In the fall of 1958, the Sangers were in Stow, and Ted brought Berg out to visit for a long weekend. In the mornings Marjory would first take her husband to the train station, and then go up to Concord with Berg to buy him the Boston Herald, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Herald-Tribune, all of which she was permitted to pay for but not to touch. After she cooked breakfast for Berg, he would insist that Marjory accompany him for a long walk across the pine-needle-strewn paths in the woods. Later there was shopping to do, dinner to cook, and Ted’s commuter train from Boston to meet. Marjory found that Berg was “constantly seeking attention,” and felt relieved that he punctuated “his monologues” with “a lot of bathing.” The old house had one bathroom, and Berg’s fetish about baths meant that Marjory made a few trips to the woods. After his baths, Berg liked to make complimentary jokes about Marjory’s thick, soft towels. They were monogrammed with her maiden initials, M.B., which were, of course, his initials too.
On a Monday morning, Ted and Berg walked into the kitchen to announce that Berg was having such a good time that he was staying on for a while. Marjory’s face fell. Berg caught on immediately. “All right, Marnie,” he said, voice gone cold. Ted drove him to Boston. For the next few days Ted was furious, but the rift seemed to heal with time.
That winter, the Sangers moved into a house in Cambridge, and in February, Teddy went off to Maryland to visit his mother, promising to be back on a Monday evening in time for dinner at Henri IV, a Cambridge restaurant. On that Monday, just before seven in the evening, the doorbell rang, and when Marjory opened it, Moe Berg was standing in front of her. “Come,” he said, “I’ve come to take you out to dinner.”
“Moe,” she said, “that’s awfully kind of you, but Ted’s not here yet. When he comes home, we’re going to Henri IV, and I hope you’ll come with us.”
“Ted’s not coming back,” said Berg.
“Yes, he is. He’s visiting his mother.
“No, he’s in England.” Ted, it turned out, was leaving his wife. “I pulled out somewhat dramatically,” Ted says.
From then on, Berg was Marjory’s constant companion. They ate lunch and dinner at out-of-the-way restaurants, with Berg always paying the check, took long walks around Harvard Square, and went on day trips to Walden Pond and to Wellesley. They went to bookstores, where Berg would make tall stacks of books and then leave without buying any of them. Marjory heard nothing from her husband.
After several weeks of this, Marjory says that “Moe seemed to change the tempo, and instead of trying to divert my attention from my shocked sense of loss, humiliation, and rejection, he started talking of divorce and finding me a lawyer and taking me to Baltimore to face my father. I never needed to face my father, and he’d hardly have wanted to see me with Moe.” Marjory noticed another change. Whereas previously Berg had taken her to drugstore soda fountains and small cafés for meals, now they dined in posh restaurants and in plush hotel dining rooms at the Ritz, the Somerset, and the Copley Plaza. Berg still paid for everything, and was attentive and considerate, especially to the Red Sox fans who were always stopping by the table to say hello to the old Boston catcher and his slender blond companion.
One day, Berg invited her for breakfast at the Parker House, where he was staying. There was no sign of him in the lobby, so Marjory called up to his room. “Marnie,” he said, “I’m here. Come on up.” When Berg opened the door, he was still in his pajamas, with a Japanese kimono over them. “Come in,” he said. “Breakfast is just about ready.” Marjory told him that it had been her understanding that they were eating in the dining room. “I thought it would be cozier up here,” said Berg. Berg had never made the slightest sexual advance toward her, and Marjory didn’t think romance was quite his intention here either. She suspected something darker. “All of a sudden I thought there might be a photographer,” says Marjory. “My father had warned me about doing anything incriminating.” She told Berg she’d rather not. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “We’ve known each other for a long time.” She left anyway.
After two months with Berg, Marjory knew there would be no reconciliation with her husband. Berg seemed annoyed that she was still upset. “He’s not worth grieving over, you know,” he said. At about this time, Berg told her how he’d come to be involved in the breakup of her marriage. He said that Ted had gone to Maryland to see his mother, and then met Berg in Newark to discuss the situation. (Ted Sanger says that Berg met him in New York and saw him off at the pier when he left for England.) Berg told Marjory that his response to Ted’s request that he be the one to tell Marjory that he was leaving her was “I can’t do this.” But Berg had done it.
