rfmcdonald | [LINK] "CSIS knew of navy spy's activity, left RCMP in the dark" (Reply)

I've been following the case of Jeffrey Delisle, a Canadian navy officer who also turned out to be spying for Russia, since the story broke with his March 2012 arrest, continuing through to his surprise October 2012 guilty plea and subsequent sentencing to a twenty-year prison term this February. CBC reports that, apparently, CSIS and the RCMP were unable to cooperate at even the most basic level; the FBI needed to get involved.

The Canadian Press has learned that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation alerted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to Delisle's illicit dealings with Moscow well before the Mounties took on the file in December 2011 and later brought him into custody.

CSIS ultimately decided not to transfer its thick Delisle dossier to the RCMP. The spy agency, acting on legal advice, opted to keep its investigation sealed for fear of exposing a trove of Canadian and U.S. secrets of the intelligence trade in open court proceedings.

In a bizarre twist, it fell to the FBI — not CSIS — to send a letter to the RCMP spelling out how a Canadian was pilfering extremely sensitive information, including highly classified U.S. material.

The RCMP had to start its own investigation of Delisle almost from scratch. The delay alarmed and frustrated Washington as the geyser of secrets continued to spew.

At one point the Americans, eager to see Delisle in handcuffs, sketched out a Plan B: luring the Canadian officer to the U.S. and arresting him themselves, perhaps during a stopover en route to a Caribbean vacation.

The RCMP and CSIS are supposed to be able to "seamlessly hand off cases back and forth between them," said intelligence historian Wesley Wark, a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa's graduate school of public and international affairs.

He said "it is deeply troubling" if the system indeed broke down in the Delisle case over CSIS's refusal to share its files or to bring the RCMP in at an early stage.

"I think that's scandalous, in fact," said Wark, who served as an expert witness at Delisle's sentencing. "And it would be a matter, I think, for a judicial inquiry or certainly a serious parliamentary investigation."