Les Whitten, 89; investigative reporter, novelist

Les Whitten, an investigative reporter whose skill at cultivating government sources and securing secret documents — sometimes through threats or the use of a paid private investigator — made him a top legman of muckraker Jack Anderson and an enemy of President Richard M. Nixon, died Dec. 2 at an assisted-living community in Adelphi, Maryland. He was 89.

He had recently been hospitalized for sepsis, said a son, Les Whitten III.

A self-described "swashbuckler," Whitten was an aspiring novelist who covered wars in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam before joining the staff of the country's most popular daily news column, the Washington Merry-GoRound, in 1969.

Helmed by Anderson, a reporter whose investigative prowess was matched by a reputation as an unrepentant, self-aggrandizing showman, the syndicated column reached tens of millions of readers. It broke news on topics as diverse as a CIA plot to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro and the Nixon administration's secret foreign policy shift toward Pakistan and away from India, which earned Anderson a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1972.

Whitten was "the best reporter in the country," Anderson told The Washington Post in 1978, and he had a hand in nearly all the column's stories for a decade until he left to write thrillers and focus on his translations of the French poet Charles Baudelaire.

Still, Whitten and other reporters for Anderson — including a young Brit Hume, who later became a Fox News anchorman, and Jon Lee Anderson, now a staff writer for the New Yorker — were only occasionally credited with a byline.

Working largely behind the scenes, they practiced an aggressive, occasionally unscrupulous brand of reporting that included the use of bribes and blackmail, according to Mark Feldstein, author of "Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture."

During the Watergate investigations, Whitten "was trying to get some leaks and couldn't get it," Feldstein said in a phone interview. "He threatened his source by saying, 'If you don't give this to me I'll say it came from you, but if you give it to me, we'll have lunch and I'll say it came from ' a source near the White House.'