I never took him seriously, says Allen. He wasn’t a nice man. He was a professional liar, a layabout who lived on his brother, a lecher, a charlatan. Just why the OSS took him I can’t see. He didn’t speak any foreign language well enough to be a spy and he was rather the parody of a spy. Berg was a self-invented mystery, a charming chap, but an outright fraud. The mystery is that there is no mystery.