The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  In June, Berg resigned from the OIAA. He had spoken with an OSS colonel named Ellery Huntington, who thought Berg was excellent OSS material. Huntington was a lawyer who had known of Berg since his days as a Princeton shortstop, and had worked with him at Satterlee and Canfield. These were just the sort of clubby, rep-tie connections that the OSS thrived upon. The hiring process would take a while, but Berg could wait. He had something else on his mind. Her name was Estella Huni, and he was in love with her.

  OR MAYBE HE wasn’t. What was clear, she was beautiful. Tall and slender with delicate bones, wavy brown hair, a pale complexion, and large brown eyes, at times she resembled Paulette Goddard’s gamine in Chaplin’s Modern Times. Only in appearance, however, because Estella was no waif, but a sophisticated and challenging woman.

  Estella’s father owned the New Haven School of Music and was an opera baritone, her mother played the violin, and Estella also became a musician, a pianist. In 1926, at sixteen, she left New Haven for England, where she had won a scholarship to attend the elite Matthay School of Pianoforte in London. In 1934, she was alone in New York. Her parents had both died, and Estella had sold the music school. When Berg met her, probably in the mid-1950s, she was supporting herself by giving recitals and teaching piano.

  He must have seen quickly that this was a woman who could keep up with him. Years later, Estella would be selected as a contestant for the television quiz show “21,” but feeling too shy to compete against Charles Van Doren, she withdrew her name. She read as much as Berg did, everything from Greek mythology to the New Yorker, and spoke Italian, German, and excellent French. French was Berg’s best foreign language too, and presumably they spoke it together, since she signed her love letters to him “Etoile.” Even better, one of her hobbies was etymology. Berg’s heart must have leapt the first time he visited her apartment and saw her huge, well-thumbed dictionary resting on its brass stand.

  Estella was witty, enthusiastic about everything from opera to haute cuisine to puns to tennis to President Roosevelt to riding to newsreels, and full of fun when around people who could keep up with her. Dull company, on the other hand, made her impatient and sulky. Her ambition was to be an actress, and though she never attempted to be one, she was suitably vain, she lied about her age, and she had social pretensions. Like Berg, she was photogenic and enjoyed being photographed. Although she wasn’t wealthy, she lived on East Sixty-sixth Street, on the posh Upper East Side of Manhattan. A snug apartment at the best possible address was more important to her than spacious quarters in a more modest neighborhood. And one more thing, she was Christian.

  London had made an Anglophile of Estella Huni, and back in New York she moved in a patrician circle where many of her friends were English aristocrats. But Moe Berg was better company. They were two vivacious, intelligent people, absorbed in the world around them, and they had a lot of fun together. Berg loved to be out on the town in New York, and so did Estella. They went to nightclubs—to Toots Shor’s, and Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe for the glittering floor shows. During the baseball season she visited him at the Parker House in Boston, and when the Red Sox had a day off, they were off to Plymouth Rock and then to Cape Cod where, on the beach, Berg wore black bathing trunks with a white undershirt.

  Berg wasn’t much interested in music and heard Estella perform only once, but she succeeded in introducing him to opera, urging him to read the librettos, and he grew to like Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. She also taught him to play the piano a little. While she knew Berg, Estella followed baseball and became a lifelong Red Sox fan. Berg could be harsh about anything from overpacking to using poor grammar, and sometimes his impatience spilled over and he yelled at her. This was something. Moe Berg, who never lost control of his emotions, yelling. Another time he wrote her a poem, “To the Girl of East 66th Street.”

  Berg didn’t introduce Estella to a great many people. One evening, when they unexpectedly encountered a group of ballplayers at Lüchow’s Restaurant, Berg told them that she was a friend visiting from Romania, a countess who couldn’t speak a word of English. So for the next hour, Estella didn’t say anything to Berg in English. She thought it a wonderful lark. This sort of behavior was to be expected from Berg anyway, but there was a practical explanation for his reserve about Estella and hers about him. They were living together out of wedlock, which wasn’t something respectable people flaunted in 1940. The situation appalled Bernard, who refused to meet her, but Rose, Sam, and Ethel all did. Ethel was jealous that Moe bought Estella gifts, something he rarely did for his family. Sam fell for her completely. He referred to his brother’s lover as “the most beautiful and cultivated and intelligent girl I have ever known.”

