In defence of Cameron Ortis, the spy who (probably) wasn’t

The arrest of senior RCMP official Cameron Ortis in September 2019 sent shock waves through the global intelligence community. Canada’s partners in the international Five Eyes information-sharing alliance between Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States had questions: How could someone at the epicentre of Canadian national security be accused of trying to sell classified information to an international network of criminals? And why?

Ortis, 47 at the time, had risen over 13 years at the RCMP to a position of trust no civilian had ever occupied: director-general of the Ottawa-based National Intelligence Co-ordination Centre (NICC).

After a seven-week trial in the fall of 2023, Ortis was convicted by a jury on three counts of violating the Security of Information Act by “intentionally and without authority” communicating “special operational information,” one count of attempting to do so, and two Criminal Code charges, breach of trust and unauthorized use of a computer. On Feb. 7, he was sentenced to 14 years, which means, accounting for time already served, that he could spend up to seven years and 155 more days in jail.

Everything about the case was unprecedented. Never before had such a senior official been charged with such a crime. Never had the Security of Information Act been tested in court. Never had a case involving highly classified information been tried in front of a jury.

A statement entered at trial outlined the agreed-upon facts. In 2015, while on temporary French-language leave from his job as director of the RCMP’s Operations Research (OR) team, Ortis had made or attempted brief anonymous contact with three members of an international network run by convicted money launderer Altaf Khanani. The fourth contact was Vincent Ramos, whose B.C.-based company Phantom Secure was selling encrypted phones to criminals, including drug cartels and terrorists. It was the FBI’s 2018 arrest of Ramos that led to the discovery of emails the RCMP traced to Ortis.

The contacts included excerpts of documents and snippets of classified information, with an offer from Ortis of more. In the case of Ramos, with whom Ortis had several email exchanges, he asked for $20,000. Investigators found no evidence that Ortis ever received money or provided more information, and the contact ceased as abruptly as it had begun.

These facts were not in question; the question at hand was why. The Crown, led by prosecutors John McFarland and Judy Kliewer, said Ortis acted against the interests of Canada. Ortis said he was protecting the country against an imminent threat identified by a Five Eyes partner, luring criminals onto an encrypted service that would allow their activity to be tracked.

His trial and conviction were heralded as a success. “For Canada’s intelligence and law enforcement partners … the Ortis trial had Canada on trial,” national security commentator Wesley Wark said in a November 2023 Globe and Mail column. “Could a complex case be handled by the Canadian criminal justice system in an expeditious way? Would evidence be withheld from the jury because of secrecy concerns to an extent that could jeopardize a fair trial?

“The outcome of the trial,” he wrote, “suggests that the Canadian judicial system passed this extraordinary test.”

Scratch the surface, and you see an entirely different story: a crime with no motive, the repeated violation of constitutional rights, highly selective disclosure of information, speculation repeatedly presented as fact, and a staggering conflict of interest at the case’s heart that has, until now, gone unreported.

Ortis’s ordeal is far from over. After a four-year wait for trial, the appeal of his conviction faces similar delays because of the unusual hurdles to protect classified information. Crushed by legal expenses that have so far topped $850,000, Ortis learned in May that his request for legal aid had been overturned. Granted bail to pursue his appeal, he opted to stay behind bars rather than impose such severe living conditions on his family for a second time.

Look closely, and the proceedings against Ortis are a cautionary tale about the RCMP and our justice system.

I’ve paid close attention to the case for personal reasons. I was on the periphery of Ortis’s friend group when I moved to Vancouver in 2004, and for a few years we went to the same social gatherings.

While I’ve followed the case with interest, we are not close. We’ve spoken twice by phone since his arrest, when he called a mutual friend and I happened to be there. He sent me a few updates from prison, written in a characteristically stoic, just-the-facts tone. Knowing he was starved for reading material, I sent him a magazine subscription. (The Economist wasn’t allowed but The New Yorker was deemed acceptable.) I was one of 26 people who wrote him a character reference before sentencing, a group that included former diplomat Michael Kovrig, best known for time spent in custody in China, who pleaded eloquently for mercy on Ortis’s behalf.

