Experts Say Carelessness in Spy Case Is Bewildering

These are the many faces of Earl Pitts:

Shoulders back. Square jaw. No smile. Son of a southern Missouri cattle farmer. High school athlete. Glee Club. College ROTC. A degree in criminal justice. Law school. Military police captain. FBI agent. Senior FBI agent.

And now bumbling fool. Accused traitor.

This week, in a federal courtroom in suburban Washington, Pitts still showed the crisp demeanor, the tightly drawn face. But now the handcuffs were on him. He stood accused of espionage, charged in a 70-page affidavit with selling classified secrets to the Russians.

One senior law enforcement official said: “This guy is a lame-brain. His IQ must be as high as room temperature.”

Earl Edwin Pitts, 43, a 13-year FBI veteran who served in a sensitive post in the New York office, at FBI headquarters, and at the FBI academy, allegedly broke the same cardinal rules of federal law enforcement that he taught agents and recruits at the prestigious training school.

He told other agents not to take home classified documents, not to leave secret material in their computers, not to tell others what only the FBI should know. Then he allegedly violated those same rules under the unbelieving eyes of FBI undercover agents.

A federal affidavit alleges that he left incriminating letters at home and in his computer at work, that he traded classified information long after learning that his wife had turned him in, that he continued to play spy even after finding a surveillance camera planted above him in his office ceiling.

Pitts is expected to plead not guilty at a bail hearing Monday. But if the charges against him hold true, his colleagues will forever ask: How could he have been so sloppy? How so careless?

There had been an earlier Earl Pitts, a younger man who believed that life was something you could conquer--without slip-ups.

“He was very self-assured. He was independent. He was a self-motivated kind of guy,” said Steve Borel, a Kansas City attorney who once hired him as a law clerk. “He would get out there and get things done.”

‘That’s Not the Earl We Know’

But those in the high echelons of the FBI, who put together the undercover sting operation that led to his arrest, saw a different character. They could not believe that he would so blindly betray his country for a subjectively small amount of money.

“Is that stupid or what?” asked one FBI official.

To those who had great influence in his life, he is something different altogether.

“That’s not the Earl we know,” said his mother, Loma Pitts, a farm wife in Urbana, Mo., where he grew up along the cusp of the Ozark hills.

“Nothing has been proved against him,” she said guardedly, clearly reluctant to give up on her son. “There were so many people he went to school with and so many people he knew in the Army and nobody believes this now. So we’re just waiting to see what is going to happen. We don’t know.”

At FBI headquarters on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, Director Louis J. Freeh castigated Pitts for letting down the bureau. He said that Pitts sold out all “25,000 FBI employees who day in and day out serve this great country.”

Then came the ultimate insult.

Asked whether the case against Pitts rises to the level of “super spy,” whether it compared to a recent scandal in which a CIA agent received nearly $3 million and caused the deaths of 10 U.S. intelligence officers in the Soviet Union, Freeh scoffed.

“I certainly would not compare him with Aldrich Ames in any degree,” the director said.

For Pitts’ alleged take was paltry by comparison.

Working counterintelligence operations in New York in the late 1980s, he reportedly pocketed $124,000, with the promise of another $100,000 in a “reserve Russian account” that he never saw. Later he was paid another $65,000 as the target of a 16-month FBI undercover sting, according to the affidavit.

He did not live lavishly. Nor did he outwardly wear the accouterments of the secret sleuth. But he practiced secrecy nonetheless.

Telling Signs Beneath Facade of Normality

Neighbors said that his marriage to the former Mary Colombaro is a success. The couple lived in the rural Virginia community of Spotsylvania, about an hour’s drive south of downtown Washington. They read golf and gardening magazines. He came home each night carrying his briefcase. No children were in the house but there were two large German shepherds. This week, Christmas decorations adorned the front of the house.

John Craddock, owner of Pak-Mail, where Pitts kept a mailbox address, said that Pitts “was a very nice man. He didn’t appear to be secretive. He was a little reserved; not especially outgoing, a matter-of-fact type.”