“I asked him if he’d be the one to tell her,” says Ted Sanger. “How he expressed this to her and how he interpreted it was out of my hands.” Marjory always suspected that her husband had been bankrolling Berg, but Sanger says that’s not so. “I didn’t ask him to stay in a hotel and take care of her,” he says. “I just asked him to break the news to her. I asked him to make things as easy as he could for her. I knew it would be hard on her. He was my missionary, not my agent. It was the role the fates dealt him and he accepted it.” How Berg, who had no money, was able to escort a woman to restaurants every day for two months while staying at a fancy hotel remains a mystery.
Marjory agreed to a divorce. Ted Sanger says he asked Berg to handle it for him, but Berg refused and recommended a Boston attorney instead. After that, Marjory never saw Ted or Berg again, although Berg did send her a postcard from Cuba. Following the divorce, the country house in Stow was put up for sale, and that summer, Marjory drove up from Baltimore to clean it out. The house was full of old newspapers, and it seemed obvious that Berg had been living there in a squalor of newsprint. Upstairs she found similar chaos, but what she did not find were her towels with the embroidered M.B. In the end, they had proved irresistible.
BERG HAD BEEN staying in Stow, and with Ted Sanger. When he got back from England, Sanger found that Berg was, as he put it, “living a bit pillar to post,” and took him in. With Marjory Sanger, Berg had gone to restaurants. With Ted, he went to church. Sanger thinks that church for Berg was a lark. “He was a very undoctrinaire person,” he says. “He didn’t care about religion. He cared about honesty and morality. I don’t think he ever set foot in a synagogue.” In the morning, they got up, bought the newspapers, and found a place to have coffee. They talked a lot of politics and had a true bachelor’s time together. Sanger found it liberating. “We were not responsible to anybody else,” he says. “We were two people who thought we knew a lot. In a sense I was sitting at his feet.” At night they went out to diners where Berg met sports fans. Sanger always paid for dinner, and if they stepped into a book shop and Berg wanted something, Sanger slipped him the money for that, too. Once they went up to Hanover, to see a Dartmouth College football game. Nelson Rockefeller was there, and he and Berg shouted hearty greetings to each other. The association lasted a matter of months. Then Sanger remarried, and he didn’t see much of Berg after that. Sanger speculates about Berg that “maybe he was an unhappy man” and says, “I think the times with me could have been an escape.”
DURING THE “TED and Marnie affair,” as Berg referred to the divorce in his notes, he went to a cocktail party in Cambridge, where he met a young, whipcord-handsome bachelor named Harry Broley. Broley was a consultant for the Arthur D. Little Company. He had once worked in naval intelligence, loved baseball, and liked old bookstores, and he and Berg hit it off immediately. They began going to Red Sox games at Fenway Park and to Cambridge bookstores together. Broley says that the Sangers’ divorce had depressed Berg. “Moe had a kind of romantic streak,” he says. “He was against marriage to begin with, but if you do get married, Moe felt you should stick it out.” Broley gave him something new to think about.
At the moment, Broley was working on a baseball project for Arthur D. Little. The city of Buffalo was contemplating building a downtown ballpark
for a possible franchise in the Continental League, a new professional baseball league. It was Broley’s job to assess for the Buffalo Redevelopment Foundation the likelihood of professional baseball coming to Buffalo and the facilities a professional team would require, and to evaluate proposed bond issues involved with raising the money to build a stadium. Broley invited Berg to go to Buffalo and assist him, and Berg went gladly. Broley paid him $100 a day, plus out-of-pocket expenses. Broley was on the Buffalo assignment for three years, and even when Berg’s own work on the project was done, he visited Broley frequently, for four or five days at a stretch.
Broley admired Berg for the reasons many men did, and also because Berg intrigued him. Broley came to see that Moe Berg “didn’t commit to people. He didn’t get involved. I don’t think he got involved with me.” Even so, Broley did achieve a frequency of contact with Berg that almost nobody else ever had. He gave Berg money, bought him drinks at Bill Donovan’s old club in Buffalo, the Saturn, and at the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Bar in Manhattan, and he watched him operate. Berg traveled “with a toothbrush and a lot of phone numbers,” and when he arrived somewhere, he’d flip through the numbers, place a call, announce “I’m in town for the night,” and just like that would come an invitation. “He’d be there for three weeks,” says Broley. “People liked to take him home. He stayed in thousands of houses. He felt if he came to your house, he was giving you something. His company and conversation.”
