The Catcher Was A Spy - On Amazon Prime
Posted: July 26th, 2021, 3:37 pm
IMHO one of the most unusual films set in the Second World War is "The Catcher Was A Spy", which last night I found out is now on Amazon Prime. As the opening of the film puts it: "The Nazis gave the task of building an atomic bomb to Nobel prize winning physicist Werner Heisenberg. In response, the U.S. Government sent a Jewish baseball player to assassinate him."
It's based on a true story. In 1944 American intelligence sent an agent to determine whether Germany was ready to build a nuclear weapon and if necessary to assassinate the head of Germany's nuclear program when he was giving a lecture in Zurich.
The agent wasn't your James Bond type. His name was Moe Berg, a 15-year veteran of Major League Baseball who'd finished his career as a catcher for the Boston Red Sox. Berg, known as "the brainest guy in baseball", was a polymath who had graduated from Princeton and Colombia Law School, was fluent in seven foreign languages and could get by in over a dozen more.
Berg already had experience of spying in the field. In 1934 when he was one of the players in a Major League baseball exhibition team playing in Japan, he took his movie camera to the top of one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo and filmed the city and the military harbour. He gave the film to the American government.
When war broke out, Berg was recruited by the OSS (predecessor to the CIA). Berg was given the nuclear assassination mission because he knew enough about nuclear physics to assess the risk based upon what he discovered on his mission.
I first saw the film when the American DVD's came out in 2018 (and I've read the book upon which the film is based). It's very much a film of three parts; Berg's pre-war life, military action in Italy (and consulting with physicists) and then the mission. Here's the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0XTxOs-_Os
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_Berg
It's based on a true story. In 1944 American intelligence sent an agent to determine whether Germany was ready to build a nuclear weapon and if necessary to assassinate the head of Germany's nuclear program when he was giving a lecture in Zurich.
The agent wasn't your James Bond type. His name was Moe Berg, a 15-year veteran of Major League Baseball who'd finished his career as a catcher for the Boston Red Sox. Berg, known as "the brainest guy in baseball", was a polymath who had graduated from Princeton and Colombia Law School, was fluent in seven foreign languages and could get by in over a dozen more.
Berg already had experience of spying in the field. In 1934 when he was one of the players in a Major League baseball exhibition team playing in Japan, he took his movie camera to the top of one of the tallest buildings in Tokyo and filmed the city and the military harbour. He gave the film to the American government.
When war broke out, Berg was recruited by the OSS (predecessor to the CIA). Berg was given the nuclear assassination mission because he knew enough about nuclear physics to assess the risk based upon what he discovered on his mission.
I first saw the film when the American DVD's came out in 2018 (and I've read the book upon which the film is based). It's very much a film of three parts; Berg's pre-war life, military action in Italy (and consulting with physicists) and then the mission. Here's the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0XTxOs-_Os
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_Berg
