The Catcher Was a Spy

by Nicholas Dawidoff

  In London, the OSS brass stayed at Claridge’s Hotel, where Berg received word from Dix that his pleas on behalf of Scherrer had come to something. Scherrer would be officially invited to spend July through October in the U.S., dividing his time between the West Coast and the Schenectady home of his old student, Guy Suits. After a few days in London, it was on to Paris, where Donovan, Berg, and the rest checked into the Ritz. John Kieran turned out to be staying there too. He was thrilled to see the long-lost Professor Berg, and attempted to prise out of him what he was doing in Paris. Kieran got no further than anyone else, leaving him to grumble that Berg’s security was three grades higher than top secret.

  Yet, at least once on the trip, Berg did betray himself. From Paris, Donovan and company continued east. At a field hospital in eastern France, Donovan paid a visit to a friend who was recuperating from the loss of an arm. Wounds made Berg squeamish, and so he stepped outside the tent. Nearby, some young GI’s were playing catch with a baseball. Berg watched for a while and then couldn’t resist. “Let’s see the ball,” he said. He threw once, and one of the soldiers said, “You’re a pro.” He snapped off a second toss and the voice responded, “You’re a catcher.” He caught and flicked the ball back a third time and the game was up. “And your name is Moe Berg!”

  On May 30, Berg sent in a request to Groves. There was to be a Jubilee Celebration at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and in Leningrad from June 15 to 28. A number of American scientists would be attending. Berg proposed to join them, and suggested calling himself a secretary or an aide as a cover, but Groves placed the gala off limits to anybody who knew anything about Los Alamos or AZUSA, and he pointedly suggested that Berg get himself to Sweden as fast as he could.

  Back in London, Berg obediently went about securing the necessary travel orders and a cash advance in Swedish kronas. June 24 was spent in Oslo, drinking beer in a pub with a group of American soldiers. On the twenty-sixth, he sat waiting while Lise Meitner read a letter from Paul Scherrer introducing her to “Dr. Moe Berg” and inviting the exiled Austrian physicist to take up residence at the ETH in Zurich. With her solemn face, hair wound tight into a bun, and formal way of speaking, Meitner had always seemed a prim, somber woman. She was, in fact, terribly high-strung, and never more so than when she met Berg. For seven years she had lived in exile from Austria, her work compromised, her money and property stripped away from her because she was of Jewish descent. Now the radio had begun to tell her what had been happening at places like Belsen and Buchenwald to the millions of Jews she had left behind. The tossing sleep Meitner had managed after learning of the concentration camp atrocities was plagued by nightmares. She had fits of uncontrollable weeping. And now an American stranger had arrived on her doorstep. Meitner was in a mood to pour out her feelings, and her ensuing conversation with Berg was probably a long one.

  Berg doesn’t seem to have asked anything of her that first day. Instead, he played the kind messenger, delivering Scherrer’s letter and listening sympathetically while she talked. That night Meitner sat down and wrote a lengthy letter to Scherrer, in which she described her recent work, expressed her hostility to the likes of Von Weizsäcker and Heisenberg, and responded to Scherrer’s offer of a job. She said she would consider going to ETH, and modestly detailed the number of graduate students and the sort of laboratory conditions she would require to do her work properly. It was after midnight when she closed the letter by saying, “Dr. Berg was extremely friendly; this does one so much good after the long years of isolation.”

  The next day Berg was invited to tea. Meitner mentioned Hahn, and now that they were friends, Berg had a suggestion. Why didn’t she write to her old friend and partner? Berg would see that the letter got to Hahn in the United States. When he left that day, Berg carried the letter for Scherrer, a copy of one of Meitner’s articles, which she’d inscribed to Berg “With many thanks and kindest regards,” and a letter to Hahn.

