Fbi Agent Charged With Spying For Russians 13-Year Veteran Caught In Undercover Investigation

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.

He was arrested Wednesday at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va., where he worked as a supervisory agent.

But during 1987-89, he was in the FBI New York office assigned to hunt and recruit Soviet KGB officers, and during 1989-1992, he worked on top secret records and personnel security at FBI headquarters in Washington.

Last Friday, the FBI said, he told undercover agents he thought were from the Russian SVRR intelligence service that during 1987-92 “I have provided you with everything that I was aware of.”

In the affidavit, FBI Agent David G. 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.

“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, Va., 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.