The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  After scouting Peenemünde, Rosbaud returned to Berlin in late August 1941 and wrote a report for British intelligence; it included a description of the cigar-shaped V-2 and its components. Virtually no one read it. Who’d ever heard of Peenemünde? But in 1942 the photographs of the mysterious circular embankments gave the Griffin’s report new impetus. Over the next two years the nature of these embankments would become the subject of intense, vitriolic debate within the intelligence community—debates that would eventually send Joe Kennedy to his doom.

  Joe had had a frustrating war up to this point. He enjoyed the social side of law school, filling his days and nights with plenty of dates and hijinks. (He reportedly kept a “cretinous alligator” named Snooky in his bathtub, and would occasionally toss it into his roommates’ tubs, while they were bathing, as a joke.) But law school itself bored him and, sensing his destiny lay elsewhere, he dropped out after his second year to join the navy. Specifically, he wanted to enroll in flight cadet school, which he considered the most dashing program in the military: “I’ve always fancied the idea of flying,” he wrote to a friend. “I’ve never fancied the idea of crawling with rifle and bayonet through the European mud.” The suggestion appalled his father, who thought flying far too dangerous. Flight school also seemed unlikely to provide the quick advancement that a Kennedy boy deserved. But Joe Junior proved every bit as bullheaded as his namesake and signed up for a flight cadet program in June 1941.

  Over the next few months, Joe proved his father right about flight school being a bad idea. For one thing, Joe was a terrible pilot. He struggled to control his plane in the air and didn’t really retain things from one day to the next. He also lacked a natural instinct for the craft, jerking the plane around and relying too much on his instruments. As one historian noted, “A talented pilot—a natural—sees and feels; Joe Jr. spent his time trying to remember what he was supposed to do next.” His instructors didn’t trust him with a solo flight for several weeks, and he eventually graduated seventy-seventh in a class of eighty-eight.

  Even worse for Joe, his brother Jack’s military career got off to a soaring start. In reality, the military never should have accepted Jack, since his health was about on par with Irène Joliot-Curie’s. (He’d caught scarlet fever at age two and remained perpetually sickly after that; Catholic priests read him Last Rites three separate times during his life.) But Kennedy Senior pulled some strings, and after a sham medical exam Jack joined naval intelligence. Unlike flight school, this proved a quick route to advancement. Pretty soon Jack outranked Joe, despite having joined the navy four months after him. The thought of having to salute Jack, even in theory, left Joe sputtering.

  Temperamentally, the two brothers had always been different. Whereas Jack was sickly, Joe was the soul of vigor. Joe was considered brighter as well: Kennedy Senior had once dismissed Jack’s prospects by saying that he “wouldn’t get very far.” In sports, Joe argued aggressively with refs and umpires, and he loved smashing into people on the football field. Jack, meanwhile, was more retiring; he was a wily quarterback and later became a cheerleader. (As a youth he’d also served as a batboy for the Boston Red Sox; one of his favorite players was Moe Berg.) Both Kennedy boys proved popular with their peers, but as one historian noted, “Joe swaggered while Jack charmed.”

  Still, being just twenty-two months apart in age, the boys couldn’t help but clash over certain things. With his swagger and arresting blue eyes, Joe had no trouble attracting women; in college he’d gone on dates with the likes of Ethel Merman and Katharine Hepburn. Joe wasn’t above scooping up Jack’s dates, too, just to stick it to him: he’d plop down next to Jack’s girls, throw some money around, then tell his kid brother to scram. They nearly came to blows over dolls several times—and didn’t in large part because Joe would have walloped Jack. Their senior theses at Harvard turned into another competition. Kennedy Senior believed that publishing a book gave a young man gravitas. So he’d taken Joe’s cum laude thesis on the Spanish Civil War, spiced it up with some of his letters from Valencia and Madrid, and peddled it as a sort of cerebral adventure story, à la Lawrence of Arabia. Editors didn’t bite. Jack, meanwhile, wrote his Harvard thesis on the buildup to World War II, and this time Kennedy Senior succeeded in getting it published, as Why England Slept. Joe remembered Jack throwing the thesis together with the help of five stenographers the week it was due. The book nevertheless sold eighty thousand copies, in part because Kennedy Senior purchased them in bulk. But father again knew best: the book gave Jack prestige, to Joe’s frustration.

  Now Jack was surpassing him in the military. But Joe finally caught a break during the summer of 1942. By this point he’d graduated to flying larger, bulkier planes called PBM Mariners; they topped out at 211 miles per hour. Giving an iffy pilot a larger plane might not sound like a great idea—if someone struggles to back up a sedan, you don’t hand them the keys to an eighteen-wheeler—but flying larger planes actually required less brio and natural skill. Pilots relied on instruments instead, which played to Joe’s strengths: he’d always flown more with his head than his hands, and he didn’t mind all the procedures and checklists the way some hotshots did. By the end of the summer, he was even instructing other pilots. He soon got shipped to Puerto Rico for his first assignment, hunting submarines, and earned a promotion there as well, drawing even with Jack.