Old friends in Kansas City said that law enforcement was always his dream job.

“Absolutely nothing about Earl would strike you as someone you would have any concern about any kind of illegality,” Borel said. “You would have no concern about his loyalty to the country.

“He seemed like a real straight arrow. When he went to work with the FBI, that seemed consistent with the Earl I knew.”

Corinne Corley, a law school classmate at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said: Pitts “was the kind of a guy that, even if he was arrested as a mass murderer, you’d still say, ‘Nope. Not Earl.’ ”

Family members in southern Missouri remember the kid on the high school basketball team, the freshman class vice president, the youth who ran track in the spring and was a member of Future Farmers of America.

His cousin, Vergie Pitts of Urbana: “I never heard any bad things he done. And he was raised to be a good kid.”

But others do recall signs of uneasiness in Pitts’ career. He once called Steve Streen, another Kansas City lawyer for whom he had worked, and complained that he was “somewhat disenchanted” with life in the FBI.

And Roger Loy, a Virginia neighbor, remembered “at one time he was trying to get a transfer from here.” But Loy did not press the issue. “When a person says he works with the FBI, that’s a closed case with me.”

Pitts joined the FBI in 1983. His first stations were in northern Virginia. In 1987, he was sent to New York, where he eventually earned a promotion to supervisory special agent.

James Fox, a retired FBI assistant director who ran the New York field office while Pitts was there, said that Pitts was assigned to an “illegals squad” that worked counterintelligence operations and trailed Soviet KGB “illegals” in the New York area.

Deep-Cover Job, Difficult Financially

It was a pressure-cooker of a job. “The illegals are deep-cover guys who are the most difficult to detect and unmask,” Fox said. “This squad is one of the more sensitive units in the New York field office, so Pitts probably had access to pretty sensitive stuff.”

With more than 1,100 agents in New York, the posting was an assignment that many agents found tough financially. The city is expensive. The pay is not always that high. And in the late 1980s, sources said, many agents were scrambling for transfers out of New York.

Pitts stayed for two years, leaving New York in 1989. But it was during his time there that he allegedly traded classified information--including detailed personnel data on a vast number of individual FBI agents--to a Soviet intelligence officer working in the United Nations mission.

He next went to FBI headquarters in Washington and the Records Management Division. In 1992, he was transferred to the Legal Counsel Division at headquarters. He worked on DNA legal assistance matters and civil litigation. Last year, he was reassigned to the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI academy.

He was sent there, sources said, “so we could watch him.”

Authorities learned of his alleged New York spying activities after a 1993 audit of the field office there. Using the same Soviet officer, who now was working as a “cooperating witness” for the U.S. government, they played out a 16-month sting.

It was this operation that amazed FBI headquarters. They were stunned, bureau officials said, at how readily Pitts jumped back into the spying game, and how recklessly he conducted himself. To some, it was almost as though he dared to be caught.

“It’s like he was asking for it,” said one top-level official.

According to the affidavit, and a subsequent 12-count federal grand jury indictment filed Thursday, Pitts:

* Cooperated with the undercover agents posing as Russians even after his wife confronted him with a letter from them that she had found at home and even after she had said that she had told another FBI agent. He later went to that agent with a desperate cover story meant to shield his involvement.

* Stuffed cash inside his office ceiling, even though he found a surveillance camera that had been placed there to monitor his every move.

* Kept an “emergency escape plan” in the hard drive of his office computer that would take him “outside this country.” He would deploy it, he wrote, “in the event it needs to be used on short notice.”

* Stored a gym bag under his office desk, sometimes taking out large sums of money, spreading it across the desktop and counting it out into neat piles of $10 bills. At the same time, he was conducting security briefings with fellow agents on the sanctity of classified information. And yet, if the affidavit is correct, he was being cavalier about his own secretive activities.

“I believe,” he once told the people he thought were Soviet agents, “that I have provided you with everything.”

Times staff writer Robert L. Jackson contributed to this story.