The Canadian military has evacuated staff from the Halifax naval intelligence facility where a sailor accused of espionage was working before his arrest.
The Department of National Defence said authorities are conducting a security sweep of HMCS Trinity to see whether this confidential communication centre has been compromised.
Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Paul Delisle was charged Jan. 16 under Canada’s Security of Information Act and faces the possibility of life in prison if convicted.
Experts are scanning Trinity, a naval communications and surveillance centre, for evidence of espionage or mechanisms designed to leak information to outsiders.
“The place is being investigated …. [for] software, hardware, bugs, the works,” a military official said.
Trinity staff have been temporarily moved a few kilometres away.
“As part of a normal and prudent business contingency plan, personnel belonging to elements of HMCS Trinity have been relocated to 12 Wing Shearwater for an undetermined period of time as a security precaution,” said Captain Karina Holder, spokeswoman for the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal, who commands the military police.
The military declined to say how many people work at Trinity, a unit that gathers and analyzes confidential and secret information for the Royal Canadian Navy. Perhaps most critically in the eyes of Canada’s international partners, it receives confidential defence information from allies.
Separately, Monday, the naval officer at the centre of sensational espionage charges lost his lawyer in a hastily scheduled courtroom appearance. Cameron MacKeen, who would not explain why he was quitting, pledged to assist his former client in finding new counsel.
In the meantime, SLt. Delisle will be represented by legal aid.
The case fell to Mr. MacKeen by chance. He was on duty at the courthouse when the matter arose and he was assigned.
A former reporter, Mr. MacKeen is active in the federal Conservative Party and, according to a spokesman for Defence Minister Peter MacKay, on personal terms with the powerful Nova Scotia politician.
He would not comment when asked whether these ties were behind his decision to quit.
SLt. Delisle, an intelligence officer, was arrested and charged earlier this month. He stands accused of passing information to a “foreign entity” and is being held in custody locally.
The sailor did not appear in court Monday and was patched in from prison by telephone. He barely spoke, saying little more than “Yes Ma’am” in response to a series of procedural questions.
SLt Delisle’s next appearance, originally set for Jan. 25, has been postponed until Feb. 28. On that day a date for a bail hearing will be set. He will remain in custody until then.
The RCMP alleges that the sailor leaked confidential government information to a foreign entity over a four and a half year period – and as recently as January tried to do so again.
As the charges reverberate across the country, SLt. Delisle’s family and ex-wife are coping with the fallout.
Reached at her home in suburban Ottawa, the sailor’s former spouse said she was “overwhelmed” by the reports.
“Of course, I didn’t know. It was shocking and my head is just reeling with all this news,” Jennifer Lee Delisle said. “We’re just coping. The family … we’re just managing.”
The couple, married in 1997, had four children before separating in April of 2008, according to court documents that cite unspecified “certain differences.” As part of the agreement, the Canadian Forces member assumed the couple’s debts on three credit cards and a consolidated loan.
They divorced in 2010.
The charges surprised many who knew him.
In a brief message to The Globe and Mail, Angelica, the couple’s oldest child, wrote simply: “my father is an amazing dad.”
Two Russian Embassy staff in Ottawa have left Canada in the wake of spying allegations against a Canadian naval officer in Halifax, but there’s little else that’s clear about the murky espionage case.
Intelligence experts and those in close contact with the embassy disagree on whether any Russian diplomats engage in spying, leaving Canadians to try to piece together what bits are public.
Initial media reports said up to four Russian Embassy staff had been removed from a list of embassy and diplomatic staff recognized by Canada. CBC News has confirmed that two have had their credentials revoked since news broke of the naval officer’s arrest, while two diplomats left the country a month or more before the arrest this week of Canadian Sub.-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle.
Another report pointed to two other staff who are no longer accredited to be in Canada. It’s not clear which of the staff have been expelled over the spying allegations.
Konstantin Kolpakov, a former aide to the ambassador, was scheduled to leave Canada on Dec. 25 because his posting was over, and had a send-off attended by diplomats in Ottawa mid-month.
LONDON – In a rare acknowledgment of espionage reminiscent of the Cold War, a former British government official admitted that a fake rock discovered in 2006 by the Russian FSB secret service in a Moscow park concealed a listening device planted by British spies.
