>The Pig System sucks in decent people who think they're doing the
>right thing. They really do see themselves as defending freedom
>against Terror (or, a generation ago, the Evil Empire).
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."
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040712&s=wakefield