Ex-FBI Agent Gets 27 Years for Espionage

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A former FBI agent was sentenced to 27 years in prison Monday for spying for Moscow before and after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Earl Pitts, 44, the second FBI agent caught spying, had been charged with selling U.S. intelligences secrets to the Russians for more than $224,000 from 1987 to 1992.

Prosecutors had sought a sentence of nearly 24 1/2 years. But U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis told Pitts his crimes were especially severe and said Pitts has yet to fully apologize.

Pitts, looking thin and disheveled, told the judge he understands how deeply he betrayed his country and his profession. “I do not wish to excuse or explain away my actions. What I did was wrong, pure and simple,” he said.

Pitts was snared in a 16-month FBI sting that ended with his arrest in December, when he was stationed at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va. The FBI caught Pitts by convincing him that the Russian government wanted to reactivate him as a spy.

He pleaded guilty in February to conspiring and attempting to commit espionage, avoiding a possible sentence of life in prison.

The only other FBI agent ever caught spying was Richard W. Miller, a Los Angeles agent who was arrested in 1984 and later sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Pitts sought out a Soviet agent and offered his services while stationed in Moscow in 1987, then moved later that year to the FBI’s New York office, where he was assigned to hunt and recruit KGB officers. From 1989 to 1992, he worked on top-secret records and personnel security at FBI headquarters in Washington.

The FBI said Pitts turned over a secret computerized FBI list of all Soviet officials in the United States with their known or suspected posts in Soviet spy agencies.

Officials have said no deaths resulted from Pitts’ activities and no nuclear or satellite information was turned over.