Moe Berg

Morris "Moe" Berg (March 2, 1902 – May 29, 1972) was an American professional baseball catcher who played in Major League Baseball from 1923 to 1939 and later served as an intelligence officer for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. Born in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Berg graduated from Princeton University with a degree in modern languages and earned a law degree from Columbia University, though he never practiced law. A polyglot fluent in multiple languages including Japanese, German, and Spanish, he leveraged his linguistic skills both on the diamond and in espionage.

In baseball, Berg was known for his defensive prowess rather than offensive output, compiling a career batting average of.243 over 662 games while playing for teams including the Brooklyn Robins, Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, Washington Senators, and Boston Red Sox. He set an American League record with 117 consecutive errorless games at catcher from 1931 to 1934 and was praised for his handling of pitchers and strong throwing arm. After retiring as a player in 1939, he briefly coached for the Red Sox before joining U.S. intelligence efforts.

During World War II, Berg's OSS assignments included secretly filming industrial sites in Japan during a 1934 baseball tour and parachuting into occupied Europe to evaluate Nazi atomic bomb development, particularly targeting physicist Werner Heisenberg. His reports contributed to Allied assessments that Germany lagged in nuclear weapons production. For his wartime service, President Harry S. Truman awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1946, America's highest civilian honor at the time, though Berg declined it during his lifetime; his sister accepted it posthumously. Berg lived reclusively after the war, residing with family and avoiding public disclosure of his spy work due to classification restrictions.