It marked the beginning of the end for Coffin. He had joined the CIA at least in part to atone for his role in the shameful 1946 incident at Plattling, but instead had found only further tragedy, been complicit in operations all but certain to fail. A year earlier, his favorite volunteer, Serge, had gone off on his mission to Russia, never to be heard from again, and now four more men Coffin regarded as friends were gone, too, bound for the gulags or the KGB execution rooms. Shortly after, he abruptly resigned from the CIA. “It destroyed him,” Sichel recalled of Coffin’s tour in Germany, “just
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