Ortis was born in Chilliwack and grew up mostly in B.C.’s Lower Mainland, attending high school in Abbotsford. His dad was a pastor and psychotherapist, and his mom worked in health-care administration. “Spy Cam,” as he was affectionately known by his friends, was quiet but easy to talk to, about everything from ’80s big-hair bands to the Anti-terrorism Act. Two things stood out: his deep interest in geopolitics and his clear sense of purpose. He appreciated the freedoms we take for granted and spoke of his interest in countering threats to those freedoms. No one was surprised when his PhD thesis on transnational cybercrime launched his intelligence career.

News of his arrest was met with stunned disbelief. Cam’s family, longtime friends, and former academic community were, and most remain, staunch supporters. They simply can’t square the man they know with the prosecutors’ portrait of Ortis as Canada’s own Public Enemy No. 1.

As a former journalist, I was curious to see how a case so shrouded in secrecy would play out. I read the coverage, tracked proceedings, attended Zoom hearings, pored over trial transcripts and parsed court exhibits. While much about the case is still classified, virtually all of the facts in this piece are drawn from documents that are publicly available.

The story they tell is complex but compelling. I started out open to the possibility that Ortis had undergone a character transplant in the years since I’d known him. What I’ve observed is a Kafkaesque miscarriage of justice that should shake our collective faith in our institutions.

From the moment Ortis was arrested on Sept. 12, 2019, he was at a devastating disadvantage. Sworn to permanent secrecy about his work, he couldn’t answer the questions RCMP investigators put to him during his eight-hour interrogation. And because the evidence in his own case was classified, he was denied access to it.

So, while the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees rights to both legal representation and evidence, for the first six months, Ortis was unable to access information about his case and barred, under Section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act, from speaking to a lawyer about it.

In October 2019, he was granted bail — another constitutional right — and briefly allowed to live with family under severe restrictions. The Crown immediately appealed, arguing only incarceration could stop him from communicating the information “in (his) own memory.” Seventeen days later, he returned to prison.

The Crown’s appeal succeeded because the charges against Ortis carried a rare “reverse onus” under Section 515(6) of the Criminal Code of Canada: Instead of the prosecutor having to prove that he should be in custody, the burden was on Ortis to prove that he shouldn’t.

In effect, he was deemed guilty until proven innocent. Bound by secrecy and represented by a lawyer operating blind, he had to prove he wouldn’t flee or commit a crime. Predictably, he couldn’t.

Ortis spent the next 34 months in the maximum-security Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre (OCDC), waiting out a global pandemic in a windowless cell for his day in court. Between 2021 and 2023, his wing was regularly locked down, and on some days he spent 23.5 hours out of 24 in isolation.

Secrecy, long his highest imperative, became his millstone. To disclose anything confidential would have been deemed a criminal offence. Because of that secrecy, his lawyer required security clearance to comb through more than 100,000 pages of disclosed documents. And because of the need to review documents at an off-site secure facility, he could only prepare for trial when lockdowns lifted. For two years, each time he travelled to and from prison under RCMP escort, he was strip-searched — more than 1,200 times in all. He was subjected to 642 full-body X-ray scans.

His case was so sensitive that all disclosed documents — many of them redacted — and everything he planned to say at trial had first to be vetted by the Federal Court. He was therefore required to provide his defence strategy, verbatim, to the government of Canada, the Federal Court, and the prosecution years in advance of his trial. The prosecution, therefore, had the extraordinary advantage of building their case knowing exactly what he would and could say.

To be clear, if he said anything in the Ontario Superior Court that hadn’t been pre-approved by the Federal Court, he would have been committing a crime. Far more than a barrier to fairness, this was the ultimate Catch-22: To clear himself of multiple alleged crimes, Ortis continually risked committing another.

In December 2022, while awaiting trial, Ortis was granted the most restrictive bail imaginable. At the hearing, prosecutors questioned his elderly parents at length. They doubted the trustworthiness of his mother, a retiree and hospice volunteer, because of her letter-writing advocacy on her son’s behalf.

He and his family put up more than $250,000 in bonds. Even with an ankle monitor he required 24-hour supervision. His curfew was 9 p.m. He could leave his parents’ two-bedroom Abbotsford, B.C., condo for only two hours a day, spending that time running laps at the local track.