  Typed single space in English translation, Lise Meitner’s letter to Otto Hahn covers a full page and a half. Meitner revealed nothing about her future plans or how she felt about the Russians. Still, as pleasant letters to old friends go, this was pure poison. “I feel that I have so much that I want so desperately to say,” she begins. And then after she gives “full assurance of my unwavering friendship,” sheets of outrage come pouring across the page. “How could a man who had never raised a finger against the Criminal of the last years ever be of any possible aid to Germany?” she demands. “That is the great tragedy of Germany, that you all have lost every kind of standard of righteousness and fair play.… You consciously worked for Nazi Germany, without, as far as is known, ever making a single attempt even at passive resistance. I must write this,” she explains, “because there is so much at stake for Germany.” And then she leans into him even harder. “Undoubtedly to salve your conscience, you have now and then helped some miserable human being, but millions of innocent people were murdered and ‘nary’ a protest was heard.” She tells him of the disturbing things she has been hearing on the radio and faults Hahn for his reluctance to “see things clearly,” because “it was too uncomfortable.” She closes by asking Hahn, “Please let me know how you are,” and asks him to forgive her because “the American is waiting, hence the haste.” These concluding soupçons of endearment sound as strange as a back-alley thug bending over the man he has just jumped, asking how he is feeling, and apologizing for kicking in his ribs so untidily.

  Otto Hahn was not in the U.S., but imprisoned in Belgium and bound for Farm Hall with Heisenberg and the other German scientists. He was soon to contemplate killing himself, after hearing of Hiroshima, and so it is perhaps merciful that the scathing letter Lise Meitner thought she was sending to him was actually written for Moe Berg. Hahn would never read it. Berg had no desire to do favors for Lise Meitner, and asking her to write to Hahn had been a ploy. Berg only wanted to know what she would say to Hahn, her professional confidant. Eventually the letter landed in Groves’s hands, but first Berg read it, probably as soon as he was a few blocks from her home. He must have thought it remarkable. At the least, it reminded a man of what he’d been fighting for.

  ON JUNE 30, Berg was back in Paris. Or, the OSS thought he was. Arrangements were being made for Scherrer to leave for the U.S. on or about July 19. It was hoped that Berg would accompany him. Berg left behind traces in the form of a hefty bill at Claridge’s Hotel in London and back in Sweden, where he took some leave time, but by July 26, he was more than accounted for; he and Scherrer were in Howard Dix’s office in Washington, discussing how to keep Meitner from the Russians. Berg suggested that the Rockefeller Foundation might support her work under Scherrer.

  After Washington, Berg escorted Scherrer on his visits to Cal Tech and Aerojet in California. They traveled using aliases—Scherrer was Peter Sherman, and Berg, Morrell Bush—and had a good time. In San Francisco, red ink sketches came to life as Berg took Scherrer to a San Francisco Seals, Pacific Coast League, baseball game. Berg’s old friend Lefty O’Doul was managing the Seals, and the well-traveled O’Doul knew how to present a tourist with a memorable occasion. He invited Scherrer to watch his first professional baseball game from the Seals dugout.

  Returning home to the East Coast seemed to have an awkward effect upon Berg. He didn’t want to be recognized, but then he did. At Washington’s Griffith Stadium one afternoon, his old teammate Rick Ferrell was catching for the Senators, and Berg called out a greeting from the stands. “I’d turn to say hello,” says Ferrell, “and he’d shush me like everything was secretive. I just wanted to say ‘hello.’ I guess all he wanted was a wave.” The same sort of thing happened on a side trip to New York with Scherrer. They met up with Berg’s OSS friend from London, Michael Burke, and Scherrer announced that he was eager to visit Manhattan’s venerable celebrity haunt, the Stork Club. Berg was reluctant to go, “for fear of being recognized,” said Burke, so it was agreed that Burke would take Scherrer inside for a drink while Berg
waited outside in the shadows of a doorway across the street.

  It was only around OSS people that Berg seemed comfortable. He passed one afternoon in Howard Dix’s office with Dix and Margaret Feldman, telling them war stories. Feldman had always thought Berg “the perfect operator for OSS,” an opinion that grew firmer now as she listened to him talk about the aborted submarine trip to see Amaldi in Italy, and his meeting with Meitner. Berg also described playing catch with the soldiers, although, as was often his habit when it came to storytelling, he changed the details some. He placed himself amidst a group of GI’s in Germany who lacked only a second catcher to complete two sides of nine for a game. Berg volunteered to give it a try, although, he said, he’d never played any baseball before. With his first throw down to second base he was discovered. A voice straight out of Brooklyn exclaimed, “Jesus Christ! Moe Boig! And here you are in Goimany!”

