The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg

The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg

Nicholas Dawidoff

Language: English

Pages: 453

ISBN: 0679762892

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The only Major League ballplayer whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA, Moe Berg has the singular distinction of having both a 15-year career as a catcher for such teams as the New York Robins and the Chicago White Sox and that of a spy for the OSS during World War II. Here, Dawidoff provides "a careful and sympathetic biography" (Chicago Sun-Times) of this enigmatic man. Photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cohn, the Jewish middleweight boxing champion in The Sun Also Rises, of whom Hemingway writes, “No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton.” Princeton, like Barringer, made Berg aware that he was branded with the mark of a faith he had been raised to resist. Yet Berg made no attempt to hide his Jewishness. When a group of Jewish students decided to hold Friday night services, Berg was asked to preside. Baer says Berg readily

example, Shaheen file of January 7, 1944. 47 “In addition to”: OSS cables June 19, 23, 25, 27, 1944. 48 “If documents required”: Ibid., July 5, 1944. 49 “Berg’s pouches went”: See cable from John Teeter thanking Berg, July 18, 1944. 50 “Soon notes of appreciation”: Ibid.; and J. C. Hunsaker to Stanley Lovell, July 21, 1944. 51 “Lovell and Donovan”: Lovell, July 19, 1944; Donovan, July 21, 1944. 52 “Rome wasn’t all work”: Interview with Aldo lcardi, Maitland, Florida; Berg to his mother,

Ines Jucker, Bern, Switzerland. 159 “Such strange things”: Interviews with Heinz Albers, Georg Busch, and Herman Waftler, Zurich, Switzerland; Ines Jucker, Bern, Switzerland; Kurt Alder, Werner Bantle, Markus Fierz, Heinrich Medicus by telephone; and Ina Scherrer to Ethel Berg, undated. 160 “We never saw”: Interview with Ines Jucker, Bern, Switzerland. 161 “Dulles had slipped”: Bradley F. Smith, pp. 189–93, 222–26; Corey Ford, pp. 285–89; and R. Harris Smith, pp. 211, 267–68. 162 “Bern was

were billeted right on the Gulf of Mexico in the posh Hotel Biloxi, and Mildred Cronin remembers walking into the sun parlor one evening to find Berg all alone with a large sheet of paper spread out before him on a table. When she asked him what he was doing, he replied that he was translating hieroglyphics. On April 22, Berg went 3–4 as the Senators defeated the Athletics. He also made an error, his first fielding mistake since 1932. He had played 117 consecutive errorless games, breaking Ray

in Japanese characters on a blackboard. With a wink at Professor W. R. Sears, who was also in the room, he asked Kobashi who that was. “Cone-ee Mock—great manager of Philadelphia Athletics” was the response. Berg picked up the chalk and wrote out another name. Kobashi was baffled. “Connie Mack,” he read aloud. “Who is that?” That was, of course, the correct pronunciation of Mack’s name, proving Berg’s point that many Japanese mispronunciations of English words are due to faulty transliteration.

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