  In early May 1944, Berg left her for the war in Europe. She started off game, declaring that although he was “difficult to get along without,” she wanted him “over there as I know how much it means to you.” Three weeks after that, she wrote, “There is absolutely no need for you to worry or be concerned about me.” In mid-June she was thrilled when a package from London arrived, filled with “such a fascinating mélange of papers, rags, cuttings and programmes,” as well as two grammar books. His communications soon grew sparse, and her resolve wavered. She hinted that she was lonely, and then, perhaps trying to stir up a bit of proprietary jealousy, told him, “I look best I have in two years.” When he did write, she was “a different girl.” But more often, when the postman came, there was a letter from Sam, stationed in the Pacific, and silence from Berg. Berg used the distance to create distance. Many couples survived the war, but Moe Berg and Estella Huni did not. Eventually, she sensed what was up and married an engineer, a navy officer she met in New York. Years later she said she was relieved, that Berg had been a physical addiction and ultimately would have been impossible to live with.

  Estella Huni came closer than anyone to putting an ear to Moe Berg’s soul. After her marriage, she settled in New Jersey, where she raised a family. She died in 1992. Aside from one brief, awkward afternoon when Berg called on Estella and her husband, it can’t be said whether Estella ever saw Berg again or even how much she thought about him. She never spoke about him, even to her children, who describe their mother as an extremely secretive woman who was a mystery to them. “In many ways,” says Christine Curtis, Estella’s daughter, “my mother was as elusive as Mr. Berg.”

  10

  Remus Heads

  for Rome

  It is uncertain whether William Donovan had a direct hand in making an OSS man of Moe Berg, but without question Donovan liked unusual, talented people. He was one himself. At the Argonne forest, during his World War I days as an infantry colonel leading New York’s “Fighting Irish” 69th Regiment, his response to an order to retreat under brutal enemy fire was to command a charge. “What’s the matter with you?” he hectored his terrified troops. “Do you want to live forever?” They charged. “You wouldn’t believe the appeal he had,” says Ned Putzell, who was an OSS executive director. “Donovan’s the only guy I’ve ever met who had physical and intellectual daring.”

  Donovan was a lawyer, and in peacetime his professional integrity was the stuff of pulp allegory. During prohibition in 1923, as the U.S. district attorney for western New York, he sent his burly enforcers through the front door of the oak-paneled Saturn Club in Buffalo, where some of his law partners and in-laws, not to mention Donovan himself, were prominent members. But it was at war, where the rules grew vague and the result was what mattered, that Donovan flourished.

  Donovan didn’t simply create the OSS, he set the tone for the organization and infused it with his personality. He wanted the OSS to be a place, as he wrote President Roosevelt, for “calculatingly reckless” young men of “disciplined daring.” Donovan admired gusto and whimsy. “He was a rather small, rumpled man with pale yet piercing blue eyes,” remembers Julia Child, who, before she became a famous chef, subsisted on boiled water buffalo as an OSS file clerk in China. “He could read an entire document by looking at
it. He was intensely personal, so everybody just loved him.” The OSS was created with the country headed for war, leaving no time for Donovan to assemble it meticulously. “He didn’t really try to organize it, he just authorized it,” wrote Stanley Lovell, a chemist whom Donovan hired as his director of research and development. Lovell’s experience was fairly representative. “For my activities [Donovan] laid out the objectives in the broadest possible terms and left me wholly free to develop unorthodox weapons and stratagems.” Donovan gave Lovell a well-guarded building and a generous budget and left him on his own to make devices. Soon enough Lovell was designing bombs that looked like crustaceans, sacks of Chinese pancake mix filled with explosive batter, buttons and shoes with secret compartments, and a false documents plant staffed by some of the nation’s most notorious forgers, who churned out ersatz Swiss passports and counterfeit Japanese yen.

  In a sense, Donovan’s OSS was a bohemian organization filled with dazzling people who were handed assignments and told to make of them what they could. He hired “Circus King” Henry Ringling North; Grapes of Wrath director John Ford; assorted Vanderbilts, Du Ponts, Mellons, and Morgans, as well as members of Murder, Inc.; the bartender at the New York City Yale Club; professional wrestlers and leading ornithologists; John Birch; Tolstoy’s grandson and Toscanini’s daughter; sexy journalists; and professors of religion from small Midwestern colleges. “We had,” says Geoffrey Jones, president of the Retired Veterans of the OSS, “all kinds of egomaniacs and crazies.”