He couldn’t have visitors his parents didn’t know. He couldn’t use internet-connected devices, including streaming TV. He couldn’t go anywhere that housed connected devices.

To prepare for trial, the RCMP supplied him with an internet-disabled laptop with disclosure documents. He was barred from meeting with his Ottawa-based lawyers via video conference or researching points of law online. All conversations had to be conducted from his parents’ landline.

The trial was finally set for October 2023, more than four years after his arrest. That arguably violated his constitutional right to be tried within a reasonable time, defined as 30 months for Superior Court cases. He could have requested a stay of proceedings, as was his right under R v Jordan, but didn’t — because while that might have freed him, it would not have cleared his name.

Character may count for little in law, but it’s key to understanding intent. From the start, the Crown’s inability to name a credible motive was problematic. In fact, the trial judge instructed the jury that “Cameron Ortis’s motive is the most important question,” and that “the absence of motive will be a critical reason why the Crown has failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Reporters mostly settled on financial gain, casting Ortis as an aspiring big-shot drowning in debt. But if money had motivated Ortis, he would have pursued a private-sector career, not a government job. There was no evidence of outsized debt or compromising behaviour. RCMP investigators testified that an exhaustive probe of his finances found nothing untoward.

At trial, the absence of motive was treated as a pesky detail. In her closing statement, Kliewer said the Crown wasn’t concerned with the “why” of the case, only the “what.”

“Was there a profit motive?” she mused. “Maybe. It’s not something the Crown has to prove.”

Ortis was charged under Section 14 (1) of the Security of Information Act: “Every person permanently bound to secrecy commits an offence who, intentionally and without authority, communicates or confirms special operational information.” The case hinged entirely on what was meant by “authority,” which had never been defined or tested in court.

Under Section 11(c) of the Charter, any person charged with an offence has the right not to be compelled to be a witness in proceedings against them — in other words, the right to remain silent. According to R. v. P. (M.B.) (1994), it is a basic tenet of criminal justice that the Crown must establish a “case to meet” before an accused can be expected to respond.

Because “authority” was undefined, the defence asked repeatedly for the definition to establish the case to meet. At a pretrial hearing, defence lawyer Jon Doody raised a constitutional challenge based on the vagueness of “authority.” That was only answered on March 28, 2024 — seven weeks after sentencing. According to that ruling, the words “without authority” were not vague because the “implicit definition … in the context of s. 14 is reasonably straightforward and it is the power or right to act.”

The definition should have been central to the trial’s outcome. Ortis cited various sources of authority for what he did: his job description; documentation about the OR’s mission and operations; memorandums to Cabinet outlining intelligence priorities; the trust relationship among Five Eyes members to protect and act on information when required; and the OR’s role in activities designed to diminish a threat.

Although these sources of authority were tabled at trial, they could not be presented as evidence because the documents themselves, which contained some classified information, had not been disclosed by prosecutors.

In other words, the defence handed over its strategy and went through trial without knowing the definition of the alleged crime. In a justice system built on precedent, that is the very definition of unprecedented.

While post-trial coverage has mostly thrown up its hands, accepting we will “never know” what drove Ortis, he has told us. In closed-door testimony that was partly redacted before release, his story emerged — haltingly, given the heavy restrictions imposed, but with a plausible explanation for his actions.

Among the many elements of the closed-door testimony that weren’t reported was its audience, which at times included a group of government lawyers. At any time, they could stop the proceedings and strike testimony from the transcript.

Even under these conditions, the story Ortis told was entirely consistent with the methodical workaholic he was known to be.

To understand Ortis’s actions and beliefs, you need to examine the trajectory of his career and its geopolitical context.

Ortis got a BA in international relations and political science from the University of Northern British Columbia, an MA from McMaster, and a PhD from the University of B.C. His 2006 doctoral thesis looked at the “intersection between international security and cybersecurity and how state and non-state actors were adapting to those new threats,” he testified.

He also completed a certification in systems administration related to cybersecurity. After a brief stint doing research at UBC and some private-sector consulting, he was recruited in 2006 by two senior RCMP executives. His first role was as senior intelligence research specialist in the National Security Operations branch for the Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Team (CIIT).

