distraught cables wondered what had become of Moe Berg.

  He reappeared in May. It turned out that he had gone skiing in Switzerland, where he had injured his leg.

  One reason that the SSU was looking for Berg was they wanted to know how he’d been spending their money for the past two years. “Mr. Berg has returned several times to the United States, but has rendered no accountings … these facts indicate procrastination and avoidance of financial responsibility,” came one indignant memo from the chief of SSU special funds to General John Magruder. Lieutenant Colonel Skinner argued in reply, “Berg’s mission is of such value that it should not be endangered by a lapse of morale in him through demanding a specific accounting,” and Magruder agreed. “I have no concern about the systematic and appropriate use of funds on the part of Mr. Berg,” he wrote on March 20. By May, however, Lieutenant Colonel William Quinn, the head of the SSU, had become puzzled on two counts: why Berg was not yet back in the U.S., and what he had done with $19,012.99 in unvouchered special funds.

  Berg was in Frankfurt, making notes to himself on Joliot-Curie. He had been told that the scientist had 200 tons of uranium and that there were three functioning atomic piles in France. Although he felt he had followed European atomic science very closely since October, Berg still had very little specific information about whom the Russians were interested in, whom they had already approached, and what countries were attempting to build piles on their own. The Dutch, for example, were rumored to have begun one, but Scherrer said not, and Berg believed him. All this was important to know, but as he moved about Europe, from France to Germany to Switzerland and to England, Berg was raising more questions than he was answering. At Nuremberg, the Chief U.S. Council wondered what Berg was doing there, and General Edwin Sibert of Army Intelligence let it be known to Edward Green, commander of the U.S. Naval Reserve in Europe, that he “did not like the idea of various individuals ‘freewheeling’ through the [European] Theater.”

  You couldn’t cross generals like that, and the SSU moved to correct the situation. As usual, it took a while to locate Berg, but in late July, Lieutenant Colonel Quinn met him in France and asked him to go back to Washington. Berg protested that he was onto some useful information, but Quinn was adamant. “You are ordered back,” he said, and so Berg boarded a plane.

  In Washington he met with procedure, and it didn’t agree with him. He didn’t like being told what to do, he resented being questioned about money, and he didn’t want to be home. Disquieted and morose, in August he turned in two boxes of .32 Colt automatic shells, kept his pistol, and resigned from the SSU. In September he was told that his outstanding funds now totaled $21,439.14. The SSU ordered him to explain it all in writing by October.

  Since early December 1945, meanwhile, the ever-loyal Howard Dix had been writing and rewriting a letter outlining Berg’s exploits, in a prolonged effort to nominate Berg for the Medal of Freedom. In one draft, Dix described Berg’s entering Italy by submarine in April 1944, when entering in June and by command car was the truth. In another draft, Dix wrote, “It must be borne in mind that Miss Meitner was under German surveillance all the time in Sweden, and frankly, the question in my mind is how Mr. Berg ever accomplished the ends without being incarcerated; I do not know.” Again this was misleading. Berg had seen Meitner after the war had ended, when it was perfectly safe to visit her. Yet Dix knew only what Berg had told him, and besides, people expected medal recommendations to burst with tales of daring more than they looked to them for scrupulous accuracy. Filled with mistakes, exaggerations, and several quarts of hyperbole as Dix’s letters were, they met their purpose. On October 10, Berg was awarded the Medal of Freedom.

  Citations usually describe what the honoree has done to be worthy of a medal, but Berg’s activities in Europe were classified, a problem that his citation skirted by omitting the details of his work. The heart of it reads: “In a position of responsibility in the European Theater, he exhibited analytical abilities and a kee
n planning mind. He inspired both respect and constant high level of endeavor on the part of his subordinates, which enabled his section to produce studies and analyses vital to the mounting of American operations.”

