FBI Agent Arrested in Sting as Spy for Moscow

In a move that rocked the proud Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency arrested one of its career supervisory agents Wednesday on charges that he sold government secrets to the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and, more recently, to FBI undercover investigators.

Earl Edwin Pitts, 43, became only the second agent in the bureau’s 88-year history to face espionage charges. He is accused of providing information about fellow agents and boosting Soviet efforts to penetrate the bureau.

“Nothing was sacred to Pitts,” said U.S. Atty. Helen F. Fahey, whose office will prosecute the case. “He was willing to betray his country, his agency and his fellow agents.”

The 13-year FBI veteran was arrested at the FBI’s training academy in Quantico, Va., where he worked providing security briefings for fellow agents. Pitts’ wife, Mary, a former FBI employee, cooperated in the investigation, officials said.

His capture was the latest in a string of high-profile spy cases that have broken in Washington in recent years, many coming as the end of the Cold War brought the former superpower adversaries closer and provided U.S. counterintelligence officials with new tools to root out traitors.

Indeed, Wednesday’s arrest stemmed from a tip by a former Soviet intelligence official, who claimed that Pitts had been involved in trading U.S. classified data during his stint as an FBI counterintelligence agent in the bureau’s New York field office in the late 1980s.

Armed with that information, FBI officials in Washington launched an undercover sting that they called a “false flag” operation. American agents posed as Russian operatives and allegedly induced Pitts to provide classified material in return for cash on nearly two dozen occasions.

According to a government affidavit unsealed here, Pitts pocketed at least $224,000 from the Soviets and provided them with a wide range of classified material--everything from personal, medical and financial data on his fellow agents to secret information about an FBI “asset” who spied covertly on Russian intelligence matters.

He also allegedly took $65,000 from undercover agents who conducted the sting. Even as late as Friday, Pitts was asking for permission from the U.S. agents he believed were his Russian handlers for permission “to draw on reserve funds” that were being given to him in a special Russian financial account, the affidavit said.

And in his FBI computer at the Quantico academy, Pitts reportedly kept an “escape plan” presumably to whisk him out of the country should he learn that his superiors had found out about his alleged activities.

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh said that the matter demonstrates the “threat to national security” that exists even during this modern era of friendlier relations with nations like Russia.

“The FBI must work harder and take every possible step to prevent espionage,” Freeh said, appearing at a press conference with Atty. Gen. Janet Reno. “Where prevention fails, we must do a better job of finding spies before they do major damage.”

Freeh added that the bureau is still conducting a “damage estimate” to learn how much U.S. intelligence has been crippled by the information Pitts allegedly sold.

At the State Department, spokesman Nicholas Burns said that Russian spying in the post-Cold War world is disturbing. But, he said, it will not torpedo today’s generally constructive relations between Washington and Moscow.

“This is not a government with which we have, in all respects, shared values or shared ideas,” Burns said. “But it is a government with which we have constructed the type of relationship that can best secure the future and the security of the American people.”

The slightly built Pitts, wearing a blue open-collar shirt and olive pants, was arraigned during a brief hearing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. He did not speak. Judge Thomas Rawles Jones set a Friday afternoon hearing to consider bail.

If convicted, Pitts could face a maximum penalty of life in prison. Fahey said that “at this time” the death penalty is not being considered because investigators have not determined that any lives were lost, or that U.S. satellite information or nuclear material was put in jeopardy.

The Pitts matter is different from other recent spy cases, most notably those of CIA agent Aldrich H. Ames, who pleaded guilty, and CIA case officer Harold James Nicholson, who is charged and awaiting trial. Those cases engulfed government personnel working directly in the intelligence-gathering field.

But the Pitts case stung deeply because it came from within the FBI, the agency charged with hunting down spies in all U.S. intelligence services.

“These charges are certainly repugnant to the fidelity, bravery and integrity of the more than 25,000 FBI employees, who day in and day out serve this great country, putting their lives and their welfare, and the welfare of their families, on the line,” Freeh said.

The only other time this happened, it involved Richard W. Miller, a former agent assigned to the FBI’s Los Angeles office. In 1991, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for passing secret documents to the Soviets in exchange for a promised $65,000 in gold and cash.

Freeh said that the Pitts investigation goes back to 1993, when FBI officials suspected that their intelligence unit in New York may have been penetrated. He said agents began a thorough analysis of the unit, along with deep background checks on agents who had gone in and out of there in recent years.

At the same time, he said, a “cooperating witness”--the former Soviet intelligence official--told investigators that he had had a cash-for-secrets relationship with Pitts when Pitts worked for the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence squad between January 1987 and August 1989.

Freeh refused to identify the cooperating witness, except to say that, at the time of the alleged offenses, he was a Soviet citizen assigned to the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. He still lives in this country.

According to the affidavit, while in New York Pitts had access to “a wide range of sensitive and highly classified operations” that included recruitment efforts involving Russian intelligence officers and double agent operations.

The affidavit said that Pitts wrote a letter in July 1987 seeking to arrange a meeting with Soviet agents. That allegedly was followed by a meeting at the New York City Public Library, where Pitts was introduced to Aleksandr Vasilyevich Karpov, who at that time was the New York chief of the Soviet Union’s KGB intelligence gathering agency.

Over the next several years, Pitts allegedly sold the Russians:

* A document known as the “Soviet Administrative List.” It was the FBI’s computerized, alphabetical compilation of all Soviet officials posted or assigned to the United States.

The classified list included detailed information on all FBI counterintelligence agents who were working on Soviet cases, including pertinent information describing their personal lives.

* Specific FBI surveillance information that had been gathered about the Soviet agent himself.

* Secret data concerning an “FBI asset” who worked on covert operations on Russian intelligence matters.

Freeh said that person was not harmed. “He is still alive,” he said.

The Soviet agent, then no longer working for Russian intelligence, told the FBI about Pitts in 1995 and the bureau began its “false flag” undercover operation. The sting lasted 16 months, Freeh said, and cost about $1 million.

According to the affidavit, the operation used FBI agents and the former Soviet agent. It began in August 1995, when the former Soviet agent went to Pitts’ home in Spotsylvania, Va., and met him at the door.

“There is a guest visiting me,” he allegedly told Pitts. “He wanted to see you. He’s in my car. He’s from Moscow.”

Pitts allegedly met later that day with the former Soviet agent and his “guest”--an undercover U.S. intelligence officer--at the nearby Chancellorsville, Va., Civil War Battlefield Visitors’ Center. They told Pitts that they were “very happy” with him. But they said that they worried about the behavior of a senior Russian intelligence officer in the United States.

Pitts allegedly responded: “I’ll help you if I can.”

Pitts also allegedly asked about money. The undercover agent gave him a sealed envelope containing $15,000 in used, unmarked, nonsequential $100 bills, officials said. Pitts stuffed the envelope in his pants pocket, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit said that in following months, Pitts made 22 “drops” of classified, internal FBI documents and made a series of incriminating statements about his past involvement with the Russians in New York.

Among the materials he was said to have provided during the sting were strategies on how Russian intelligence officers could recruit additional FBI agents, plans to smuggle into the FBI academy a Russian intelligence agent versed in technical expertise and a stolen FBI handset to a telecommunications device used to transmit classified information.

The affidavit indicates he had nine telephone conversations with the undercover agents, conducted two face-to-face meetings with his Russian “handlers” and accepted $65,000 in payments for his services.

And inside his computer at the FBI academy, agents allegedly found a letter indicating that he was putting together an emergency escape plan that, in his words, would “only be put into effect as a final extreme measure.”