Ortis was responsible for cyber and telecommunications infrastructure, alongside passenger rail and urban transit. He met with owners and operators in the sector to help them build reporting systems for suspicious incidents, persuade them to share information with the RCMP, then turn it into intelligence they could use to protect their assets.

The creation of the CIIT was part of a large-scale shift in Canada’s post-9/11 approach to countering terrorism, mirroring moves across the western world. In addition to amending the Criminal Code and federal Evidence Act to help criminalize threats and prosecute terrorist offences, the government marshalled its resources. Traditionally, the four pillars of national security had been Global Affairs Canada, the Department of National Defence, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and the Communications Security Establishment. Now, the RCMP was poised to become the fifth.

Ortis was deemed integral to these efforts by a succession of senior leaders. In 2008, he testified, Supt. Larry Tremblay assigned him some counterterrorism-related intelligence analysis off the side of his desk. The files he worked on involved “high side” — classified — material for the first time, and he reported directly to Tremblay, who reported to Bob Paulson, then chief superintendent in charge of National Security Criminal Operations. (In 2011, Paulson was appointed the RCMP’s commissioner.)

Ortis soon found he needed access to the lone Canadian Top Secret Network (CTSN) terminal in a specially secured closet at the RCMP’s aging headquarters. On the terminal, he double-clicked on an icon for Five Eyes, which brought up a window that prompted him to call a number: “And so I called that number,” he testified. He also got permission to create a CTSN email account, which allowed him to communicate with Five Eyes agencies.

Remarkably, even though the RCMP could access the Five Eyes trove of information, no one was using it. Ortis brought this to Tremblay’s attention, he said, and asked to summarize the threat reporting on the CTSN system so they might “see the RCMP’s mandate and mission within that reporting.”

His work yielded results. Early on, Ortis was responsible for intelligence that launched Project Samosa, leading to the prosecution of three Ottawa men for terrorism-related offences. Senior leaders saw intelligence-led policing as key to the RCMP’s transformation, and they saw Ortis as their changemaker. Paulson talked regularly about “primacy of operations,” which prioritized performance over process and encouraged smart risk-taking over risk avoidance.

Ortis’s success led Paulson to place him at the helm of a 12-month pilot project for OR in 2009. Its mission, in Ortis’s words, was to meet the national security threat to Canada. When the pilot ended, the OR unit was formally established.

While Ortis and his team were now consuming the available intelligence, the RCMP weren’t yet reciprocating — partly because of the need to keep intelligence separate from investigations.

So, a part of OR’s mission, in Ortis’s words, “was to understand what we (could) share from the RCMP back into the Five Eyes world.” This required developing rules and policies describing how they would operate, largely written by Ortis. Strict adherence hindered OR’s work, however, because top-secret material had to stay within the small secure compartmented-information facility, or SCIF. Team members would take turns accessing the CTSN terminal, said Ortis, “but a closet is a closet, and you can only fit so many people in a closet.”

In 2010 and 2011, the OR regularly worked outside the closet, technically violating the rules they had themselves written. Ortis had authority to approve these violations, he said, as long as they took measures to minimize risk. Senior leaders were aware of this practice, his former team members confirmed.

In 2012, the OR relocated to the new RCMP headquarters, where they continued this practice until their eventual move into a secured space. This was one of several ways OR members operated outside the normal rules.

Ordinarily, for the RCMP to engage in intelligence there had to be a criminal element, but senior officials often travelled overseas and needed “situational awareness.” Knowing they hated reading reports, Ortis would gather information into what were known as “Cam’s Classified Briefing Binders,” providing digestible intelligence on people and organizations, criminal or not.

Ortis regularly delivered these binders to executives in boardrooms, even though they should have stayed secured. OR members also transported certain classified files on secure USB sticks, another technical breach of information-handling policy. Ortis believed he had the authority to make sensible exceptions, he testified.

He also routinely worked from home, which was permissible when using RCMP-issued hardware. After his arrest, officers seized five laptops and multiple hard drives and USB drives from his home, finding 488 encrypted classified files. According to Ortis at trial, “All but one (of those seized) was an RCMP work device.” In 2020, the RCMP acknowledged in an internal security review that Ortis had been “allowed the latitude to function with minimal supervision or oversight.”

