"There is a guest visiting me. He wanted to see you,'' the man told Pitts, according to papers filed in federal court Wednesday. "He's in my car. He's from Moscow.''
An hour later, Pitts, 43, allegedly met the two men at nearby Chancellorsville National Battlefield Park and listened to their requests for top-secret information. According to court papers, he bluntly asked if they had money, then stuffed $15,000 in cash into a pocket and said, "I'll do what I can.''
That encounter began a 16-month sting operation in which Pitts behaved with increasingly reckless greed, eager to renew a profitable spying arrangement he began with the Soviets during the 1980s, according to an affidavit describing the case against Pitts, who was arrested Wednesday on espionage charges.
Throughout the sting, Pitts apparently never realized that his mysterious Russian contacts really were working for the FBI, according to court papers.
Pitts, who spent part of his career in counterintelligence, also ignored increasingly evident warning signs that his wife and the FBI were suspicious of his actions. In November 1995, he found an FBI surveillance device in his Quantico office, but he continued to contact his "Russian'' handlers, the affidavit said.
According to the FBI affidavit, Pitts first reached out to Soviet spy masters in July 1987, just six months after he had been assigned to a New York unit that handled counterintelligence.
Pitts sent a letter to an unidentified Soviet attache then at the United Nations that "requested a meeting with the [attache], or if [he] was not a KGB officer, with an actual KGB officer,'' the affidavit said.
A short time later, Pitts and the attache met in the New York Public Library. The attache introduced Pitts to a second Soviet official, Alexander Karpov of the KGB, the FBI said. "The meeting between Karpov and Pitts at the New York Public Library was the beginning of five years of active espionage activity by Pitts,'' the affidavit said.
The spying relationship went "dormant'' in 1992 after Pitts, who has a law degree from the University of Missouri, transferred to the FBI's legal counsel division, officials said.
Pitts's alleged spying might have gone undetected, but in 1995, the former Soviet attache who was his first contact, told U.S. officials that Pitts was a spy, federal officials said. The FBI then launched the sting.
In the last few months, Pitts was planning his most brazen act -- giving his "Russian'' handlers a key and badge that would have allowed them to sneak into the FBI Academy, the affidavit said.
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