  Only to fall behind again that autumn, when Jack was promoted a second time. Worse, Jack soon transferred out of naval intelligence to become a PT boat jockey, one of the studliest jobs in the war. PTs were basically mobile torpedo units: they’d zoom up to Japanese ships and unload on them, then dart away. The job rewarded reckless daring, and because Jack would be risking his neck in the South Pacific, he was virtually guaranteed a medal. Meanwhile, Joe found himself flying circles in the Caribbean, hunting for nonexistent German subs. Flying out of Puerto Rico was about as unglamorous a job as an ambitious young Kennedy could hope for, and it left Joe seething, once again, over his status compared to his kid brother.

  CHAPTER 19

  Brazil and Beyond

  Like Joe Kennedy, catcher Moe Berg whiled away the early days of the war in an obscure theater, South America.

  Berg coached for the Red Sox in 1940 and 1941, earning a tidy $4,000 a year ($70,000 today). But as the seasons dragged on he found himself increasingly restless. Europe was in chaos, ravaged east and west by war—and here he was, still cracking jokes with relief pitchers in the bullpen. As a Jew, Berg felt a natural antipathy for the Nazis, and even more than that, he hated the persecution of intellectuals. The Nazis jailed professors and harassed scientists, smashed printing presses and burned books. It infuriated him.

  In January 1942, Berg finally got a chance to do his part in fighting fascism. The Office of Inter-American Affairs, a government agency run by Berg’s friend Nelson Rockefeller, aimed to promote U.S. interests in Latin America during the war, work that took many forms. In one case, OIAA officials brokered a deal on behalf of Ecuador to clear Peruvian refugees out of the Galápagos Islands, which the U.S. Navy then got to use as a base. OIAA also aimed to undermine the widespread popularity that Nazism enjoyed in South America. The Nazis had spent years stirring up resentment on the continent by spreading rumors about American soldiers raping women and stealing meat and sugar and kerosene intended for locals. Rockefeller and his staff fought back with pro-American puffery. They arranged to exhibit South American painters in New York, and leaned hard on Hollywood studios to re-edit romance flicks so that the lovers jetted off to, say, Rio instead of Paris at the end. Because sports were popular down south, Rockefeller also suggested hiring athletes like Moe Berg as goodwill ambassadors and sending them on tours.

  In addition to battling the Nazis, Berg wanted to join OIAA for another, more personal reason. By the winter of 1941 his father Bernard was bedridden with incurable cancer, but he remained as stern and unforgiving as ever. Just before the attack on Pearl Harbor he lapsed into unconsciousness for a f
ew days, and after coming to and hearing the news, he struggled to one elbow. “Where are the boys?” he demanded. He wanted his sons out fighting for their country. Berg’s sister told him they were at home. “And what are they doing there?” he growled.

  In joining OIAA, Berg hoped to win his father’s approval at last. But before he could tell him anything, Bernard lost consciousness again and passed away. Berg once told a friend that seeing his father in the stands at one of his games would have given him more joy than breaking all of Babe Ruth’s home run records. But Bernard never did attend a game, and he would now never know that his son had joined the war effort. Although he’d played his last Major League game in 1939, Berg had never officially retired from baseball. He did so the day his father died in mid-January 1942, determined to leave that life behind and make Bernard’s ghost proud.

  While OIAA worked out the details of Berg’s trip—which took a mysteriously long time—another agency asked him to deliver a radio speech to the people of Japan in their native language. Berg agreed, and gave a heartfelt if rambling talk. He evoked memories of his two trips to the island, and lamented the fact that two countries who both loved baseball were now enemies. More to the point, he scolded Japan for overrunning and attacking other countries—“You have lost face and are committing national seppuku”—and urged the Japanese people to overthrow their government and embrace democracy. The speech made no difference, of course, and the mention of baseball arguably backfired: within a year Japan had banned this decadent American sport. Later, when American troops began invading Japanese-held islands in the South Pacific, Japanese soldiers would scream the vilest insults they could imagine about Babe Ruth, convinced that this would crush the morale of American troops.

  After the speech, Berg continued to cool his heels in Washington, waiting month after month to deploy. Growing frustrated, he eventually dug out the twenty-three seconds of film he’d recorded in Tokyo in 1934 and began shopping it around to various military officials. It was essentially his espionage audition tape.

  Berg finally left for South America in late August 1942, and spent the next six months bouncing around to military bases in Panama, Peru, the Galápagos, Costa Rica, Trinidad, Aruba, British Guiana, Dutch Guiana, Guatemala, and Brazil. He earned $22.22 a day ($330 today), and traveled mostly on small planes and in the back of jeeps. (He had to bum rides because, as a native New Yorker, he couldn’t drive.) Rather than his standard black suit and tie, Berg made a concession to the equatorial heat and, for the first and last time in his life, wore khakis and no suit coat. It wasn’t the most flattering look: he appears sweaty and pudgy in pictures, well above his playing weight.