Speaking on a three-part BBC documentary starting Thursday – “Putin, Russia and the West” – Jonathan Powell, chief of staff at the time to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said, “The spy rock was embarrassing, they had us bang to rights. Clearly they had known about it for some time and had been saving it up for a political purpose.”
Hidden Russian TV cameras recorded video of the rock and of men handling it. The video was widely broadcast at the time along with footage showing the rock being taken apart to reveal the delicate listening mechanism inside.
The Russian regime waited for some time before claiming publicly that it was a British device. Russian leader Vladimir Putin ordered a crackdown on several foreign-funded organizations, claiming they were a front for Western intervention in Russia’s internal affairs. A Russian-British diplomatic row followed.
Tony Brenton, British ambassador to Moscow at the time, said in a BBC radio interview Thursday that the rock episode was “a considerable headache.”
“The Russians chose their time carefully and it was politically very damaging,” Brenton said. “It was unfortunate that one of the people involved was also dealing with our relations with
Russian nongovernmental organizations and therefore the Russians were able to use the rock incident to launch accusations against the support we were giving to Russian nongovernmental organizations.”
Brenton added that British-Russian relations were deteriorating at the time and the incident “led us down the route which led us to the Litvinenko murder…to attacks on me personally, to attacks on BP and Shell.”
In November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian security service officer turned investigative journalist, died in a London hospital of radiation poisoning. His reporting targeted corruption inside the Russian government. In a deathbed statement he accused Putin of being involved in his poisoning.
Two Russian Embassy staff in Ottawa have left Canada in the wake of spying allegations against a Canadian naval officer in Halifax, but there’s little else that’s clear about the murky espionage case.
Intelligence experts and those in close contact with the embassy disagree on whether any Russian diplomats engage in spying, leaving Canadians to try to piece together what bits are public.
Initial media reports said up to four Russian Embassy staff had been removed from a list of embassy and diplomatic staff recognized by Canada. CBC News has confirmed that two have had their credentials revoked since news broke of the naval officer’s arrest, while two diplomats left the country a month or more before the arrest this week of Canadian Sub.-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle.
Another report pointed to two other staff who are no longer accredited to be in Canada. It’s not clear which of the staff have been expelled over the spying allegations.
Konstantin Kolpakov, a former aide to the ambassador, was scheduled to leave Canada on Dec. 25 because his posting was over, and had a send-off attended by diplomats in Ottawa mid-month.
Kolpakov and Fedorchatenko were known to circulate around the diplomatic scene in the capital, attending functions with other foreign representatives, Canadian diplomats and journalists.
Two others, Mikhail Nikiforov and Tatiana Steklova, were listed as administrative and technical staff until Jan. 19 but are no longer on a list of accredited diplomats on the website of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
A report in the Russian media Friday quoted the country’s foreign ministry as saying it was surprised to see Canadian media reports about the expulsions. The report says the embassy staff left at the end of 2011 because their rotations were ending.
A woman who answered the phone at the Russian Embassy in Ottawa refused to comment on the departures.
Public Safety Minister Vic Toews refused to comment on a national security matter, but did say: “I’m not aware of why those individuals left Canada.”
Russian diplomatic staff usually do two- or three-year postings at the embassy before returning home or going on to a posting in another country.
Delisle, 40, was arrested in the Halifax area last weekend. He faces two charges under the Security of Information Act that deal with communicating information that could harm Canada’s interests, according to court documents.
Doug Thomas, a former defence official who now represents a Russian military equipment exporter in Canada, said the vast majority of diplomats collect information, while a small number may pick it up “through alternative means.” Thomas doesn’t believe anyone at the Russian Embassy, with whom he’s worked since 2006, is involved in spying.
“If you were going to run one of these operations, the last thing, personally, I’d think you’d want to do is run it out of the Russian Embassy on Charlotte Street in downtown Ottawa. You’d want to run it remotely,” he said.
But the Russians “are among the world’s biggest spies,” said Wesley Wark, an expert on security and intelligence at the University of Ottawa. “Spying is just in the DNA of the Russian state.”
Wark said the Russians are known to be aggressive, flooding their diplomatic missions with intelligence personnel posing as diplomatic personnel. He said the country, if it uses spying effectively, could close research and development gaps. They may also want access to Canadian communications with the U.S. and the U.K. or other allies.
“We [Canadians] tend to underrate ourselves as an intelligence target. We’ve long been an intelligence target, partly because of who we are. We’re a NATO country, we’re a Western country, we’re a high-tech country, we engage in a lot of military operations and we’re close to the United States and close allies,” Wark said.