  There were risks to constructing an organization in this headlong fashion. Washington panjandrums clung to their turf and could be waspish on the subject of the new adventure in town. “Oh so silly,” they scoffed. “Oh so secret and oh so social.” Some of the OSS gaffes were horrendous and, as it happens in war, men died because of them. But behind the lines, in places like Burma, France, Italy, and neutral Switzerland, OSS operatives and contacts also made important contributions to the Allied victory. Among the most effective of them was a man whose personal qualities came to represent all that was promising and doomed about the organization, the old Red Sox catcher Moe Berg.

  “Donovan would have liked Moe Berg personally,” says OSS veteran Monroe Karasik, “because he took delight in having people around him who were first class. He wanted the best.” As the architect of an organization that thrived upon spontaneity, the OSS director embraced Berg’s unpredictable ways. He could also empathize with Berg. Donovan was born poor, Irish, and Catholic, in the shadow of the grain elevators down by the docks in Buffalo’s hardscrabble first ward. He first attended Niagara University and then moved on to Columbia, where he was the second-string quarterback behind Berg’s future White Sox teammate and manager Eddie Collins. Donovan remained at Columbia for law school. He was too talented, too ambitious, and too charismatic for anyone to hold him back for long, but in 1929, political triage briefly succeeded. President Hoover had promised to make him his attorney general, and then, when it seemed to him that the nation couldn’t bear a Catholic, he went back on his word. So Donovan and Berg had similar backgrounds and some of the same scars, too. There were plenty of differences; Donovan became the consummate insider, while Berg was the opposite. But they also shared one more important quality. Both men were fascinated by secrecy.

  IN EARLY JUNE, the OSS deputy director of operations, Ellery Huntington, wrote a memo introducing Berg to the chief of the Special Operations Branch, Lieutenant Commander R. Davis Halliwell. “I can vouch for his capabilities,” said Huntington. “He would make a good operations officer either here or in the field.” Berg paid a visit to the OSS offices at Twenty-fifth and E streets and then, suddenly one day, he left Washington. His brother, Dr. Sam, was stationed with the Army Medical Corps in Stockton, California, and Berg telephoned him there to say he was coming out for a visit. Long-distance wartime travel was almost impossible for civilians, so when Moe arrived in Stockton, Dr. Sam asked him how he got there. Berg said that he’d come in an army plane. “What the hell are you doing in an army plane?” asked Dr. Sam. Berg put his finger to his lips. It was a baffling visit for Dr. Sam. Berg brought Chico Marx along for dinner one evening. Sam hadn’t known that his brother socialized with the Marx brothers, but Berg wasn’t explaining that, either.

  When he returned to Washington in July, Berg checked into the Mayflower Hotel and filled out his OSS application. Such requests for information were generally fruitless with Berg. During his Red Sox years, when the publishers of Who’s Who in Sarasota sent him a form, what Berg mailed back was either puckishly evasive, puerile, or in poor taste, depending upon how you felt about it. It most definitely was not informative. Beside “Full Name” Berg wrote “Mohammed Montaigne”; his “Profession” was “narcotics”; for “Birth Place” he wrote “Bed”; his “Wife’s Name” was “Venus de Milo”; as “Names of Children” he included “Abortia and Miss Karridge”; and his “Winter and Summer Addresses” were simply the “Out of Town News Stand” (in Harvard Square). When it came time to list “Additional Data,” he scribbled “Smyrna figs, disa & data & nuts to you.”

  Joining the OSS was something he badly wanted to do, however, and so here he was forthcoming, making it one of the rare occasions where Moe Berg willingly divulged personal information. As his home address, he listed the house Dr. Sam had purchased at 156 Roseville Avenue, Newark, instead of the apartment he’d grown up in on South Thirteenth Street, where Ethel still lived with their mother. Most of the time, of course, Moe stayed at Estella’s when he was in the New York area. His character references included an old Princeton professor, Christian Gauss, and Eddie Collins, then the Red Sox vice-president. Berg was much closer to Boston owner Tom Yawkey and to Joe Cronin, still the manager, but Collins had played football with Donovan. Rockefeller was also a character reference, while Enrique López-Herrarte, Ted Lyons, and Milton Kahn, Berg’s partner in the Novelart stationery business, were named as friends. In the otherwise accurate educational history he supplied, Berg failed to list the time he’d spent at New York University in 1919–20, before transferring to Princeton, and he claimed to have graduated from Columbia in 1928, when the truth was it was two years later.

