The former head of the Canadian federal police’s intelligence unit, Cameron Ortis, who is accused of leaking secrets said he was acting on a foreign agency tip that warned about a “grave threat”, news agency AFP reported citing a transcript released Friday.
Ortis was the director general of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) national intelligence coordination unit and was arrested in September 2020.
Ortis has said he is not guilty of selling sensitive secrets from Canada and the powerful Five Eyes intelligence alliance to criminal organisations. The Five Eyes alliance also includes Australia, the United States, Britain and New Zealand.
Ortis told the Canadian court that a counterpart at a foreign agency reached out to him towards the end of 2014. The name of the country was not mentioned.
He told the court that they briefed him about an online encrypted service called Tutanota, which the foreign agency set up for criminal targets to use so that they can eavesdrop on their communications.
“It was very compelling, and it demonstrated clearly a direct and grave threat,” Ortis said.
He then added that he was given information about an impending threat to Canada, regarding which he did not elaborate but said that he corroborated by checking intelligence reports and police files.
He said the agent that approached him instructed him to not share the information with anyone. Then he decided to act on it secretly and formulated a plan to get Vincent Ramos — the chief executive of Phantom Secure Communications, a Canadian company that provided encrypted mobile phones to transnational crime groups — and three others to start using Tutanota, the AFP report said.
“Ultimately the plan was mine,” he said. Ortis said he reached out to Ramos to lure him into using Tutanota by selling him top secret intelligence documents. Ortis’ lawyers agree that Ortis sold secrets to Ramos, the jury is to decide whether he did so with authority.
Ortis’s former boss RCMP assistant commissioner Todd Shean told the court that Ortis was not meant to undercover or reach out to targets of police investigations. Authorities got wind of his alleged crimes through a separate investigation of Phantom Secure Communications. RCMP documents eventually linked to Ortis were found on the laptop of Ramos, who has been jailed for racketeering in the United States.
(with AFP inputs)