ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 19, 1996 TAG: 9612190059
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
The FBI charged one of its agents Wednesday with selling secrets to Moscow for more than $224,000, arresting him after an undercover investigation aided by a former Russian official and inadvertently almost upset by the agent's wife.
With help from the former Russian official at the United Nations, FBI agents posing as Russian spies began a ``false flag'' operation in August 1995 aimed at incriminating Earl Edwin Pitts and learning the extent of treachery he might have been guilty of before he became ``dormant'' in 1992.
Days after the phony Russian agents contacted Pitts, his wife, Mary, then an FBI clerk, turned him in to bureau officials because she suspected he might be spying and she didn't know about the undercover effort. The FBI pretended to accept his explanations for his contact with the Russians and continued the secret operation against him.
Pitts, 43, a 13-year bureau veteran, is the second FBI agent ever charged with spying.
This is the third major Russian spy case since 1994, when CIA officer Aldrich Ames pleaded guilty to spying that has been blamed for the deaths of 10 Western agents. Former CIA station chief Harold Nicholson pleaded not guilty last month to selling the identities of new CIA agents since 1994 for more than $180,000.
Pitts was arrested Wednesday at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va., where he worked as a supervisory agent.
But from 1987 to 1989, he was in the FBI New York office assigned to hunt and recruit Soviet KGB officers, and from 1989 to 1992, he worked on top-secret records and personnel security at FBI headquarters in Washington.
On Friday, the FBI said, he told undercover agents he thought were from the Russian SVRR intelligence service that from 1987 to 1992, ``I have provided you with everything that I was aware of.''
In the affidavit, FBI Agent David Lambert writes that the FBI believes Pitts turned over the ``Soviet Administrative List,'' a secret computerized FBI compilation of all Soviet officials in the United States with their known or suspected posts in Soviet spy agencies.
Pitts also is believed to have told the Soviets about ``an FBI asset who reported covertly on Russian intelligence matters,'' Lambert wrote.
FBI Director Louis Freeh told a news conference this man ``is still alive.'' A law enforcement official, requesting anonymity, said the man was a Russian government official serving in the United States.
``Nothing was sacred to Pitts,'' U.S. Attorney Helen Fahey said. ``He was willing to betray his country, his agency and his fellow agents.''
No deaths resulted from Pitts' activities, and no nuclear or satellite information was turned over, so he could face at most a life sentence rather than the death penalty if convicted, Fahey said.
At a court hearing in Alexandria, Pitts was charged with attempted espionage and conspiracy to commit espionage. He also was charged with a lesser espionage count and with conveying government property, each of which carries a maximum 10-year penalty.
The slightly built Pitts, dressed in a blue, open-collar shirt and olive pants, fidgeted and turned to look at reporters seated behind him while waiting for the hearing to begin. He did not speak.
Attorney General Janet Reno praised the FBI for ``piecing together an espionage case without the knowledge of the suspect, a trained counterintelligence officer.''
In the spring of 1993, Freeh said, information from defectors and the failure of some FBI counterintelligence operations in New York led the bureau to suspect it had been penetrated by Moscow's agents. A list of everyone who knew about the failed operations, including Pitts, was drawn up.
Separately, in the mid-1990s, Freeh said, the FBI recruited a Russian official working at the United Nations in New York. In the 1980s, the FBI had mistakenly believed this official was a KGB agent.
Freeh said the cooperating Russian official, now a permanent resident alien in the United States, identified Pitts as the FBI agent who wrote him a letter in 1987 volunteering to spy for Moscow.
With the Russian's help, the FBI was able to link New York visits by Pitts, allegedly to meet Moscow agent Aleksandr Karpov, to $124,000 in cash deposits in eight accounts that could not be explained by his income during that time. Pitts later told the FBI agents posing as Russians that he also had a ``reserve'' account in Russia with more than $100,000 in it, according to the FBI affidavit.
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