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