While Frank Cohn enlisted as a young man and then dedicated most of his career to military service, Moe Berg had already distinguished himself—as a catcher for the Dodgers and the White Sox—before World War II began. Stuart Halpern writes:

Morris Berg was born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents in a tenement on East 121st Street in Manhattan on March 2, 1902. At seven, demonstrating a passion for both the game and secret identities, he played for a Methodist Church team under the pseudonym Runt Wolfe. After graduating from Barringer High School, Berg played shortstop for Princeton, where he majored in modern languages. He and another teammate would communicate on the field in Latin. . . . Continuing to balance his intellectual and athletic interests he [later] spent the winter studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Following his 1939 retirement as a player, Berg remained a committed patriot. He undertook an undercover assignment as a sports ambassador in Latin America under the auspices of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs—a U.S. government agency dedicated to countering German and Italian propaganda efforts in Latin America. He parlayed that opportunity into a job as an officer in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, in 1943.

At the OSS, his missions included posing as a businessman in Switzerland and being dropped behind enemy lines in Italy to make contact with an Italian atomic scientist. Also fluent in German, Berg was assigned to assassinate the leading German physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Werner Heisenberg in Zurich if Heisenberg indicated during a lecture there that Berlin was close to developing an atomic bomb. (Germany wasn’t, so Berg didn’t kill Heisenberg.)

When he called upon Hamas to end the war and release the hostages last week, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was also getting ready for a reshuffle within his regime. On Saturday, he appointed Hussein al-Sheikh deputy president of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is intimately tied to the PA itself. Al-Sheikh would therefore succeed Abbas—who is eighty-nine and reportedly in ill health—as head of the PLO if he should die or become incapacitated, and be positioned to succeed him as head of the PA as well.

Al-Sheikh spent eleven years in an Israeli prison and, writes Maurice Hirsch, was involved in planning a 2002 Jerusalem suicide bombing that killed three. Moreover, Hirsch writes, he “does not enjoy broad Palestinian popularity or support.”

Still, by appointing Al-Sheikh, Abbas has taken a step in the internal reforms he inaugurated last year in the hope that he could prove to the Biden administration and other relevant players that the PA was up to the task of governing the Gaza Strip. Neomi Neumann writes:

Abbas’s motivation for reform also appears rooted in the need to meet the expectations of Arab and European donors without compromising his authority. On April 14, the EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas approved a three-year aid package worth 1.6 billion euros, including 620 million euros in direct budget support tied to reforms. Meanwhile, the French president Emmanuel Macron held a call with Abbas [earlier this month] and noted afterward that reforms are essential for the PA to be seen as a viable governing authority for Gaza—a telling remark given reports that Paris may soon recognize “the state of Palestine.”

In some cases, reforms appear targeted at specific regional partners. The idea of appointing a vice-president originated with Saudi Arabia.

In the near term, Abbas’s main goal appears to be preserving Arab and European support ahead of a major international conference in New York this June.