Re: Spooks (Was Re: Alex Cockburn going the Hitchens way?)
On Jun 20, 2006, at 2:23 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
This is from a Nation review of a biography of Spook/Reverend
William Sloane Coffin:When the Korean War broke out, however, Coffin took the CIA up on
its offer, and in 1951 was stationed in Munich, where he recruited
and trained Soviet émigrés to infiltrate Russia as spies. Years
later he reasoned (or rationalized) that leaving seminary for the
CIA was “not as schizophrenic as it might superficially appear,
because the difference between CIA and seminary to me in those days
was not great. It was pursuing the same kind of goal of
righteousness as I saw it.” A CIA colleague felt he was “a
Romantic” who “wanted the excitement,” an assessment borne out by
Coffin’s choice of his code name, “Captain Holliday,” after Doc
Holliday, the Wild West partner of Wyatt Earp.After several years it was clear the operation had failed–the CIA- trained spies were easily caught, their safehouse exposed and most
of them probably executed. Coffin resigned in 1953 and went back to
seminary, this time Yale Divinity School, where he soon was “a
magnetic figure on campus…whizzing about New Haven on his
powerful BMW motorcycle.”
…and later hero to my era of Yalie for his antiwar activism.
Doug