  The language section of the OSS application clears some of the ambiguity surrounding the number of languages Berg could speak, and how well. Berg delighted in the conspicuous possession of foreign newspapers, and likewise took every opportunity to break off conversations with English-speaking friends for brief, animated chats with foreign-born taxi drivers, toll collectors, busboys, and tourists. Yet, when in the company of his friend Sam Goudsmit’s wife, Irene, a native German speaker, or OSS major Max Corvo, who spoke fluent Italian, Berg was more reticent. If they proposed speaking in German or Italian, he always demurred. With French he was more agreeable. “He had a nice accent,” says Ned Putzell, who spoke it with Berg.

  On the OSS form, Berg lists his French, Spanish, and Portuguese as “fair,” and his Italian, German, and Japanese as “slight.” When he was speaking it regularly, Berg’s French was good or excellent, but he had not had much occasion to use it since 1923, so “fair” was the best available substitute for “rusty.” During the six months he was in Latin America, his Spanish and Portuguese undoubtedly improved, and spending the summer of 1944 in Italy would be a boon to his Italian. Berg knew varying amounts of Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, but he left them off his OSS application. This was probably because he thought they were irrelevant to OSS work and, with Yiddish and Hebrew, he may have thought that being Jewish might make him a less desirable candidate to the OSS. There should be no question that Berg was a gifted student of languages. During his life he also took a passing interest in, among other languages, Russian, Polish, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Old High German, and Bulgarian. Real fluency in a foreign language, however, is something else, and although Berg didn’t object to sportswriters ascribing it to him, he would not do so himself. Sam Goudsmit, a native of Holland, who spoke fluent English, Dutch, and German, good F
rench, and some Italian, met Berg just after the war and knew him for many years. Goudsmit says Berg was “a linguist, certainly, but his command of the spoken foreign languages was not as fluent as reported. He listened and understood, but said little in any language. When he spoke it was important to pay attention.”

  Berg submitted the application to Halliwell on July 16, showed him the letter of congratulations Rockefeller had written him back in April, and was vague and apologetic about his trip to California. It was a special mission for the White House, he explained. He was sorry, he couldn’t elaborate. The next day Halliwell requested an expedited security check on Berg, appending to it a note that explained his “belief that we should get our hands on him as fast as possible.” He also wrote to Huntington: “It is evident from Berg’s conversation with me that his mission for the White House indicated that considerable responsibility had been placed upon him and that he was entrusted with a most confidential mission since he was last in this office.” There is still no explanation for this mission, but in one respect, at least, its effectiveness is undeniable. It impressed Halliwell, which is exactly what Berg intended. The OSS snapped him up.

  By August 2, Berg had agreed to a meager annual salary of $3,800 and had taken the oath of office, swearing that he’d keep all information he obtained undisclosed unless authorized. After pushing him through the hiring process with such celerity, nobody could think of what to do with him. Finally, it was “believed best … to keep Berg’s assignment somewhat amorphous.”

  The first OSS agents were trained by the British in England, but by the time Berg joined on, Donovan had established his own camps in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, not far from President Roosevelt’s retreat, Shangri-La, and at other locations outside Washington. Apprentice spies were tutored in silent killing, safecracking, bridge blowing, and lock picking. They learned codes, ciphers, and how to install listening devices; they were taught hand-to-hand combat by Major Don Fairbairn, the former chief of the Shanghai police. Fairbairn was grey-haired and well into middle age at this point, but he was still spry as a terrier as he passed along the particulars of gouging out a man’s eyes with a knife, shooting to kill, and using judo to disarm knife-wielding attackers. Recruits were sometimes dumped miles from camp, handed a compass, and told to return without talking to anyone. There were stress interviews, construction problems—moving a range finder across a swollen river was one—and also a terrifying OSS fun house replete with dank, narrow passageways, sudden drops, and a surprise meeting with a papier-mâché Hitler, whom the OSS men were supposed to shoot in the head on sight. This capture-the-flag approach to espionage training largely left it to the recruits to study what they thought might be helpful, and some men responded by spending their time in Maryland preparing for war by reading mystery novels.