The Catcher Was a Spy

Many years back, I heard a radio interview with the author of a book called The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. I had read over the years that there were plans to option the book for a movie, but those plans apparently fell through until a few years ago when the movie The Catcher Was a Spy was finally made. I recorded it during one of the free preview weekends, and recently watched it.

Moe Berg (Paul Rudd) was a backup catcher for a bunch of Major League teams in the 1920s and 1930s. Berg was also very bright, having gone to Princeton, and very intellectually curious. On a baseball goodwill tour of Japan, for example, several years before Pearl Harbor, Berg went ostensibly to visit someone in hospital but used this as an excuse to get up on the roof to film the harbor as it was an important military target.

World War II eventually comes, and the Nazis declare war on the US. Berg offers his knowledge to the OSS, which was the forerunner to the CIA. Berg was probably too old and had too bad knees to do regular military service, but as a very intelligent man who could speak multiple languages, spy work could be right up his alley. So the OSS take him on and groom him for any number of missions, eventually trying to get Italian scientists to defect to America. Berg meets one of those physicists, and asks an important question the Allies would like to know the answer to: how far along are the Germans in their attempt to build a fission bomb?

History tells us that this was an extremely difficult question to answer, in no small part because the German physicist leading the German research into nuclear physics and its potential use as a weapon, Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong) was thought by some (and apparently still considered today) to be deliberately trying to go slow to keep the Germans from getting the bomb first. (By the same token, it's been debated whether the real-life mission depicted in The Heroes of Telemark, preventing heavy water from getting to Germany, was necessary because the operation wasn't efficient enough and the Germans weren't far enough along in their nuclear program anyway.) However, there's also a pretty big risk. As one of the spymasters says, if there's a 5% chance of stubbing your toe in the dark, you take that risk rather than turning on the light and waking up your wife. But if there's a 5% chance the Germans can get the bomb first and win the war, what do you do?

The Allies know that Heisenberg has a physicist friend, Paul Scherrer (Tom Wilkinson), who lives in Zürich, in neutral Switzerland. Also, Heisenberg has been known to visit Scherrer on multiple occasions, while Scherrer has some sympathy for the Allied cause. So Perhaps Scherrer could get Heisenberg to come for another visit to Zürich to give a lecture, which Berg can attend to try to ascertain just how far along the way the Germans are to getting the bomb. If they're close enough, Berg's mission is to kill Heisenberg to prevent the Germans from getting the bomb.

Moe Berg's real-life story is a fascinating one, but unfortunately, the movie version of The Catcher Was a Spy doesn't quite tell it as well as it perhaps could. The opening portion is too concerned with Berg's sexuality (he never married and had a girlfriend Estella (Sienna Miller) who wound up marrying another man at the end of the war), while the middle is a bit too slow in having Berg engage in less relevant operations. This leaves the last portion, the meeting with Heisenberg, to be rushed even though the movie is only a little over 90 minutes. Still, it's an interesting story, and one that definitely deserves to be better known.

The Catcher Was a Spy is available on DVD.