A pattern emerges of a civilian leader given special dispensation by top brass in the service of important, sometimes secret, outcomes. And it was resented, according to statements and testimony from Ortis’s former colleagues.

In 2011, the OR’s mandate expanded to include transnational organized crime where it intersected with national security. Intelligence indicated an “extraordinary” amount of money was being laundered through Canada and two of its Five Eyes partners by criminal organizations, threatening national banking systems. Canada had the biggest problem.

Ortis briefed leaders right up to the commissioner and was told to “get on this,” he testified. He immediately launched Project Skyfall, which focused on money laundering. (Later, when Ortis realized Skyfall was the name of a James Bond movie, it became Project Dominion.)

This threat was not just a priority for the RCMP. It was deemed a high priority by the federal government’s 2012 and 2013 Memorandums to Cabinet and by Canada’s Five Eyes partners.

While the RCMP viewed the problem as criminal, Ortis said, the OR saw it as a security threat — not just for Canada but for its global partners. Assistant Commissioner Todd Shean, who was having to answer “pointed questions” from those partners about what the RCMP was doing, asked the OR to summarize the threat. Their report, in September 2014, delved into Phantom Secure, the B.C.-based company run by Vincent Ramos.

This was the level of trust placed in Ortis by RCMP brass as the OR’s mandate expanded, and the climate in which he was operating.

In 2012, Ortis was promoted to OR director and asked to write his own job description. He wrote two, he testified: an unclassified version that was produced at trial and a classified version for senior management, which was not.

Given the case’s central question was whether Ortis had authority for his actions, which he said were aimed at stemming a national-security threat, this absence is remarkable. Equally remarkable is the fact that the job description and other relevant documents describing the OR’s function were only produced by the Crown after the trial started.

Many of the disclosed documents were heavily or entirely redacted. He was given some of his notebooks from the time but could not access his OR documents, contact reporting, or secure phone logs.

He was also deprived of any emails he’d sent on the RCMP’s main network before 2016, even though 2015 was the critical period. The cabinet memos Ortis cited as sources of authority weren’t disclosed. The emails he’d exchanged via the Canadian Top Secret Network were produced only in part.

According to the job description entered at trial, the director must “achieve and sustain credibility and trust among intelligence partners” in a “no-fail environment” and increase the department’s “visibility, reach, and leadership” among partners.

Ortis explained this need delicately: “There was a general understanding that Canada, in the Five Eyes community, was a — let’s call it a net importer of intelligence … And the RCMP specifically was a much greater consumer (of information) and produced very little to be provided back into the Five Eyes … And so, one of my jobs was to try and rectify that over time.”

The OR team ultimately provided three streams of information back to Five Eyes, and Ortis represented the assistant commissioner at domestic and international forums.

The job description said the director was “instrumental in developing the capacity to provide situational awareness intelligence that will support a strategic or tactical response by the RCMP.”

Sometimes, he said, a tactical response might mean declassifying information to a level where it could be shared with an analyst deployed overseas. Or top-secret information might be distilled in such a way that it could be released to someone outside the intelligence community.

The prosecution said that if Ortis believed he was conducting an undercover operation, he must have known he was overstepping his authority. But threat diminishment was different from undercover operations, he countered. Undercover ops are defined in the RCMP’s operations manual as “an investigative technique … to seek or acquire criminal evidence or intelligence through misrepresentation, pretext or guise.” His plan, he said, “was in no way designed to collect criminal evidence or intelligence.” Another agency would be doing the collection.

Trust, the job description made clear, was central to Ortis’s relationships — with his superiors, with overseas RCMP analysts, with “non-traditional partners,” and with Five Eyes partners. They trusted that the RCMP would protect and act on the information provided.

Where trust had not been built was with the RCMP’s National Intelligence Coordination Centre (NICC). Formed in 2013, the NICC was staffed with about 35 intelligence officers, analysts, and managers. Some were aggrieved at the speed of Ortis’s rise and resented the status the OR had been granted.

Retired RCMP chief superintendent Warren Coons, who ran the NICC while Ortis was OR director, conceded at trial that “there were times when there was tension between us …” There had always been uncertainty “about the ability of law enforcement to use intelligence information in criminal investigations,” he said.

