Saturday, July 09, 2005
The Man with the Golden Glove
CIA uses Red Sox Owner's Lear Jet to Kidnap Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan
Morse and the CIA ain't got nothing on former catcher, Moe Berg.
From Wikipedia :
CIA uses Red Sox Owner's Lear Jet to Kidnap Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan
The plane that carried Abu Omar to Cairo was not a CIA aircraft but a chartered Gulfstream owned by Phillip H. Morse, a multimillionaire Florida businessman and a co-owner of the world champion Boston Red Sox.
Morse confirmed to the Boston Globe in March that he charters his plane to the CIA and other clients when it is not being used for Red Sox business. But Morse said he knew nothing about the uses to which the intelligence agency had put the plane.
Morse and the CIA ain't got nothing on former catcher, Moe Berg.
From Wikipedia :
On August 2, 1943, Berg accepted a position with the Office of Strategic Services for a salary of $3,800 a year. In September, he was assigned to the Secret Intelligence branch of the OSS and given a place at the OSS Balkans desk. In this role, he parachuted into Yugoslavia to evaluate the various resistence groups operating against the Nazis to determine which was the strongest. He talked to both Draza Mihajlovic and Josip Broz and reviewed their forces, deciding that Josip Broz had the stronger and better supported group. His evaluations were used to help determine the amount of support and aid to give each group. In late 1943, Berg was assigned to Project Larson, an OSS operation set up by OSS Chief of Special Projects John Shaheen. The stated purpose of the project was to kidnap Italian rocket and missile specialists out of Italy and bring them to the U.S. However, there was another project hidden within Larson called Project AZUSA with the goal of interviewing Italian physicists to see what they knew about Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. It was similar in scope and mission to the ALSOS project. On May 4, 1944 Berg left for London and the start of his mission.
From May to mid-December, Berg hopped around Europe interviewing physicists and trying to convince several to leave Europe and work in America. At the beginning of December news about Heisenberg giving a lecture in Zurich, Switzerland reached the OSS, and Berg was assigned the task of attending the lecture and determining "if anything Heisenberg said convinced him the Germans were close to a bomb." If Berg came to the conclusion that the Germans were close, he had orders to shoot Heisenberg; Berg determined that the Germans were not close. During his time in Switzerland, Berg became close friends with the physicist Paul Scherrer. Berg returned to the United States on April 25, 1945, and resigned from the Strategic Services Unit, the successor to the OSS, in August. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on October 10, but he rejected the award on December 2. His sister later accepted it on his behalf after he died.
In 1952, Berg was hired by the CIA to use his old contacts from World War II to find out about Soviet atomic science. For the $10,000 plus expenses that Berg received, the CIA got nothing in return. The CIA officer that spoke with Berg when he returned from Europe said that he was "flaky."
For the next 25 years, Berg had no real job, living off friends and relatives who put up with him because of his great charm. When they would ask what he did for a living, he would reply by putting his finger to his lips, giving them the impression that he was still a spy. He lived with his brother Samuel for seventeen years. According to Samuel, he became moody and snappish after the war and did not seem to care for much in life besides his books. His brother finally grew fed up with the arrangement and asked Moe to leave. When his brother refused, Samuel had eviction papers drawn up to get him out.
After being evicted from his brother's home, Berg moved in with his sister Ethel in Belleville, New Jersey, where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1972 at age 70 from injuries sustained in a fall at home. His remains were cremated and spread over Mount Scopus in Israel. During his life, he received many requests to write his memoirs, but turned them down; he did almost write them on one occasion in 1960, but he quit after the co-writer that was assigned to him confused him with Moe Howard of the Three Stooges.