  Berg was simultaneously being celebrated for his work and hounded out of the SSU. This wasn’t unusual. Medals, in fact, were sometimes awarded to soften reluctant departures from service. But Berg was having none of it. On December 2, he rejected the award “with due respect for the spirit with which it is offered,” acknowledged his debts in full, and asked that his Siberia and Japan films be returned to him. In January, Larry Houston, the former counsel to the OSS, went to New York to see him. Because Berg’s work was so secret, very few people had known much about it, and records were kept to a minimum. Despite these obstacles, Houston had been looking into things and had calculated that, in all probability, the government owed Berg money. They met at the Pennsylvania Hotel, where what Berg had to say was as black and white as his shirt and tie. Houston remembers that Berg “was nice, very pleasant and said flatly, ‘I don’t want any of your money.’ He was that angry.” Houston got back to Washington and wrote to Berg, explaining, “There is no desire on the part of anyone to collect or to permit you to proffer any sum of money” and going on from there to praise “your accomplishments and your exceptional abilities.” Silence. In April, Houston decided simply to close Berg’s accounts, reasoning, as he wrote in an SSU memo, that “Berg’s services were of great value, inestimable in dollars and cents, but in all probability far exceeding the cost to the government for Mr. Berg’s two and a half years of service.” Houston, who went on to work as legal counsel to the CIA, says, “Everyone I knew thought highly of [Berg], but he was not an easy man to deal with.”

  MONEY AND ORDERS weren’t the source of Berg’s snit so much as symptoms of a more complicated agitation. Simply put, he didn’t want the war to end. The OSS had tolerated his eccentricity, rewarded his spontaneity, prized his work in a way that nobody ever had, and had also treated him like a pasha. The work had been perfectly suited to him. He had lived in the company of brilliant Europeans, probing at them while keeping himself a dark secret. Berg didn’t want to give up this life. He was confused and angry that the OSS was gone.

  And it wasn’t as if the work had dried up. If anything, the situation seemed more dire than ever. Whereas in 1944 the U.S. had to concern itself only with a possible German bomb, scientists now were telling the government that one might come from Russia, France, Argentina, or any number of other places. The atomic recipe had worked. Anybody might now be trying to mix one up, and American scientists sounded even more frantic than they had when they were fretting about Heisenberg. Harold Urey, who had worried so loudly about the German atomic bomb while working on uranium separation at Columbia during the war, was now referring to “the most dangerous situation that humanity has ever faced in all history.” A few years earlier, Chicago scientists were removing their families from the city for safekeeping. Now the hysteria was such that average people all over America were fleeing to remote places to dodge the impending nuclear apocalypse. All this, and Moe Berg, who had been the first American intelligence man trained to attend to such problems, was in from the cold.

  In notes he scrawled on the back of an envelope but then left out of the letter he sent to Colonel Quinn declining the Medal of Freedom, Berg says that when he saw Quinn in France, he knew he would be unable to accept the award, because “the whole story of my humble contribution [cannot be] known or divulged.” These notes closed with a strange remark. “The medal embarrasses me,” he said. Berg meant that if he couldn’t tell people what he’d done to earn the medal, he didn’t want it. For the twenty-five years that remained in his life, Berg would yearn to violate his promise of secrecy and talk freely about his war experiences in Europe. But, except for dropping his guard a few times, he refrained. It was hard for Berg to talk about himself on any subject, let alone one that was classified. And there was another, more practical reason not to say anything. He wanted to remain in the intelligence business.

  13

  A Life

  Without Calendar

  Though the war was over, Moe Berg was back in the United States, living much as he had in Rome, London, and Zurich. He was telling nobody where he was going or what he was doing, appearing and vanishing without wave or warning. The deception had changed. Whereas previously he had been hiding the fact that he did espionage work for the government, now he encouraged people to think he was a spy, when the truth was that he was doing nothing. Save a few lacunas, which included a bungled assignment from the CIA, Berg’s last twenty-five years were without regular employment of any sort. Baseball and intelligence work had kept him in nearly constant motion, permitting him much discretion in the use of his time while providing a skeletal structure to his existence. Now the structure was gone, and Berg’s became a life without calendar. Unleashed from his moorings, he wandered aimlessly, unburdened by appointment, salary, or obligation. This talented man who could have supported himself in so many ways chose instead to become a vagabond, living on wit and charm and the kindness of friends.

