LONGTIME FBI AGENT FACES ESPIONAGE CHARGE.

Byline: Michael J. Sniffen 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 innocent 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 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.

On 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.

FBI Director Louis J. 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,'' said U.S. attorney Helen Fahey. ``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.

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 1987-1992. 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.

Freeh said Karpov is an active SVRR agent - no longer at the United Nations.

To begin the ``false flag'' operation, the cooperating Russian visited Pitts at his Virginia home Aug. 26, 1995, purportedly to get him to resume spying for Moscow.

When Pitts left the house in a panic to meet with the foreign-speaking stranger, Mary Pitts searched his home office. On Aug. 29, she gave her FBI supervisor a copy of a letter the cooperating Russian had sent trying to set up a meeting with her husband.

Court papers based on FBI surveillance quote her as voicing misgivings about turning in her husband.

``It will probably be the end of my marriage either way it goes,'' Mary Pitts, who has since left the FBI, is quoted as telling a neighbor. ``If he is on the up and up and he finds out that I went behind his back, we're finished.''

Called in to explain the contact, Pitts claimed it was an old ``asset'' of his from his days in New York, seeking legal advice.

During the operation that continued, the FBI said:

Pitts used spy techniques to make 22 ``drops'' of secret and other information to what he thought were SVRR agents.

In one, he turned over a handset for an STU-III telecommunications machine capable of top secret encrypted voice and fax transmissions.

He also identified other FBI agents who might be recruited because they were lonely or isolated.

He concocted a scheme to let an SVRR agent secretly enter the FBI Academy and turned over his badge and security keys to aid in that effort.

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Photo

PHOTO Earl Edwin Pitts

Said to have received $224,000