As Communism Fades, U.S. Goes Hunting for Moles

The United States has won the Cold War. Now, slowly and methodically, it is collecting prisoners.

When FBI agent Earl Edwin Pitts was arrested Wednesday and charged with spying for Moscow, he became the latest casualty of a continuing post-Cold War espionage sweep by America’s spy hunters, sources said Thursday.

The investigations have dragged on for years since communism’s collapse, but U.S. intelligence sources said they have been gradually building their criminal cases thanks in part to a remarkable flow of espionage information that began to reach the FBI and CIA after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union.

High-ranking Soviet--and later Russian--intelligence officers began to defect in large numbers, while the files of now-defunct East Bloc intelligence services were thrown open to Western scrutiny. Suddenly, the FBI and CIA had tantalizing information pointing them toward spies that they never otherwise could have tracked.

Often, the information leads back to long-dormant spies like Pitts or Robert Lipka, a former clerk at the National Security Agency who was arrested last February. Federal authorities said Pitts had not spied for the Russians since 1992, whereas Lipka had ended his years of alleged betrayal in the early 1970s. Pitts was identified with the help of a former Soviet official at the United Nations, whereas Lipka was accused after being uncovered by another defector who brought a sheaf of Soviet documents with him.

Sometimes there are more spectacular results. Although information on the matter is still tightly held, senior U.S. intelligence officers said a highly placed Soviet source helped identify Aldrich H. Ames, the high-ranking CIA official caught nearly two years ago and the most damaging spy Moscow ever had inside the CIA.

Other evidence, buried deep in aging documents, has come to the surface as huge vaults filled with secret papers suddenly have opened up. The most infamous are the Stasi files--the records of the old East German spy agency--which were opened to the CIA and West German intelligence after the the Berlin Wall came down.

Those files have yielded the names of Communist moles in West Germany and other European countries but have not yet led to any major American spies. But U.S. intelligence sources said the Stasi files, along with others, have provided “inferences, references” to Americans who may have been compromised by the East Germans, the Soviet KGB or other Communist services.

And those files will continue to get intense scrutiny from Western counterintelligence experts for years to come.

Washington’s post-Cold War counterintelligence scrub is not limited to a few major cases. The FBI and the Diplomatic Security Service, the State Department’s security arm, have conducted methodical, low-level counterintelligence sweeps at U.S. embassies in former Soviet bloc countries, according to documents obtained by The Times.

One significant effort, code-named “Operation Plowshare,” has called for a counterintelligence review of foreign nationals hired by the American embassies to serve in jobs ranging from cook to translators to press aides.

Russia’s spies seem to have responded to the end of the Cold War by hunkering down. The Pitts case and another recent high-profile case involving accused spy Harold James Nicholson, a CIA officer, suggest that Moscow has been forced by diminished resources--as well as by a shift in focus away from traditional targets in favor of economic and technical espionage--to change the way it conducts its espionage against the United States.

Pitts, a career FBI agent, appears to have been virtually abandoned by his alleged Russian handlers in 1992, soon after the demise of the Soviet Union. The SVRR, the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB, seems to have made a decision that Pitts, who had been transferred out of his sensitive post in counterintelligence in the FBI’s New York field office, was no longer producing enough, sources said.

At the height of the Cold War, U.S. intelligence officials said they believe, it would have been unlikely the Soviets would have cut off contact with a mole inside the FBI, especially one who still retained high security clearances.

Spies are notoriously untrustworthy when they talk publicly about their espionage operations, but Col. Gen. Vyacheslav Trubnikov, first deputy director of the SVRR, told a Moscow newspaper last year that the collapse of the Soviet Union had wreaked havoc on Moscow’s network of spies abroad.

“We really have lost that part of our network--the hardest-working part--that cooperated with us on an ideological basis,” he said. “These were people who believed in the ideals of socialism, in the USSR.”

Now the Russians have to pay more for spies.

A foreign agent, he said, “costs as much as his information. His information may cost him a prison term, or even the death penalty. We take this into consideration when paying for his efforts.”

To be sure, U.S. officials believe that the Russian intelligence service is still an aggressive and dangerous adversary and one that has not suffered the disastrous collapse that has left Russia’s military in a shambles. Still, it clearly has undergone a sharp downsizing that has forced it to become more selective in who it recruits as spies.

The Nicholson case also suggests a change in Russian espionage tactics in the United States, according to U.S. intelligence sources. Nicholson allegedly began spying for the SVRR in 1994 while serving as the CIA’s deputy station chief in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He soon was transferred back to the United States to become an instructor at “the farm,” the CIA’s secret training facility at Camp Peary, Va., outside Williamsburg.

Nicholson allegedly continued to spy for the Russians, giving them the names and identities of the new CIA officers he was then training. But he never met with any of his Russian handlers inside the United States, according to the FBI’s affidavit in the case.

The SVRR never communicated with him through “dead-drops” in this country, either, and instead reportedly ordered Nicholson to message them by sending postcards to a post office box overseas. By contrast, the KGB, and later the SVRR, communicated with convicted spy Ames through dead-drops in the Washington, D.C., area.

CIA officials said they believe that the SVRR’s decision to keep all their contacts with Nicholson overseas marked a significant change in Russian spying technique. In part, that change may have come from a greater awareness of the counterintelligence capabilities of the FBI after the 1994 arrest of Ames, officials said. But it also may be further evidence of the erosion of the resources and capabilities of the Russians.

One U.S. intelligence source said SVRR officers at the Russian Embassy in Washington no longer appear to have primary responsibility for handling American spies but seem to leave that work to other officers. Indeed, the SVRR now has a liaison officer to the CIA. The two sides cooperate on such neutral topics as international terrorism, narcotics smuggling and organized crime.