Knowing more about CHAOS and COINTELPRO, I felt that men like Reeve Whitson were potentially much more common than I’d anticipated, always in peripheral, undefined roles. Part of the reason that Whitson seemed like such a wild card to me was that he appeared to have walked on the scene from nowhere: an outré, worldly man suddenly hobnobbing with the LAPD’s top brass. I wanted others who fit that profile. To cover up an operation like CHAOS, the agency needed friends in law enforcement—insiders who could make arrests or, just as important, not make arrests.
