Moe Berg - The Spy Behind Home Plate (Hardcover, Turtleback School & Library ed.)

A major league baseball player fluent in nine languages, an Ivy League scholar, and an attorney, Moe Berg led a life of mystery and ingrigue as a top-secret spy who helped the United States win the race against Germany to build the dreaded atomic bomb.

Moe Berg used baseball as a cover to make significant intelligence contributions to the United States. In one of his most famous exploits, Moe took secret pictures of Tokyo's skyline from a hospital roof while on a goodwill baseball tour of Japan in the 1930s. Years later, his pictures were used by American bombers in a World War II raid on Tokyo.

After sixteen years in the majors, Moe went to work for Nelson Rockefeller, the coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Officially, Moe was goodwill ambassador to Latin America, but that was only his cover for a secret mission for the United States.

Later, he was recruited as part of a top secret OSS team and sent behind the enemy line sin Europe. One of his most important assignments, known to less than a dozen people, was to help the United States decide whether to build two atomic bombs -- one to drop over Germany, the other over Japan. His information helped U.S. scientists concentrate on building a bomb targeted for Japan and, by so doing, helped to hasten the end of World War II.