Ask Alma's Owl: The Spy Who Loved Baseball
Dear Alma,
I know several Columbians have gone on to become professional baseball players. Is it true that one of those ball players also became a spy?
Dear Fan,
You must be referring to Morris “Moe” Berg (LAW’30), who was known as “the brainiest guy in baseball.” Berg, who played first base and shortstop for Princeton as an undergraduate, never played for Columbia, but he did play for the Chicago White Sox while at the Law School. He went on to play for the Cleveland Indians, Washington Senators and Boston Red Sox and ended his baseball career as a Red Sox coach in 1941.
And yes, he also was a spy. Berg, who spoke several languages fluently, joined the new Office of Inter-American Affairs, an agency created to counteract enemy propaganda in Latin America, soon after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. In 1943, he was hired by the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Born in 1902 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents in a tenement on East 121st Street, Berg was signed by the Brooklyn Robins, precursor to the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1923, just after earning a B.A. in modern languages at Princeton.
While at OSS during World War II, he parachuted into Yugoslavia to evaluate resistance groups there and was sent to Switzerland to collect intelligence on Germany’s efforts to build an atomic bomb. His first stint as a secret agent may have been in 1934, when he went to Japan with a team of All-Stars that included Babe Ruth and Columbia’s Lou Gehrig—Gehrig is one of some 15 former Lions to have played professional baseball. While in Tokyo, Berg managed to get to the roof of one of the city’s tallest buildings to film the harbor and military facilities. That film, according to legend, later was used by the U.S. to plan bombing raids in World War II.
Berg was only a so-so major league ball player, with a career batting average of .243. Friends reportedly joked that “he can speak 10 languages but can’t hit in any of them.” Nevertheless, two of Berg’s baseball cards are on display in the museum at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. And he was the subject of three books, including one by his sister Ethel, which along with some of his class notes while at Columbia, are available in the Law School’s library. He died in 1972.
“Maybe I’m not in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame,” Berg once said, “but I’m happy I had the chance to play pro ball and I’m especially proud of my contributions to my country.”