The world is watching how Canada responds to Delisle case
The case of Jeffrey Paul Delisle, the Canadian naval intelligence officer who moonlighted as a Russian agent from 2007 to his arrest in January 2012, has come back to life in a Halifax courtroom. Delisle has pleaded guilty and spared the public purse the costs of a lengthy trial, but now two conundrums remain — how to arrive at an appropriate sentence for his offences, which will ultimately fall to a senior judge of the Nova Scotia provincial court, Judge Patrick Curran, to decide, and the related and hot issue of just what damage the former naval officer did to Canadian national security.
On the damage front, Canadian government agencies believe that Delisle’s spying did major harm, including to relations with allies and to Canada’s own intelligence capabilities. Our close intelligence partners — the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand — have taken the unprecedented stance of demanding that Canada fix the lax security problems revealed in the Delisle case, if Canada wants to continue to have access to the allied pool of intelligence. This is a serious threat and reflects the dismay our allies, led by the U.S., who uncovered the Delisle spying in the first place, must feel. Canada will have to comply, as access to the intelligence of our close partners is our intelligence lifeblood.
But as for the real damage done in this spy case, we are casting in the dark. Government agencies, fearing the worst (a professional instinct), assume that Delisle was a genius who systematically ransacked Canadian government databases for sensitive information and passed it all to an attentive Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, who, in turn, must have made good (but unspecified) use of it. As of yet, beyond the fact that our allies are pissed off at us because of lax security, nothing has shown up in the real world to denote actions taken by the Russians on the basis of Delisle’s material.
What we know of Delisle’s action is based on what he told an RCMP interrogator at the time of his arrest (surely one of the fastest confessions on record?) and on material that the RCMP managed to intercept during the brief period in late December 2011/early January 2012, when they had warrants to intercept all of Delisle’s communications and were figuratively perched on his shoulder as he attempted to pass documents to the Russians via a website account. Some of this intercepted material — stuff that never reached the Russians thanks to the RCMP — included SIGINT (signals intelligence) reports from Canada’s allies (derived by them from intercepted foreign communications) and two CSIS reports. The precise contents of these materials remain classified, but the fact that Delisle had his hands on SIGINT and was passing it to the Russians confirms what he told his RCMP interrogator and is the bedrock of the case against Delisle and the bedrock of any damage assessment. SIGINT is prize stuff and has been since the great intelligence breakthroughs of the Second World War, and any security breach around it is serious. The problem is we just don’t know what exactly Delisle provided to the Russians prior to January 2012. We don’t know because there is no way to trace back his electronic activities, because Delisle himself kept no record, because the Russians are (naturally) not talking, and because no plea bargain has been arrived at which might loosen Delisle’s tongue about what he remembers.
A damage assessment based on extrapolation from a single document “package” that never reached its intended Russian recipients, and worst case analysis of what we don’t know, compounds the difficulties presented by sentencing in the Delisle affair. The Delisle case is unprecedented in a number of ways — as a spy case we haven’t seen its like since the days of Igor Gouzenko in 1945. Delisle is the first Canadian spy to convicted since 9/11 and the passage of the new Canadian official secrets act (Security of Information Act) and there are virtually no Canadian legal precedents. Delisle faces a potential life sentence, but where might the balance lie between fairness and sanction when so much about the harm he potentially did cannot be known for certain?
What next? The sentence that Judge Curran eventually comes up with will be closely scrutinized at home and abroad. Our allies will no doubt look for signs of Canadian toughness, so too will Canadian intelligence agencies, smarting from the betrayal of one of their own, and so might a broad swath of the Canadian public. This is a bit of a stacked deck.
Our allies have demanded that Canada make some security fixes or else — and who can blame them? The security lapses revealed by the Delisle affair were appalling. But we shouldn’t be doing this simply to appease our intelligence friends. We need a hard look at how security works in an age of electronic intelligence gathering and cyber aggression. We might start with the creation of more tightly controlled and monitored sensitive data systems with a “memory” of who accessed them and why. Such systems might have ultimately prevented the kind of casual trolling of highly classified records that Delisle conducted and might also have provided a counterintelligence tool that could really assess and mitigate damage.
One expert witness for the Department of National Defence, General Robert Williams, suggested in testimony that trust is at the heart of any security system. The Delisle case revealed that trust will be betrayed and that trust is not enough.