The Moe Berg medal - a baseball player and US Spy

TopographicOceans · May 2, 2017 3:12AM

Jewish-American Hall of Fame medals celebrate baseball players Hank Greenberg and Moe Berg.
Greenberg was the first Jewish athlete inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

But Moe had another claim to fame. He was a master linguist that spoke numerous languages, including German.
The CIA recruited him during WWII for a plan to kidnap Italian rocket and missile specialists out of Italy and bring them to the U.S.

However, there was another project hidden within that, called Project AZUSA, with the goal of interviewing Italian physicists to see what they knew about Werner Heisenberg.

Heisenberg was a German scientist who was working on developing a nuclear bomb for the Germans. Heisenberg was giving a lecture in Zürich and the CIA wanted Moe to attend. They gave him a gun and a cyanide capsule. His mission was to find out if the Germans were close to building an atomic weapon and if so, he was to kill Heisenberg with a shot to the head, and then take his own life with the cyanide.

Moe wasn't a scientist and from the lecture, he couldn't figure out where the Germans were in their plans to build the bomb.
But there was a dinner party after the lecture and Moe got himself invited. He overheard a guest ask Heisenberg if he thought Germany would win the war. With his gun in hand, he waited to hear the answer, which led Moe to come to the conclusion that the Germans were not close, and he aborted his mission. He returned to the US and within 6 months the war was over.

But if the Germans were close to the bomb, it was up to Moe to take out Heisenberg and stop it.

He was awarded the Medal of Freedom on October. but he rejected the award. His sister accepted it on his behalf after his death

A NUMISMATIC CONNECTION TO MOE BERG