A veteran FBI supervisor once responsible for investigating the Soviet Union’s spy efforts was charged on Wednesday with espionage for allegedly selling U.S. secrets to the Russians for more than $224,000.
Earl Edwin Pitts, 43, is a lawyer and 13-year FBI veteran. He was arrested at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., after a former Soviet official cooperated in a 16-month undercover investigation that was almost derailed by Pitts’ well-intentioned wife.
He is the second FBI agent ever charged with espionage and the third government employee charged with spying for the Russians.
Unaware of the sting operation, Mary Pitts, a former FBI employee, contacted the bureau after her husband first met with the former Russian official. She told an FBI official she suspected her husband of spying.
She clearly was torn by loyalty to her husband and her country. In an anguished phone conversation with a neighbor, she said she came forward because she was worried about national security.
“There is things wrong with this country, but it’s still my country,” she told the neighbor.
She also confronted her husband, who allegedly made up a story that he told the FBI the next day. The bureau pretended to accept his explanation.
Apparently unknown to Mary Pitts, her husband was a “significant threat to national security” and had passed secrets to the former Soviet Union and then Russia for five years, from 1987 to 1992, according to FBI Director Louis Freeh.
The FBI thinks Pitts turned over a secret list of all Soviet officials in the United States and provided information on an FBI informant who reported on Russian intelligence.
While the FBI is still assessing the extent of the damage, Freeh said, there is no evidence that the secret information caused the deaths of any agents.
He would “certainly not compare Pitts … in any degree” to former CIA agent Aldrich Ames, who pleaded guilty in 1994 to acts of espionage linked to the deaths of at least 10 Western agents in the Soviet Union.
During the five-year period he allegedly spied, Pitts worked in New York on FBI foreign counter-intelligence investigations and at FBI headquarters in Washington, according to an affidavit filed in federal court on Wednesday.
Pitts came under suspicion as early as 1993, when the FBI concerned about a possible security lapse in its New York office identified people with access to information thought to have been compromised, Freeh said. Pitts was among them.
In 1995, the unidentified former Soviet official, who is a U.S. resident, identified Pitts as a spy for Russia, Freeh said. Pitts allegedly had contacted the official, who worked at the Soviet Mission at the United Nations, in 1987 and offered to spy.
