A Canadian naval intelligence officer has pleaded guilty to spying for Russia over four-and-a-half years, Steven Chase and Jane Taber of The Globe and Mail report.
Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Delisle, 41, pleaded guilty to criminal charges of “communicating with a foreign entity” and "breach of trust" for funneling top military secrets from his post at the ultra-secure Trinity naval intelligence center in Halifax to Russia for about $3,000 a month.
A prosecutor at the bail hearings cited intelligence sources who feared the scandal could throw Canada’s relations with allied intelligence organizations“back to the Stone Age.”
Delisle also had access to reports on organized crime, political players and senior defense officials as well as personal information regarding members of the intelligence community. But what international officials are most outraged about is perhaps Deslisle's compromising of a system called the "Stone Ghost".
The Stone Ghost links intelligence networks between the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada — the "Five Eyes".
So while Delisle searched Canadian databases for the term “Russia" he was not only scouring Canadian intelligence but that of the Five Eyes aas well. Once he located what he was looking for, the Canadian officer sent the information to a USB memory stick before dropping it into the body of an email and saving it to the draft folder.
His Russian handler would then log into the same account, take the information and save a draft message in response.
In mid-2007 the Canadian Forces member walked into the Russian embassy in Ottawa as his decade-long marriage was unraveling and offered his services for “ideological reasons,” The Globe and Mail reports.
Russia and Delisle even set up an escape plan: he could walk into a Russian embassy and inform them he was “Alex Campbell." The Russians would then ask him “Did I meet you at a junk show in Austria?” And he would reply: “No, it was in Ottawa.”
SEE ALSO: Russian 'Spies' Arrested Over $50 Million Military Electronics Smuggling Network >
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