  Always elusive, Berg now began to defy chronology. Whereas previously his movements could be marked along the immutable points of a baseball schedule and traced through the trail of documents recording his wartime activities, in the ocean of time that was the last third of his life there were very few buoys to chart his passage. The signal events of his life had all occurred, and so Berg gyred through an amorphous span of years. He watched baseball games, he traveled, he paid visits, he fled and traveled some more, and all the while he hoped for one of the government’s infrequent calls.

  For many World War II veterans, the war had been a disruption, and after the German and Japanese surrenders, they returned home to resume their lives. For Moe Berg, however, war had provided him with a life he loved, and returning home was the disruption. There was nothing there to anchor his attention. Until he left her to go off to Europe, Estella Huni had come close. She had brought him companionship, intimacy, and diversions, both social and intellectual. But she was now married, which inconvenienced Berg more than it buffeted him. Instead of sharing an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, he was forced to move into the house of his brother, Dr. Sam, on Roseville Avenue in Newark. He had no better place to go. What he did have were big financial problems.

  Shortly after his return to Newark, Berg received a telephone call from the Internal Revenue Service, requesting that he come in to their office and explain several years of expense deductions on his income tax return. An appointment was made for the following day. Berg arrived wearing his fedora and a fur-collared topcoat. The agent assigned to the matter knew who Berg was and he was nervous. Berg was not. He handed the IRS man a slip of paper with a Washington telephone number written on it and asked him to call. The agent went into his supervisor’s office. The supervisor listened, took the slip of paper, and dialed the number himself. When Washington picked up, the supervisor explained who he was and that he was auditing Morris Berg’s tax returns, and then the person in Washington began talking. A moment later the supervisor hung up and told the agent not to trouble Mr. Berg anymore.

  The problems of the Novelart Manufacturing Company were not so easily solved. In 1933, Berg had been a founding investor in the stationery and film company with his friend Milton Kahn, who served as the managing director. For a while, with orders received from well-known department stores like S. S. Kresge, W. T. Grant, and F. W. Woolworth, and theaters from Virginia to Texas, the partnership did well. When Berg left for the war, he had reason to believe that his original investment of $4,000 had earned him a considerable profit. On December 11, 1944, Kahn contracted to provide the government with $117,000 worth of writing portfolios. A year later, he entered into a repricing agreement, assuming a debt to the government of $16,341. When Berg returned to the U.S., $7,500 remained unpaid and the company was on the verge of ruin. In the fall of 1950, Kahn incorporated,
disconnected the telephone at the company’s new Long Island City headquarters, and filed for bankruptcy. He was granted a discharge of his debts in early 1951. The government proceeded against Berg for the $7,500, plus 6 percent annual interest.

  Berg had made none of Novelart’s financial decisions, and might have been more than justified in filing for bankruptcy himself, but he resisted. At the time, bankruptcy was still publicly regarded as something approaching chicanery, and Berg would not consider it. Perhaps he was confident that the crisis would dissolve. But this time there was no appreciative OSS or mysterious voice on the telephone in Washington to hoist him from the financial morass. By stoically maintaining his honor in the Novelart affair, Berg put himself in for years of misery.

  Accounts of how the demise of Novelart affected him vary. Berg may have focused his resentment on a government that pursued him for money when he felt it should have been welcoming him home as a hero. In any case, Berg’s initial response to the situation was to ignore it.

  The simplest way to have satisfied the government was for Berg to have taken a job and begun to make payments on the debt. He didn’t do that. Ted Lyons, the new manager of the White Sox, offered him a coaching position. Berg declined. Red Sox owner Thomas Yawkey would always have found something for one of his favorite players to do in Boston, but Berg never asked him to, and when Yawkey tried, he was politely rebuffed. Berg did not apply for a teaching position, join a law firm, advertise his legal services, or even list himself in the Newark or Manhattan telephone books.