  The true version stood up fine without the embroidery, but Berg could be excused for his tinkering and, indeed, for feeling out of sorts that August. He had always been reluctant to give up secrets, and now one he had been guarding for close to two years was out in the instant it took to turn part of the Japanese city of Hiroshima into a pot of boiling black oil where tongues of fire scorched the bodies of men. Aside from whatever distress he may have felt at such vast destruction—he never talked about that—divulging the existence of the bomb meant, in a sense, that it was no longer his. He was not a scientist who could boast the tangible accomplishment of having helped to build the uranium bomb. The spy’s currency is that he knows what others don’t, and now everybody knew about the atomic weapon. And besides obviating his wartime activities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki somehow diminished them. Little Boy was the news of the century. Heisenberg’s bomb never existed. A callous man might have dismissed Berg’s work as a wild goose chase. Berg could have been excused for privately wishing that he had uncovered a German bomb and stopped it. If he’d shot the evil Heisenberg and thus scuttled Hitler’s atomic bomb, that would have been something heroic. What he had done, of course, was also something heroic, but it required much complicated explanation, and explanations weren’t permitted.

  One person who grasped the fading resonance of Berg’s work right away was Whitney Shepardson, the head of the OSS Secret Intelligence division. Shepardson wasn’t so much out to celebrate Berg as he was eager to keep his job. There had been plenty of talk that Harry Truman was not well disposed to the OSS, that the new president intended to disband the organization. It was with that foremost in his mind that three days after Hiroshima, and even as a plutonium bomb was exploding over Nagasaki, Shepardson wrote formally to Berg, requesting that he set down a narrative of his AZUSA work before he returned to Europe. “We are entitled to claim credit, at the appropriate time, for our contribution and that contribution has been very largely through you,” he wrote. “I don’t think there is anyone in the organization who can make this record correctly and in detail except yourself.” He closed by saying “how much it has meant to the organization that you have been working on this revolutionary subject.” Berg didn’t do it. He spent the rest of his life trying to write that narrative, but he never could.

  WITH THE MANHATTAN bomb project, AZUSA, and the entire war over with, Berg and Paul Scherrer left for Zurich on September 14, Scherrer carrying one of the coveted copies of the just-published Smyth report titled Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. Six days later, President Truman signed an executive order terminating the OSS as of October 1. It would wind up its business as the Strategic Services Unit (SSU). Personnel reductions would begin immediately. Berg, meanwhile, had been instructed to read an OSS report on Soviet interest in German scientists and then pay another visit to Lise Meitner’s home in Sweden. He must have found it all confusing. At the same time that the SSU was continuing to give him important secret work to do, it was sending him terse messages demanding that he make immediate account of the $13,058.49 in cash advances he had withdrawn during the war.

  A letter Howard Dix wrote him on October 1 added to a sense of unraveling. At first, Dix was all business. He instructed Berg to go to Rome to make sure that Amaldi, Wick, and their peers resisted the Russians, and also suggested that Otto Hahn should be asked to write to Meitner. Then Dix became desultory. Groves could not finance Meitner’s proposed appointment in Zurich with Scherrer, he said, because Congress had “almost shut off the money spigot.” Donovan would be no more help to Berg either. He was going back to practicing law. Dix described the “very grand” farewell speech the director had given on the twenty-eighth. As for Berg, Dix suggested that he be back in Washington by November. Berg had been hoping to go to Japan, in the wake of the atomic bombs. Dix wrote again on October 4, to say that the SSU could not send him there, and that it could probably do nothing more for Meitner. In a third letter, dated October 9, Dix told Berg that he would be leaving SSU at the end of the month to become a lawyer in New York.

