Morris "Moe" Berg's dying words — "How did the Mets do today?" — were on brand for the 70-year-old New York native who enjoyed a 15-year career in Major League Baseball before America entered World War II.

Sports columnist John Kieran called Berg "The Professor" on account of his reputation as an Ivy League-educated linguist and lawyer, a mentor and coach to younger MLB players, and a newspaper-devouring raconteur who earned fanfare as a repeat contestant on the NBC radio quiz show "Information Please."

His 1972 New York Times obituary eulogized, first and foremost, the "catcher in majors who spoke 10 languages."


"We often think about athletes just playing ball and going in for records. But Moe, Ted Williams twice, Joe DiMaggio — they went off and risked their lives and their careers to serve," said filmmaker Aviva Kempner, who illuminates Berg's life and legacy in her 2019 documentary, " The Spy Behind Home Plate."





"It's important to know who our unknown heroes are and what they did," she said.

Here's a window into Berg's life and transition from multilingual ballplayer to World War II nuclear spy.

He was the son of immigrants.




Moe Berg's passport.

As a 7-year-old, he played baseball on a church team using the pseudonym "Runt Wolfe." He excelled on the field and in the classroom, initially studying at New York University. He transferred to Princeton University, where he was a star on the baseball team and in the modern languages department.

The popular, idiosyncratic scholar-athlete turned down an offer to join one of Princeton's exclusive eating clubs, purportedly after being told that while he'd be more than welcome, he shouldn't think of bringing other Jews around.


After Berg graduated college, the Brooklyn Robins (now the Los Angeles Dodgers) and the New York Giants were interested in recruiting him, in part because they thought he'd help draw the city's relatively large Jewish population.

He joined the Robins and played in the minor leagues. His technical skills and lack of offensive power inspired the phrase "good field, no hit." He went on to play for the Chicago White Sox.

At the time, major leaguers worked in the spring and summer and were off the rest of the year. Berg used his baseball earnings to travel. He studied Sanskrit at the Sorbonne in Paris and wrote of how much he enjoyed French "wine, women, and song."

Largely to appease his father, Berg also enrolled at Columbia Law School and arrived late to spring training while finishing his first year. The following year, the White Sox owner denied Berg's request to arrive late again, so Berg arranged to leave school early and make up his courses. He'd go on to pass the bar and join the firm Satterlee and Canfield.


He became a catcher by accident.


"If it doesn't turn out well, please send the body to Newark," Berg reportedly told his teammates. He took to catching. He and his second baseman communicated about the opposing team's base runners in Latin.

If the runner trying to steal understood Latin, Berg said they'd switch to Sanskrit.

He made two trips to Japan "for baseball" in the 1930s, capturing panoramic footage of Tokyo that is believed to have been used to plan the 1942 Doolittle Raid, the US's first bombing raid on Japan in World War II.


Two Japanese naval vessels, left foreground, at Yokosuka Naval Base near Yokohama, directly in the path of bombs from Maj. Gen. James Doolittle's raiders, April 18, 1942.

(Library of Congress)

In 1932, Berg was among a group of major leaguers sent to Tokyo to coach Japanese college players in hitting, base-stealing, and other skills. When the tour ended and Ted Lyons and Lefty O'Doul returned home, Berg stayed, traveling around Asia by himself.

He ended his trip in Berlin, and he saw firsthand the beginning of Adolph Hitler's rise to power in Germany, along with then-Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini's fascist influence on the Nazi movement.




While Berg had set a league record for catching 117 games straight without an error, he didn't have the same hall-of-famer status as other recruits, like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Earl Averil, and Lefty Gomez. But he had been to Japan before, and when catcher Rick Ferrell dropped off the All-Americans roster just before the tour, Berg readily accepted the invitation.

Moe Berg, second from the left in the first row, with other members of the "All Americans" on a visit Nagoya Castle during a free day on the 1934 exhibition.

(CIA Museum)





On one occasion, Berg peeled off from his teammates and went to the roof of a Tokyo hospital, then the city's tallest building. He wore a Japanese kimono and slippers, and he had flowers and an alibi that he was visiting an ambassador's daughter who'd just had a baby.



When pressed on how he'd left the hospital with the movie camera, he supposedly responded, "What made you think I had anything in my kimono other than my big pecs and biceps?"

After the All-Americans swept the series and Berg's teammates left Japan, Berg stayed for another month. Back in the US, he played for and then helped coach the Boston Red Sox.


Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, killed more than 2,300 Americans and catapulted the US into World War II. Millions of Americans joined up. Before Berg's father died in January 1942, he asked his sons, "Why aren't you contributing to this war?"


In February 1942, Berg made a radio broadcast addressing the people of Japan, in Japanese, asking for peace; he identified himself as "a friend of the Japanese people" and urged listeners to avoid "a war you cannot win."


The OSS tapped him as a nuclear spy who carried out acts of espionage and sabotage to thwart Hitler's nuclear program.


Donovan, a Republican, was Roosevelt's Columbia Law classmate and a World War I general turned Wall Street lawyer. As the founding father of America's CIA forerunner, Donovan recruited a diverse cast of military and civilian personnel whom he fondly regarded as his "Glorious Amateurs."


Berg was recruited to the OSS in 1943.

With his unusual aptitude, agility, language skills, and information-gathering experience, Berg became the OSS agent that Donovan designated to support the government's top-secret initiative to develop its first nuclear weapons, codenamed the Manhattan Project.

It was an undertaking so covert that Roosevelt supposedly didn't even tell then-Vice President Harry Truman about it.

Leading researchers and scientists, including Albert Einstein, briefed Berg, teaching him what they hoped would be sufficient background on atomic energy and their adversaries' efforts so Berg could collect vital information and assets from occupied Europe.

In 1944, Berg moved throughout war-ravaged Italy to track down important Italian scientists and documents in danger of falling into Hitler's hands.

"I see Moe is still catching very well," Roosevelt said after learning Berg had located and extracted Italy's foremost expert in aerodynamics, Antonio Ferri.


(CIA Museum)


With special permission from Roosevelt, Ferri entered the US with a suitcase and the crate of documents and was escorted to the nation's leading aeronautics research center, in Langley, Virginia.








In 2018, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi awarded a Congressional Gold Medal to OSS personnel. The presentation of Congress's highest civilian honor marked the first collective recognition of the OSS, which President Harry Truman disbanded in 1945.

Truman formed the CIA in 1947 from the old OSS headquarters. While Donovan was not employed by America's post-war intelligence organization, many of his "Glorious Amateurs" were, and four would go on to hold the agency's top post.

A bronze statue of Donovan — and an OSS book of honor naming the 116 OSS members who were killed during World War II — are on display in the lobby of the CIA's current headquarters in Langley.



Ethel took Berg's ashes to Israel, but to this day, no one knows where his remains are buried.