  In addition to spreading goodwill, Berg served as a sort of roving health inspector for OIAA, and he spent much of the mission fretting over those age-old vices of soldiers: booze, cards, and especially sex. Given the hordes of young men, prostitution flourished near U.S. bases, and the rates of syphilis and other venereal diseases reached pandemic levels in some spots, as high as 66 percent among local women. Berg worried long and hard over how to keep American boys “out of the clutches of these girls” (as if the women were solely responsible). Naïvely, he suggested that the military could eliminate most hanky-panky by distracting the troops with ice cream, movies, fishing gear, badminton, and horseshoes. He figured that books would also help, and made a rather poetic plea to this effect: “Let the servicemen see the better things,” he declared, “and they may choose not to follow the worse.” Elevate the young men’s spirits, in other words, and they’ll shun whoring and drinking and gambling. A nice sentiment, if doomed.

  In between visits to bases, Berg took some daring field trips, often rising at 5 a.m. to fly to obscure locations. He tracked snakes, monkeys, jaguars, and iguanas through the jungle. He observed a leper colony on an offshore island. He hunted for submarines from the glass nose cone of an airplane. (Much like Joe Kennedy, he saw nothing of note.)

  Even these adventures, though, left Berg dissatisfied. To be sure, South America was strategically important for the Allies, given its location and abundance of rubber and other natural resources. In fact, President Franklin Roosevelt had woken up in the middle of the night after Pearl Harbor and, despite all the other things he had to worry about, gave orders to deploy U.S. marines to eastern Brazil. He did so to protect the airports there, which the military would need to bounce troops and supplies over to North Africa and eventually Europe. U.S. officials called this scheme the Trampoline to Victory.

  But however strategically important, South America wasn’t a battlefield, and the war would not be won there. Plenty of baseball stars had already joined the military and were doing great things—Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg, Bob Feller, Pee Wee Reese. Meanwhile Berg was stuck on a different continent, interviewing knucklehead sailors about where they’d caught the clap. So in addition to spreading goodwill, Berg also went a bit rogue in South America, and investigated matters he had no authority investigating. He sized up various political leaders for the State Department, met with a former president of Brazil, and inquired about a series of assassination attempts on an unpopular general. He then wrote a secret report when he returned to Washington in February 1943, hoping to impress people there with his acumen and insight.

  In the spring of 1943 Berg also followed up on the espionage audition reel he’d sent out several months before. His friends would later claim that military leaders used this film to plan the famous Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942, the first American raid to strike the Japanese homeland. Given the timing of events, that seems impossible: the Doolittle raid occurred before Berg ever shopped his movie around. But film footage of Tokyo was rare then, and military officials eagerly blew up stills from it to pinpoint docks, warehouses, factories, gas tanks, and power plants. As one officer told Berg, “We were able to get more good from your movies than would have been accumulated over several months of looking through texts and travel magazines.” The fact that they relied on travel magazines should tell you something about the sophistication of military intelligence back then. Berg’s climb to the rooftop in Tokyo made him look like a Green Beret in comparison.

  Ultimately, given his age, the military couldn’t take Berg. But there was an agency that could. In fact, given its freewheeling and even reckless approach to intelligence work, Moe Berg would prove a perfect fit for the Office of Strategic Services.

  At the start of World War II the United States had no civilian agency dedicated to gathering foreign intelligence. Not that Americans never spied: the army and navy both had intelligence branches, and even private companies like General Electric sponsored corporate espionage. But the genteel Ivy Leaguers who ruled the federal government tended to view such activity as immoral, even dirty. As Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Henry Stimson, once said, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” This squeamishness put the United States at a disadvantage compared to Great Britain, Germany, and Russia, all of which had sophisticated intelligence bureaus and happily spied on adversaries and allies alike.

  Pearl Harbor finally forced the U.S. government to admit its shortcomings and establish the Office of Strategic Services. Most people know it today as the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, but OSS’s mandate was broader than that. In addition to espionage, it carried out paramilitary operations overseas and helped pave the way for the U.S. military’s Special Forces. In many cases, as with Moe Berg’s adventures, the espionage and the extralegal activities went hand in hand.

  OSS was primarily shaped by two men, director William “Wild Bill” Donovan and chief scientist Stanley Lovell. Donovan first won fame during World War I for leading a spectacularly idiotic assault. He commanded the 69th Infantry of New York, the famous “Fighting Irish,” who were trying to conquer a German fortress in the Argonne Forest in October 1918. During an intense shootout one day, Donovan received orders to fall back. After considering his options, he ordered his men to charge instead. When the Fighting Irish hesita
ted, he screamed, “What’s the matter with you? You want to live forever?” and charged off alone, confident his men would follow. They did.

  The Germans stopped them cold, and a machine-gun bullet shattered Donovan’s knee. But he once again refused orders to evacuate, and spent the next five hours hobbling around and preparing his men for the inevitable German counterassault. When it came, he rallied the Fighting Irish and drove the Huns back into the fortress in a rout, all but winning the battle single-handedly. Had the assault failed, Donovan would have been court-martialed (assuming he even lived). As it was, he earned the Medal of Honor and returned home one of the most highly decorated soldiers in American history.