But Ortis was proud of his team’s accomplishments. In 2015, they were doing “amazing things,” former deputy commissioner Mike Cabana told Alphonse MacNeil, who was commissioned by the RCMP in 2020 to conduct a review of their handling of NICC staff complaints.

Ortis was tapped as NICC’s director-general the following year to develop the potential of using high-side information in criminal investigations. Senior officials, according to reports, wanted to level up and recognized in Ortis the vision and drive to do so. According to the MacNeil review, leadership tasked him with “overhauling things.” In Ortis’s own telling, he “was given a mandate to clean up the program and those employees ‘moved aside’ were upset.”

That was an understatement. On his first day in the job, Ortis arrived to find his office had been trashed. “Destroyed,” he testified: “I walked in and the furniture was all over the place. There was garbage on the wall. Food strewn across the wall, and dirt dumped in the corner.”

He had fielded antagonism before, but not at this level. His deputy, Supt. Marie-Claude Arsenault, had been passed over for the director-general role and had written letters to her higher-ups complaining about his appointment.

At trial, the defence read comments by Arsenault out in court. She said Ortis had been given “carte blanche” as head of the NICC, and that even senior management didn’t know everything he was doing.

That brings us to an illuminating part of the story that surfaced in August 2020, when three civilian employees who worked for Ortis at the NICC brought a lawsuit against the RCMP alleging harassment. In 2021, Arsenault became the fourth plaintiff, seeking $1.5 million.

The 27-page document laid out the plaintiffs’ demands and cracked open a window on the young NICC. According to the lawsuit, which was dismissed in April 2023, workplace morale deteriorated after his appointment. The plaintiffs alleged they felt demoralized and disrespected by his assessment of their work and “strange and controlling” behaviour.

The three civilian employees said they were screened out of potential promotions. Supt. Arsenault further alleged “deliberate sabotage,” and said senior RCMP officials “repeatedly protected” Ortis from complaints.

The lawsuit depicts a boss parachuted into an environment known to be toxic, who was ill-prepared or supported to overhaul such a team.

According to the suit, “the most damaging revelation came when they learned that the intelligence that Mr. Ortis had stolen and sold was largely the work product of the NICC employees he had targeted … The Plaintiffs have been advised by investigators connected with the RCMP’s internal investigation that the RCMP now believes that Mr. Ortis systematically targeted them and attacked their careers as part of his larger plan to misappropriate their work and use it for personal gain.”

So, investigators in 2020 clearly divulged their unproven theory about Ortis to his colleagues, who were potential witnesses in the RCMP’s own investigation.

There’s a kicker here, mentioned in trial testimony but never reported. Arsenault, the fourth plaintiff in the lawsuit and Ortis’s deputy until 2017, was married to Supt. Mike McLean, the RCMP officer in charge of Project Ace, the investigation into Cameron Ortis.

Ortis’s troubles began in the fall of 2014, when he was briefed by a foreign counterpart on a “storefront” business offering user-friendly encryption services, the trial heard. According to his source, the business had been created to attract criminal targets. If criminals used the service, the agency collecting the communications would be able to feed them back to Five Eyes, he said in court. This was an opportunity for Canada to change the perception that it was more of a “taker” than a “giver,” he testified.

This counterpart, whose identity could not be disclosed, told Ortis to keep this information secret. This was not an unusual request; he’d been asked four or five times before not to share top-secret intelligence provided by a partner, he said.

He had two secure phone conversations in September and October 2014 with this counterpart. He knew criminals were moving away from BlackBerrys and was told that January to June 2015 would be a critical window of opportunity.

After much thought, Ortis decided he had a duty to act. He conceived a “low-risk, low-resource” plan to introduce targets to the encryption service in question, Tutanota. (The company, since rebranded as Tuta, denied they were ever a storefront operation.) He called it Operation Nudge, following the RCMP’s naming convention of using “n” for operations run from national headquarters with national security in scope. It also described his objective: to nudge criminals onto the platform.

Ortis drew up a list of 10 possible targets, which he narrowed to four based on location and an established “deconfliction” process that ensured an intelligence operation didn’t “bump into” an active criminal investigation.

