Not funny, but a great story that most people don't know
>
> I have never heard this story
> before...........................
>
>
>
>
>
> *Here's a history bit that I bet you never knew...*
>
> *When baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig went on tour in
> baseball-crazy Japan in 1934, some fans wondered why a third-string catcher
> named Moe Berg was included.*
>
>
>
>
> *The answer was simple: Berg was a US spy.*
>
> *Speaking 15 languages - including Japanese - Moe Berg had two loves:
> baseball and spying.*
>
> *In Tokyo , garbed in a kimono, Berg took flowers to the daughter of an
> American diplomat being treated in St. Luke's Hospital - the tallest
> building in the Japanese capital.*
>
> *He never delivered the flowers. The ball-player ascended to the
> hospital roof and filmed key features: the harbor, military installations,
> railway yards, etc.*
>
> *Eight years later, General Jimmy Doolittle studied Berg's films in
> planning his spectacular raid on Tokyo .*
>
>
>
> *Catcher Moe Berg*
>
> *Berg's father, Bernard Berg, a pharmacist in Newark, New Jersey, taught
> his son Hebrew and Yiddish. Moe, against his wishes, began playing
> baseball on the street aged four.*
>
> *His father disapproved and never once watched his son play. In
> Barringer High School , Moe learned Latin, Greek and French.*
>
> *He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton - having added Spanish,
> Italian, German and Sanskrit to his linguistic quiver.*
>
> *During further studies at the Sorbonne, in Paris , and Columbia Law
> School , he picked up Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Arabic, Portuguese
> and Hungarian - 15 languages in all, plus some regional dialects.*
>
> *While playing baseball for Princeton University , Moe Berg would
> describe plays in Latin or Sanskrit.*
>
>
>
>
> * Tito's partisans*
>
> *During World War II, he was parachuted into Yugoslavia to assess the
> value to the war effort*
> *of the two groups of partisans there. He reported back that Marshall
> Tito's forces were widely supported by the people and Winston Churchill
> ordered all-out support for the Yugoslav underground fighter, rather than
> Mihajlovic's Serbians.*
>
> *The parachute jump at age 41 undoubtedly was a challenge. But there was
> more to come in that same year.*
>
> *Berg penetrated German-held Norway , met with members of the
> underground and located a secret heavy water plant - part of the Nazis'
> effort to build an atomic bomb.*
>
> *His information guided the Royal Air Force in a bombing raid to destroy
> the plant.*
>
>
>
>
> * The R.A.F. destroys the Norwegian heavy water plant targeted by Moe Berg.*
>
> *There still remained the question of how far had the Nazis progressed
> in the race to build the first Atomic bomb. If the Nazis were successful,
> they would win the war. Berg (under the code name "Remus") was sent to
> Switzerland to hear leading German physicist Werner Heisenberg,*
> *a Nobel Laureate, lecture and determine if the Nazis were close to
> building an A-bomb. Moe managed to slip past the SS guards at the
> auditorium, posing as a Swiss graduate student.*
> *The spy carried in his pocket a pistol and a cyanide pill. *
>
> *If the German indicated the Nazis were close to building a weapon, Berg
> was to shoot him - and then swallow the cyanide pill.*
>
> * Moe, sitting in the front row, determined that the Germans were nowhere
> near their goal, so he complimented Heisenberg on his speech and walked him
> back to his hotel.*
>
>
>
