[michael3322]

Great thread topic.

Ruth
Paige
and
Berg

"On December 18, 1944, a 42-year-old man masquerading as a Swiss physics student settled his 6-foot-1 frame into a chair in a Zurich lecture hall. Instead of simply listening to the brilliant insights offered by the physicist at the podium, the man was trying to understand enough of the scientist’s native German to identify key words—words that could change, or perhaps even destroy, the world. All the while, he was hoping the gun tucked into his jacket pocket wouldn’t fall out, as it had during his trip across the Atlantic.

The audience member was no ordinary student. In fact, he wasn’t a student at all. He was a retired baseball player named Morris “Moe” Berg, and the American government wanted him to assassinate a man dubbed “the most dangerous possible German in the field” of physics: Werner Heisenberg, director of the Nazi nuclear program.

An average-at-best catcher who played well past his prime, Berg joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the CIA, in 1943. Nicknamed the “brainiest man in baseball” due to his knack for languages and quick wit, he found himself behind enemy lines five years after he hung up his cleats for the last time. A polymath who loved the press but was reluctant to discuss his personal life, he was a man of contradictions who crossed paths with many of the leading figures of the day, from Babe Ruth to Franklin D. Roosevelt to J. Robert Oppenheimer."

Smithsonian Magazine