At lunch in New York with John Snyder, an old Princeton classmate, Berg met another Arthur D. Little employee, named Warren Berg. Warren Berg had been baseball captain at Harvard, where he also studied engineering. He was no relation to Berg, but his nickname had long been “Moe,” and he was delighted to meet the real Moe. Soon enough, Warren Berg was getting telephone calls: “I’m in town,” Moe Berg would say. “I’ll see you at six.” Warren Berg never knew how long Berg planned to stay, but he welcomed him. Berg was fun. Warren Berg would watch him open a book, read a page, hand the book to Warren, and repeat the entire page from memory. While he was in Boston, Berg liked to drop by Warren Berg’s office. If some Japanese clients were walking down the hall, Berg might bound out of Warren Berg’s office, and a moment later the Japanese were clapping him on his back. Another day, they attended the Harvard commencement exercises, where Berg translated the Latin oration line for line as it was spoken. An elderly Harvard man, seated in front of them, turned around after the orator and Berg were done and said, “Brilliant.” Warren Berg tried to give Berg work, but, with one exception, Berg always refused. “He seemed to never want to get pinned down,” says Warren Berg. “He liked to be free to roam around.”
The exception came in the spring of 1962. Charles Finley, the iconoclastic owner of the Kansas City Athletics, had quarreled with civic leaders in Kansas City and was threatening to move his team to Texas, claiming that Kansas City couldn’t support a major league baseball team. Joe Cronin, the American League president, was no great admirer of Finley’s, and at Berg’s suggestion, he commissioned Arthur D. Little to prepare a confidential study appraising the team and its prospects for profit in Missouri. ADL, in turn, asked Berg to be a part of the consulting team, and he agreed, for $100 a day and expenses, some $500 a day less than the usual ADL daily consulting fee. From May 30 to June 4, Berg was in Kansas City, talking with fans, ushers, cab drivers, and hotel clerks; afterward he dictated his findings into a short, somewhat chaotic memorandum, which was incorporated into the larger ADL report, which in turn helped the American League to decide to deny Finley’s proposed move to Fort Worth, Texas.
Berg especially liked to visit the Warren Bergs when they moved from their home in Winchester to their rambling summer retreat on the seashore in Gloucester. Berg arrived with nothing but a toothbrush and a sheaf of newspapers, took several showers a day and washed out his nylon shirt every night—“he was an immaculate son of a gun,” says Warren Berg—and stayed, as Warren Berg puts it, “a bit longer than expected.” While Warren Berg was at work, Berg read or talked baseball with Warren’s elderly father. Once he convinced Mrs. Berg to drive him to Rockport to visit his old friend John Kieran, now retired from the New York Times and writing books about natural history. At the end of the day, Warren picked him up and drove him back to Gloucester. That was the only time after the war that Berg saw Kieran. On other days, Warren Berg would return from the office and join Berg in lengthy walks along the beach, where they talked physics and baseball.
Berg could be brusque, which Warren Berg observed when a radio station telephoned him, trying to find Berg and explaining that it wanted him to appear on a World Series quiz program. When the message was passed along, Berg’s response was “Tell them to go to hell.” In 1964, the Warren Bergs were expecting a number of guests at Gloucester, who would fill all their spare bedrooms. He told Berg about the situation, and Berg left, looking displeased. Warren never saw him again.
MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE
From Boston, Berg sometimes made short trips to other parts of New England. One summer evening he appeared in the offices of the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader and Sunday News. The Sunday News sports editor, Leo Cloutier, introduced Berg around the newsroom, and one of the people who met Berg that night was a young reporter named James Freedman. Freedman, destined to become the president of Dartmouth College, was leaving journalism to enter law school that fall, and when Berg heard about this, he looked at Freedman and said, “The law is the art of fine distinctions.” Then he walked away.
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
The Japanese documentary filmmaker Jiro Hirano produced a brief television film about Berg in 1979. When Hirano came to the U.S. to interview some of Berg’s Princeton classmates, most told him that Berg was the only person they knew at college who had no close friends. The closest, these men agreed, was Berg’s teammate on the baseball team, Crossan Cooper. Hirano spoke to Cooper about Berg, and Cooper described Berg first as “a loner.”
