In 1934, the Japanese government was obsessed with the perceived problem of foreign spies.  The heads of urban police forces meet in December to discuss the problem and tourists complained about the rough treatment they received when visiting Japan including unauthorized searches of hotel rooms, and intensive questioning by police officers.  Even the All Americans were searched when their ferry passed through the Tsugaru Straights straights en route to Hokkaido.  In this context, the behavior of the All Americans’ backup catcher is particularly suspicious.

On November 29 as the team prepared to leave the Imperial Hotel for a game at nearby Omiya, Moe Berg announced that he felt ill and would remain behind.  Berg was an unusual Major Leaguer.  He had graduated from Princeton and Columbia Law, had attended the Sorbonne, spoke several languages fluently, a half dozen more (including Japanese) with some proficiency, and was one of the few Jews in the Majors.  As a result, Berg was not “one of the guys.”  He left his teammates directly after league games and in Japan often went sightseeing by himself.  The other players liked Berg but found him mysterious. 

Once his teammates left the hotel, Berg recovered, dressed in a kimono, put on geta (traditional wooden sandals), hid his 16mm movie camera under his clothes, purchased some flowers and announced that he would visit the American ambassador’s daughter Elsie Lyon, who was recovering from childbirth at St. Luke’s Hospital.  Inside the hospital, Berg walked past Lyon’s room and climbed the stairs to the roof.  The view was magnificent.  St. Luke’s was among the tallest buildings in Tokyo and commanded views of downtown and Tokyo Bay.  He pulled out his camera and took panoramic footage.  Later, Berg would smuggle the film through Japanese customs and guarded it as he traveled through Korea, China, and Russia after the tour.

    
        


For years, stories circulated that Berg photographed Tokyo under orders from the United States government and that the film was used to plan Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s 1942 air raid on Tokyo.  During World War II, Berg did become a spy—joining the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) in 1943—and carried out missions to Italy and Switzerland.  He even partook in an undercover operation to assess Germany’s nuclear bomb program and was ordered to kill a leading German scientist if they were close to a breakthrough. 

In The Catcher Was A Spy, Nicholas Dawidoff concludes that Berg acted on his own during the trip to Japan and was not a government spy.  But the question endures, why did Berg go undercover to film Tokyo from the roof of St. Luke’s?  You’ll have to read Banzai Babe Ruth!  to judge the new evidence on this oft-debated question.