  Berg pressed on without Donovan and Dix. In the months before Hiroshima, the U.S. had placed the best German physicists in protective custody, but now the Russians were mining Eastern Europe for second- and third-level scientists. Groves wanted to know who the Russians were interested in and what they were offering them, so Berg climbed into a command car with Tony Calvert, two other agents, Pete Oates and William Warner, and a large supply of Spam and Hershey bars and drove to Vienna. After completing their business in Austria, Calvert went to see the Russian commanding general about cutting back to Germany through Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia and couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. This went on for three days until, finally, Calvert, Berg, and the rest piled into their car, drove across the Danube, yelling “Amerikanish” as they passed the Russian guard station, and drove on back roads to Prague. While passing through the countryside, they were stopped by half a dozen roving Russian soldiers. Berg reached into his pocket, pulled out a letter with a large red star on it, and held it up. The soldiers saw this, saluted, and backed off. If they’d been able to read English, they would have known that they were being intimidated by a piece of Texaco oil company stationery. Warner thought this brilliant. Berg intrigued him. Berg’s suit was threadbare, and his shoes had holes in the sides. It turned out that Berg had cut the shoes open to relieve pressure on a pair of painfully swollen bunions.

  The ride continued through bombed-out Dresden to the Russian sector of Berlin, which they entered “without a hitch,” according to Calvert, on the late side of a rainy night. The German science publisher and Allied spy Paul Rosbaud had supplied them with a list of people to look up in East Berlin, and they did. By this time it was clear to Calvert and Berg that the Russian policy was to start by making a scientist a generous offer. For someone they truly coveted, this might mean a dacha on the Black Sea. Bachelors were tempted with the prospects of a beautiful Russian mistress. If the offer was refused, the scientist was then bundled off to the USSR against his will.

  All this took about a week, and when it was done, Calvert and Berg melted back into West Berlin. “Berg was always good company wherever you went,” says Calvert, who still keeps a photograph of Berg in Prague on a wall in his office. “He was quiet on the trip. He stayed in the background most of the time.”

  CAME NOVEMBER, BERG was attending a lecture titled “La Désintégration Atomique” by the French physicist and suspected Communist Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Grand Ampithéâtre de la Sorbonne, in Paris, and paying a two-week visit to Rome. In December, while SSU accounting officials fretted about his expense records, Berg moved about on the Continent, blithely continuing to withdraw money from special funds when he ran short.

  In early January, he requested 147 Swedish kronas. He was visiting Lise Meitner again. Meitner had been given a temporary position as a visiting professor at Catholic University in Washington, but one of the world’s greatest scientists might reasonably expect to attract better work than that, and Berg went to see her to make sure that no tempting offers were coming from Moscow. The si
ght of Berg enraged Meitner. Some time after Berg’s first visit to Stockholm, in June, a member of the British diplomatic legation had mailed a second letter from her to Hahn. In that letter she referred to the letter Berg had promised to deliver to him. In Hahn’s reply, he said that he had never received it. “It was very personal,” she said petulantly to Berg. Thinking quickly, Berg assured her that nobody had read it, and comforted her with the news that Hahn was in England and well taken care of. All the while curses tumbled through his brain. “It’s fun to be double-crossed like this,” he wrote sarcastically in notes he made after leaving her. “Why didn’t the London people censor Meitner’s latter letter to Hahn if they saw fit to deliver it?”

  After Berg managed to calm her down, Meitner told him that she would not accept any Russian offer, and that Gustav Hertz, a friend of hers from Berlin, had probably gone to Moscow against his wishes. As for herself, a physics institute in Sweden wanted her to teach nuclear physics there after her term at Catholic University, and she was considering it. Meitner said that Hiroshima had come as a surprise to her, and that she was “sorry that the bomb had to be invented.” A measure of how successful Berg had been at appeasing Meitner is that when he left, he was carrying a short note and a package of groceries Meitner had asked him to deliver to the aged German physicist Max Planck. Meitner worried that Planck wasn’t getting proper things to eat.

  Usually after Berg met someone, it was the other person who was left wondering about him, but with Meitner, the reverse was true. Berg never saw her again, but he talked about her for the rest of his life, sometimes in such a way that people came away from the conversation convinced that Berg had been her lover. But it wasn’t Meitner that he loved. He loved the work. It was time for him to go home now, but he wasn’t ready, and for the time being, nobody forced him.