If you wanted to create the ideal spy character you couldn’t do much better than Moe Berg. He well may be the most enigmatic spy ever to don a trench coat. Well, it’s not certain he wore a trench coat. More often than not he was wearing a baseball uniform.

Except when he was wearing a kimono.

That’s how the 32-year-old major league catcher was dressed in 1934 when he bluffed his way into Tokyo’s St. Luke’s Hospital, ostensibly to visit the daughter of the American ambassador.

At a time when Japan’s distrust for America, and Americans, was pointing the country toward war, this six-foot, one-inch, kimono-clad Caucasian made his way, unimpeded, to the roof.

Standing on what was then the tallest building in the city, Berg withdrew a professional 16mm movie camera from under his kimono. Then, according to journalist Nicholas Dawidoff, whose book, The Catcher Was a Spy, is probably the most accurate public accounting of Berg’s life, Berg  “proceeded to photograph sweeping panoramas of Tokyo harbor, the industrial sections of Tokyo, possibly munitions factories and things like that.”

After which he left.

It’s the stuff of Hollywood movies, but even the most gullible of moviegoers would have a hard time swallowing much of what is known about Moe Berg. His story simply doesn’t add up, even if you’re still doing arithmetic on your fingers.

Berg was, by all accounts, brilliant. By the time he entered Princeton, he’d demonstrated an aptitude for languages and a flair for baseball. He graduated with honors and with a reputation as a fine major league prospect. While playing for the Chicago White Sox he earned a law degree.

Nonetheless, the promising young Princetonian’s major league baseball career was distinguished by its blandness. Even Dawidoff wondered how Berg managed a 19-year stretch in the majors when the majority of his time was spent in dugouts and bullpens instead of behind home plate.

Yet an Ian Flemming or John le Carré would have deemed this brilliant, secretive loner perfect spy material.

He was fluent in 12 languages and consumed books and newspapers as if they were chocolates. When he chose to be, he was witty, charming, and wiling to engage in conversation on virtually any topic.

Except himself.

And baseball afforded him the perfect cover for travel, which is how Berg got to Tokyo in the first place.

Officially, he was in Japan on an international baseball good-will tour. Berg, the journeyman ballplayer, somehow made it onto a roster that included such luminaries as Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth.

And the camera?

Berg had convinced MovietoneNews, a newsreel company, to lend him that camera so he could shoot scenes of his trip. Secretly photographing Tokyo was, supposedly, Berg’s idea.

Was Berg truly that perceptive, predicting a war that was still years away? Was it patriotism that compelled him to act on his own? Was he staging an unsolicited audition for the spy he dreamed to be? Or was being groomed as a spy all along?

It all depends on how you want to tell the story.

There’s no shortage of reports praising Berg’s photographs as critical to the success of Jimmy Doolittle’s famous 30-Seconds-Over-Tokyo bombing raid in 1942. So the story contains some great fodder for a wartime blockbuster movie.

Except Berg’s photos were eight years old at the time. Surely the Tokyo landscape had undergone major changes in preparation for war. Even the CIA, recounting the incident on its website, only cites Berg’s photos as “reportedly” helping Doolittle.

Reportedly?

That’s hardly an eye-popping quote to splash across the screen in a movie trailer.

By 1943, Berg had made his way from baseball to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. He was officially a spy. But did the OSS hire James Bond and wind up with Maxwell Smart? Dawidoff wrote that Berg was prone to dropping his gun at inopportune moments and wearing his unmistakable OSS wristwatch on covert missions.

What is known is that in 1954 Berg’s spy contract wasn’t renewed. But don’t roll the credits just yet. There’s another twist coming.

Six years later Berg was in financial trouble, so he signed a contract for his autobiography. Only the publisher, editor, or ghostwriter involved—there are conflicting reports, of course— thought Moe Berg was Moe of The Three Stooges. Furious at the misunderstanding, Berg canceled the deal. His death in 1972 ended everything about his life except the speculation.

It also demonstrated, once again, that truth can be stranger than fiction.

Once we figure out which is which.