Hatami gave me the names of people who might’ve known him. Almost invariably they told me the same thing: that Whitson had been an undercover agent of some kind. Some said he was in the FBI, others the Secret Service. The rough consensus, though, was that he was part of the CIA, or an offshoot special-operations group connected to it. It seemed absurd, the first time I heard it: an undercover agent wrangling witnesses for the Manson trial.
