Baseball player and spy. Berg graduated from Princeton University where he specialized in languages, a rather unlikely precursor to a long, if not quite productive career as a third string catcher for a number of baseball teams in the 1920's and 1930's. It was said that he could speak a dozen languages but couldn't hit in any of them. Many newspaper reporters loved to interview him because he was such an intellectual, which was unusual for a ballplayer in any era. After his playing career ended and World War II began, Berg joined forces with the OSS, which was the forerunner of today's CIA. Because he spoke fluent German, his mission was to gather information on Germany's atomic bomb program led by Werner Heisenberg, and to assassinate him, if necessary, which it wasn't. For more details, consult Nicholas Dawidoff's biography The Catcher Was A Spy.