The former head of Canada’s federal police intelligence unit, accused of leaking top secret information to targets of investigations, “is no enemy of Canada,” his defense lawyer said Thursday.
Cameron Ortis, 51, was the director general of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s national intelligence coordination unit until his arrest in September 2020.
He has pleaded not guilty to charges of trying to sell sensitive secrets from Canada and the powerful Five Eyes intelligence alliance — to which Canada belongs with Australia, the United States, Britain and New Zealand — to individuals linked to criminal groups.
Defense lawyer Mark Ertel told the jury ahead of Ortis’s in-camera testimony on Thursday that the accused would say “he protected Canada from serious and imminent threats.”
“His actions were in large part a result of secret information communicated to him by a foreign agency,” he said.
“He’s going to tell you why he had a duty to act, why his actions were appropriate, why they were necessary… And he’ll tell you that he had the authority to do everything.”
The jury, Ertel concluded, “will be satisfied that Cameron Ortis is no enemy of Canada.”
Ortis’s arrest convulsed the national security and intelligence community, with then-Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Brenda Lucki saying that his alleged betrayal caused much concern within the Five Eyes.
Many of the details surrounding the case may not be divulged due to national security.
So far the court has heard Ortis had unlimited access to intelligence in order to help shape criminal investigations, and communicated operational details to four people through anonymous encrypted emails found on his computer, at one point asking them for Can$20,000 for more documents.
Authorities got wind of Ortis’s alleged crimes through a separate investigation of a British Columbia company that provided encrypted mobile phones to drug traffickers and money launderers around the world.
RCMP documents eventually linked to Ortis were found on the laptop of Phantom Secure Communications founder Vincent Ramos, who has been jailed for racketeering in the United States.
Trial witnesses, including Ortis’s former boss RCMP assistant commissioner Todd Shean, have said Ortis was never meant to go undercover or reach out to targets of police investigations.
Prosecutor Judy Kliewer has also said Ortis was taking language training in 2015 when he allegedly committed the offenses.
To date, there has only been one conviction under Canada’s Security of Information Act: a Canadian naval officer who pleaded guilty in 2012 to selling secrets to Russia.
Ortis is the first to face a trial under the act.
