Select Sotheby’s International Realty’s Brian Dominic, a licensed real estate salesperson based in Lake Placid, recently told me that he’s been seeing a flurry of interest in decommissioned Atlas “F” nuclear missile silos. It might not surprise you, then, that there’s a growing number of ultra-wealthy individuals buying up prime plots of subterranean real estate all over the country-a number of which are within driving distance of Saratoga Springs. And by that, I mean finding the nearest underground bunker in which to squirrel away your family and hide.

Would I even be here writing this story right now? Would you be reading it? With current headlines reporting on unhinged, trigger-happy world leaders virulent, vaccination-resistant strains of the flu and catastrophic natural disasters mushrooming up every which way, it’s easy to be worried about what the future holds-and start thinking about exit strategies. But just imagine what would’ve happened had Berg missed a key telegram or been assassinated himself. Obviously, we know how history played out: Hitler didn’t get the A-bomb-or make it out of the bunker, for that matter.

Unlike his place in baseball history, his OSS assignment was anything but trivial: He was tasked with figuring out whether the Nazis were capable of building an atomic bomb-and assassinating the scientist behind it if they were. Soon after his baseball career fizzled and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Berg became a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)-the progenitor to the Central Intelligence Agency-and spied for the US abroad during World War II.

He was a walking encyclopedia, having studied foreign languages at Princeton (he was reportedly fluent in a number of them, including French, and proficient in Sanskrit), and sported a law degree from Columbia (he moonlighted as a lawyer in the off-season). Berg was a third-string, bullpen catcher in the 1920s and ’30s for a number of different Major League Baseball teams, including the Washington Senators and Boston Red Sox, and became famous not so much for his savvy behind the plate but for his brain. Of late, I’ve been plowing through the biography of Morris “Moe” Berg-a historically significant figure I can almost guarantee you’ve never heard of.

Missile silo house