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After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, millions of Americans enrolled and were drafted into the military, including hundreds of Major League Baseball players who stepped away from the game to fight for their country. While former catcher Moe Berg had retired by that point, he also left his coaching job with the Red Sox to contribute to the cause by becoming a spy who worked for the agency that served as the predecessor to the CIA.
Berg started his MLB career with the Brooklyn Robins in 1923 (around a decade before they rebranded as the Dodgers), and while he spent 15 seasons in the league, he was a fairly average player who took a pretty unconventional path through life.
The Princeton graduate caused some headaches in Chicago due to his decision to attend Columbia Law School for three years while signed with the White Sox, and the man who could fluently speak 10 different languages used his scholarly background to his advantage while breezing through the questions he was tasked with answering during multiple appearances on Information (a wildly popular radio quiz show in the late 1930s).
When the United States entered World War II, Berg wasted no time leaving the Red Sox for a job at the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (an agency tasked with combating Axis propaganda), but he eventually found himself serving as a spy who contributed to some major operations designed to give America an edge.
How Moe Berg ended up contributing to the American cause while working as a spy during World War II
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In the 1930s, Berg made a couple of trips to Japan as a member of teams tasked with growing the sport of baseball by playing exhibition games overseas, and during his second, he headed to the rooftop of a hospital in Tokyo to film footage of the city with the camera he’d brought to capture the trip for his own records.
That turned out to be the inadvertent beginning of his espionage career, as the footage he took of the city helped members of the military get a better idea of what they were dealing with as they formulated a plan to attack Japan and get retribution for Pearl Harbor.
In 1942, he headed down to South America to officially evaluate the fitness of American troops on the continent and unofficially get a read on whether or not political leaders in the region would side with the Axis powers or potentially become allies with the United States.
The following year, he officially entered his Spy Era by accepting a position as an officer with the Office of Strategic Services, which was very keen to take advantage of his ability to speak German, Italian, and other languages.
In 1944, the OSS sent him to Italy to both obtain information about the country’s development of long-range missiles and encourage experts to defect to the United States. While there, Berg helped convince famed physicist Enrico Fermi—who played an instrumental role in developing an atomic bomb as part of The Manhattan Project—to do exactly that, which reportedly led to FDR remarking, “I see that Moe Berg is still catching pretty well.”
At the end of the same year, the OSS dispatched Berg to Switzerland as part of The Alsos Mission, a joint operation between the United States and the United Kingdom to determine if Germany was capable of developing a nuclear program and other weapons with disturbing implications.
Famed German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg was scheduled to give a lecture at a college in Zurich, and Berg was given permission to assassinate him if he believed the information the scientists shared suggested the Nazis were close to producing a nuclear bomb of their own (he determined that was not the case, and Heisenberg was spared).
Berg stepped down from the OSS in 1946 following the conclusion of WWII and lived a fairly quiet life out of the public eye from that point on (while he was offered the Medal of Freedom from Harry Truman, he declined to accept it).
It’s kind of hard to blame him for taking it easy in the second half of his life when you consider what he achieved in the first.