Geoffrey O’Brian, a former director general of counter-intelligence at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said there’s so little information available that it’s hard to assess the situation.
“Because the government has chosen not to talk about this, it’s frankly in some ways a recipe for speculation,” O’Brian said.
Many questions remain, particularly from a counter-espionage angle, O’Brian said.
“Are there more [people gathering information]? How was he recruited, if indeed he was? How was it run? Who else was involved in quote-unquote handling him? All of those questions.”
Two of the charges against Delisle are for breach of trust and communicating to a foreign entity information the government wants to safeguard, and cover July 7, 2007, to Jan. 13, 2012. A third charge is for trying to communicate to a foreign entity information the government wants to safeguard, and covers Jan. 10 to 13, 2012, after at least one of the Russian diplomats left Canada.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay described the case Tuesday as a matter of national security because of the charges involved, but would not discuss specifics at that time, including whether the foreign entity in question was Russia.
“Given the early stages of the proceedings, there is really nothing more that can be said,” he told a news conference in Ottawa.
The minister sought to reassure Canadians that allegations of espionage revolving around the Halifax naval intelligence officer would not affect the country’s reputation among other NATO members.
“Our allies have full confidence in Canada, full confidence in our information,” MacKay said.
On Tuesday, the naval intelligence officer accused of spying had his bail hearing in a Halifax court delayed until next week at the request of his lawyer, who wanted more time to prepare. SLt. Delisle opted not to appear in court. “He doesn’t want to come up,” defence lawyer Cameron MacKeen told the judge, referring to the jail cells used by prisoners due in court.
What may be the biggest spy scandal in Canada in more than half a century exploded Monday after SLt. Delisle was charged with passing secrets to a “foreign entity” under Canada’s Information Security Act. It’s the first charge of its kind ever laid and one where the maximum penalty is the toughest possible under this country’s justice system: life in prison.
Details are slowly emerging about the Canadian Forces officer, despite a curtain of silence that’s been lowered by tight-lipped authorities, including the fact he declared bankruptcy in 1998.
The RCMP, Canadian military and the government refused to discuss the case but Defence Minister Peter MacKay took pains to insist the espionage allegations had not hurt the country’s relations with its foreign partners. “Let me assure you that our allies have full confidence in Canada.”
Sources say the Trinity communications centre was also privy to intelligence from Canada’s allies including the United States, Britain and Australia.
Officials at the U.S. and British embassies in Canada were not available for comment Tuesday.
Mr. MacKay on Tuesday refused to identify which country SLt. Delisle is alleged to have been spying for. “I’m not denying or confirming anything,” he said when asked to comment on news reports saying the recipient of the secrets was Russia.
“I am not going to play Clue,” he said.
A woman at Russia’s embassy in Ottawa said the embassy had no comment at this time on the Delisle story.
Sources said the Canadian government is currently conducting a damage assessment to discern how much national security has been compromised.
CTV reported Tuesday night that Canada is preparing a “measured response” to Russia that could include either summoning the Russian ambassador or expelling Russian diplomats.
However, the network said, the Harper government is leery of poisoning relations with Moscow and causing a public spat because the Prime Minister is headed to Russia later this year for a APEC summit.
Little is known about SLt. Delisle, 40, other than he most recently resided in Bedford, N.S., a suburb of Halifax, with a woman and three children.
His myspace.com page lists him as single as of 2008 and filings show a man with the same name and date of birth as the espionage suspect declared bankruptcy in Nova Scotia in February 1998 – less than two years after Jeffrey Delisle joined the Canadian Forces reserves.
It was barely a month before his 27th birthday, according to the record of the proceeding, and he owed $18,587 while declaring assets of $1,000.
He received a discharge from bankruptcy in November of 1998, filings show. The address given during the proceeding is currently assigned to a lower-level apartment at the back of a small house in Beaver Bank, a different suburb of Halifax.
Michael Hennessy, a professor of history and war studies at Royal Military College in Kingston, said the case is really unmatched in Canadian history – if the charges are proven. “For an officer and intelligence officer in particular to be involved in such behaviour is a massive betrayal of trust. It really is unprecedented.”
SLt. Delisle originally joined the Forces as a reservist in 1996 and later became an officer in 2008 after completing a bachelor of arts at Royal Military College.
