Comment: US helped Canada nab accused spy Jeff Delisle
May 25, 2012 5 Comments
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Back in January of this year, when the Jeffrey Delisle spy affair made headlines around the world, I spoke with several journalists from The Globe & Mail, The Canadian Press, and other Canadian news outlets. Most of them were –rightly– curious about the role of the United States in the affair, in which Sub-Lieutenant Delisle, who had been employed at Canada’s ultra-secure TRINITY communications center in Halifax, was accused of spying for a foreign power. I told them that, given that Trinity handled –aside from Canadian– NATO communications, Canada was in fact obligated to notify all of its NATO partners about the suspected penetration. That aside, I said that it could be “safely assumed” that US counterintelligence agencies were “fully involved in the Delisle case, and probably ha[d] been for several months”. By the latter phrase, I implied that US counterintelligence agencies had been closely involved in helping their Canadian counterparts build their case against Delisle. Now a new report in The Globe & Mail suggests that US counterintelligence officials “supplied vital information” to their Canadian colleagues during “the early days of the investigation” into the Delisle affair. The article says that the full extent of what the Americans told Canadian authorities remains unclear; but it quotes “a source familiar with the matter”, who claims that the US “helped Canada build its investigation”, not necessarily by providing a single tipoff clue, but through “an accumulation of information”. The paper adds that Washington’s involvement in the investigation from an early stage “adds a key new detail to [the] story”. Not necessarily, I would argue. Read more of this post
intelNews.org 
Canadian spy compromised Australian, British intelligence
July 27, 2012 by intelNews 3 Comments
Most regular readers of this blog are undoubtedly familiar with the case of Jeffrey Paul Delisle, a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Navy, who until recently was employed at Canada’s ultra-secure TRINITY communications center in Halifax. Delisle was arrested in January on suspicion of passing information gathered from radio and radar signal interceptions to a foreign power, most likely Russia. Back in May, when it was disclosed that the United States helped Canadian counterintelligence investigators build their case against Delisle, we warned that “a far more important subject concerns the degree in which [Delisle’s] penetration has affected Canada’s intelligence-sharing relationship with its […] partners”. Now a new report in The Sydney Morning Herald reveals that Delisle’s espionage activities compromised Australian secrets that had been shared with Canada under longstanding intelligence cooperation arrangements. Citing “Australian security sources”, the paper said that the Delisle case “has sent shock waves through Western security agencies” due to the volume of compromised information. The Herald claims that the stolen intelligence is “on a scale comparable to the alleged handover to WikiLeaks of US military and diplomatic reports by US Army private Bradley Manning”. An unnamed “Australian security source” told the paper that Delisle’s access to classified information was “apparently very wide” and that Australian intercepts were “inevitably compromised”. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with AUSCANZUKUS, Australia, Canada, espionage, GCHQ, Jeffrey Paul Delisle, News, Royal Canadian Navy, Russia, SIGINT, TRINITY (Canada), UK, UKUSA, United States