In May 1959, Cooper was living in Baltimore, and Berg went to visit him. On the way, Berg opened a notebook and wrote down an outline of his life. He listed Columbia law school, baseball in Japan with Babe Ruth, the party where Ruth had harassed the geisha girl, and his photographing episode on top of Saint Luke’s Hospital. Then came South America, Amaldi, Ferri, Flute, Meitner, Donovan, Göttingen, Nuremberg, and AGARD. These were some of the signal moments in his life, and Berg could not have forgotten them. Why, he’d been to Europe with Von Karman less than a year before. Of course he hadn’t forgotten them. He was living off them. Berg knew that people were willing to host him because he entertained them, and so now he was priming his material, deciding what to tell and what to leave out during a long evening of talk in which the subject would be himself.
Cooper was not the only beneficiary of such preparations. Berg’s notebooks are teeming with these summaries, some more robust than others. In 1960, Berg met Ellery Huntington, who had helped recruit him for the OSS, for lunch, and in this notebook outline Berg reminded himself of his days on the Balkans desk and in Caserta, his work with Broley in Buffalo, his CIA assignment to turn up clues about Bruno Pontecorvo, and his meetings at Princeton cocktail parties with Johnny von Neumann. People always said that Berg wouldn’t talk about himself, but the truth was that he longed to. He was just extremely selective about what he said and how he said it. Ever the good intelligence man, Berg also made notes following his meetings. When a lunch with a man named Reggie Taylor was done, Berg took the first opportunity to write down the names of Taylor’s wife and children, the children’s marital status, the maiden names of all the women at the table, and a salacious bit of gossip about a suicide that had apparently been discussed during the meal. After the first day of what turned out to be a lengthy stay at Cooper’s house in Baltimore, Berg wrote down, “told Marnie story. Crossan wants to be trusted.”
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The explanation for how a man who had very little money was able to travel frequently to Washington, D.
C., by train was the usual one with Berg. He befriended people, and they were glad to do something for him. A man named Charlie ran the dining car on the Trenton to Washington train for twenty years, and Berg lit up the room for Charlie with conversation. The extended Berg family held annual gatherings in New Jersey, all of which Berg avoided like scrofula, just as he did all family functions, but when the son of another helpfully disposed Penn Central conductor, named John, was married, Berg was on hand for the evening. When John needed letters written for him, he dictated and Berg wrote. Berg made himself familiar with the schedules of conductors he knew, boarded those trains, and rode for nothing.
Once he got to Washington, Berg shifted abruptly from the gregarious entertainer to the man of mystery. Whenever he encountered people in Union Station or on the city streets who knew him, he brushed past them, without a glance. “It wasn’t politic to recognize him,” says his friend from the OSS, Margaret Feldman. Berg did this in cities besides Washington, of course, but his ostentatious displays of secrecy were perhaps the most poignant in Washington, for in Washington was the CIA, the one place where it could be confirmed for certain that Moe Berg was a secret agent no more.
For an accomplished man who was doing nothing and wished people to believe otherwise, spying was an ideal cover. Nobody could dispute it. For a private man who was loath to reveal anything about himself, spying was also an excellent means of warding off questions. Yet when Berg left the false impression that he worked for the CIA, it was not just a matter of petty dissembling calculated to save face and veil personality. It was also symptomatic of a man suffering a protracted bout of wishful thinking. “He missed it, sure,” says Harry Broley. “He was made for it. The greatest high a guy like Moe could get.” Much of the peculiar behavior that Moe Berg exhibited toward the end of his life was a consequence of being rejected by the work that he loved, not an uncommon reaction in the intelligence world, according to Charles McCarry, the former deep cover agent for the CIA. “My guess is that what Moe Berg found stressful was not being in the floating secret village,” says McCarry. “There’s something tremendously comforting about being in the floating secret village where everybody’s secrets are known—they’ve been so thoroughly investigated. Of course not everything was known, but it seemed that way, and that was a liberating factor. This produces a tremendous sense of camaraderie, and it lasts throughout life. I don’t think anybody who has been in that sort of world trusts any outsider the way he trusts other spies. The relationship between agents is deeper than marriage. My mother didn’t know about me until I was exposed on the ‘Today Show.’ She said, ‘Thanks a lot, Charles.’ ”
The Catcher Was a Spy Page 28
