Moe Berg was born in New York City in 1902 to Jewish immigrants who moved to Newark, New Jersey, choosing a neighborhood with few Jewish residents; at seven he played for a Methodist church team under an assumed name. At Princeton he studied seven languages, graduated with high honors, captained the baseball team, and called infield plays in Latin with a teammate. He signed his first major league contract in 1923, earned the scouting tag good field, no hit, and skipped spring training to finish a Columbia law degree. Pressed into catching after injuries, he handled a knuckleball pitcher in his debut and once went 117 consecutive games without an error.
On a 1934 all-star tour of Japan with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, he slipped away in a kimono to the roof of St. Luke’s Hospital in Tokyo and filmed the city and harbor, footage later given to wartime intelligence. Recruited by the OSS, he sat in a Zurich lecture hall in December 1944 posing as a Swiss physics student with a pistol and orders to shoot Werner Heisenberg if the German bomb seemed close. He judged it was not. The CIA hired him in 1952 to probe the Soviet atomic program and let him go as unreliable. He drifted for two decades and died in 1972 after a fall at his sister’s New Jersey home.
- His birth date was recorded wrong for his whole life until a filmmaker found his birth certificate.
- He bought up to 10 newspapers a day and forbade anyone to touch them until he had read them.
- His brother had eviction papers drawn up to remove him from his home.
- His last words asked a nurse whether the Mets had won; they had.
- He refused the Medal of Freedom, which his sister accepted after his death; his baseball card is displayed at the CIA.
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