Canadian authorities announced on Friday that they’d arrested a senior civilian official and charged him with espionage-related offenses in a case that authorities say has affected multiple national security agencies. So who is Cameron Ortis? What do the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have to do with spying and should the possible spy up north worry the U.S.?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Canadian news outlets report that authorities there are treating Ortis’ case as a major breach of security, with implications for the loss of secrets across multiple Canadian national security agencies. He reportedly held the rank of a civilian director general in the RCMP’s intelligence unit. A 2008 conference agenda available online described Ortis as a “Senior Intelligence Research Specialist, National Security Criminal Investigations, RCMP.”
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The RCMP announced that authorities charged Ortis with five offenses under Canadian national security law, including “unauthorized communication of special operational information.” Authorities haven’t specified which country or individual Ortis allegedly contacted in the course of his alleged crimes or what he may have communicated.
Cybersecurity and Asia: In addition to his official duties, Ortis also nursed an academic career as a PhD at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia (UBC). As an academic, Ortis appeared to focus on a handful of issues over the years. In the early 2000s, he co-authored articles focused on Asia and cybersecurity. A 2003 biography in a Pacific Review article (“The Internet and Asia-Pacific security: Old conflicts and new behaviour”) described Ortis as someone who “specializes in the Internet and security, Internet diffusion patterns and regional security issues in Asia” and was affiliated with UBC’s Institute of Asian Research.
Ortis’ most extensive work, an over-200-page PhD thesis on cybersecurity issues in Asia (“Bowing to Quirinus: Compromised Nodes and Cyber Security in East Asia”) shows a firm grasp of technical issues in computer networking and extensive travel across the region. Ortis cited “many confidential interviews with law enforcement personnel and policy makers in East Asia” he conducted for the work, including interviews in Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, and the United States.
He also presented on “Critical Infrastructure and Botnets: Implications for Canadian National Security” during a 2008 cybersecurity conference in Vancouver.
Ortis’ regional focus appeared to extend beyond East Asia, though. A search of WhoIs website registration records through the DomainTools database shows that Ortis registered two websites using his UBC email address in the spring of 2007: afghancanada.org and afghanconflict.org. The websites are now defunct and no trace exists. Canada’s Global News also reported that Ortis once focused on Somalia.
Mounties vs spies: So what kind of damage could a spy in the RCMP do to national security? Quite a bit. In the U.S., the FBI handles both sides of the counterintelligence ledger—finding and following potential spies in order to protect American secrets and gathering evidence for criminal prosecutions of American and foreign spies who don’t have diplomatic cover and immunity.
In Canada, counterintelligence works differently and responsibility is divided between the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the RCMP’s counterintelligence unit. “The role is very different between the two agencies,” Donald G. Mahar, a former RCMP officer and CSIS senior counterintelligence officer who has written about RCMP mole-hunting history, told The Daily Beast. “The RCMP collect evidence for possible use in court whereas the CSIS does not. CSIS’s role is in the traditional intelligence field where it would be similar in nature to what the CIA does.”
When the CSIS decides a counterintelligence issue is appropriate to handle through the criminal justice system, they bring in the RCMP. RCMP intelligence personnel “are given a document which outlines the case and then the RCMP, with executive powers, will then go and do their own investigation based upon the details which have been provided to them,” said Mahar.
Mole in the mounties: The most recent mole within Canada’s RCMP was Gilles Brunet, an officer whose father had been the first director of the RCMP’s intelligence unit. Canadian intelligence officials had long suspected a mole within their ranks by the 1970s but their fears were confirmed when Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB colonel who defected to the U.S. in the 1980s, told his American handlers that the KGB had recruited a mole within Canada’s RCMP and identified both Brunet and his Soviet handler. Brunet was never charged with espionage and left the RCMP in 1973 over concerns about his ties to organized crime, ending his official access to classified information. He died before Canadian authorities could mount a criminal case against him.
Damage down south? As the Brunet case showed, American and Candian intelligence services work closely together, meaning that any potential damage from a mole in the RCMP’s intelligence unit could affect U.S. security, as well.
In his memoir, former KGB officer Oleg Kalugin wrote of “a very highly placed agent in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) counterintelligence unit” whose description sounds similar to Brunet. Kalugin said the mole tipped off the Soviets to fake recruits dangled in front of the KGB as part of joint RCMP-FBI operations.
Nor is it unheard of for Canadian spies to damage American national security interests given the close intelligence-sharing relationship between the two countries. In 2012, the Canadian naval officer Jeffrey Deslisle pleaded guilty to spying for Russia after he spent years supplying Russian military intelligence with secrets shared among the Five Eyes, an intelligence partnership between the U.S., U.K., Australia, and New Zealand to collect and share signals intelligence from around the world.