The four initial targets were Ramos, Salim Henareh, Muhammad Ashraf and Farzam Mehdizadeh. Because Farzam Mehdizadeh was being actively investigated, Ortis decided instead to target his son, Masih. In the case of Ramos, the RCMP had earlier launched Project Saturation in response to concerns raised by Five Eyes, he said, but by 2014 had yielded no success. Assistant commissioner Shean had called that effort “an embarrassment” for Canada.

Mehdizadeh, Henareh and Ashraf all had suspected ties to Altaf Khanani, a known money launderer connected to terrorist groups.

On Feb. 5, 2015, Ortis emailed Ramos’s Hotmail account, posing as a hacker offering “valuable” information about an investigation into Phantom Secure. If interested, he said, Ramos would need to set up “secure comms” to find out more. Over several weeks of brief exchanges, Ramos expressed interest but didn’t bite.

On March 21, to establish his insider status, Ortis asked, “Did Judge arrive on the 8th as planned? Let me guess, he met someone ‘friendly’ while being secondaried by CBSA at the airport.” Kapil Judge was an associate of Ramos who had been pulled aside by the Canadian Border Services Agency’s Secondary Services.

Prosecutors said this was tantamount to revealing an undercover officer’s identity, but offered no evidence, relying instead on speculative testimony about what could have happened. The defence said that without providing a name or identifying details, no harm had been done — and there was no evidence to the contrary. Yet the severity of Ortis’s sentencing relied heavily on this entirely hypothetical harm.

According to Ortis, far from telling Ramos something he didn’t know, he was using what Ramos already knew to establish trust. It worked. Ramos suggested he would use the platform Wickr to continue talking and Ortis steered him toward several better options, including Tutanota.

On April 20, Ortis emailed Ramos from a tutanota.com email address, at the bottom of which was an auto-generated link to “join Tutanota.” Ramos agreed to set up an account but didn’t until nine days later, when Ortis, in a final bid to “entice” him to use Tutanota, sent seven partial documents to Ramos.

The cover letter explained he’d excerpted them but left enough to assess their potential value. They included two cover pages of FINTRAC summaries showing Ramos had been flagged for suspicious transactions; summaries of information gathered from public sources such as Facebook; the cover page of an RCMP intelligence brief summarizing findings on Phantom Secure; the title and contents pages of an intelligence assessment; and excerpts from an RCMP PowerPoint presentation about Phantom Secure.

The Crown said this was proof Ortis was trying to thwart an investigation. Ortis said there was no active investigation and everything in the documents was known to Ramos; they served solely to establish the sender’s credibility as an insider with information to sell.

Again, it worked. In May, Ramos joined Tutanota and emailed to say he was interested. First, though, he wanted to know how the full documents would be of benefit to him.

Ortis said the full documents would cost “$20,000 Canadian dollars in cash, firm.” In a followup email he suggested the financial information would help Ramos avoid mistakes and the rest would help him understand how law enforcement intended to dismantle Phantom Secure.

At trial, prosecutor John McFarland took Ortis through each line of this correspondence in painstaking detail. Some of what he told Ramos was deliberately false, Ortis said, such as the described value of the information. While he agreed that in some cases the full documents would have been damaging, they were never sent, nor did he intend to send them.

He simply wanted to build a pattern of behaviour to familiarize Ramos with Tutanota, he said, in the hope that he’d start using it. On May 15, Ortis ended contact, never supplying any further information. Why? Because OR Nudge had fulfilled its purpose.

Using similar tactics, he approached — or authorized others to approach — the other three targets with snippets of information. Ashraf and Mehdizadeh didn’t respond to emails. Henareh was mailed a package, which he passed on to his lawyer.

In each case, the information told the recipients nothing they didn’t already know, Ortis testified — and therefore nothing of value. As the director of OR, with unfettered access to intelligence, he was far more equipped to gauge this than police, he said.

To emphasize the damage that could have been done, the Crown disclosed more complete versions of many of the documents. But when these documents are viewed beside what was sent, what’s striking is the restraint with which they were excerpted. The lone exception is one FINTRAC document that was disclosed in full to Henareh, which Ortis explained was an error.

Ortis emailed his foreign counterpart to report his success, he testified, but without access to his own emails from 2015 he couldn’t prove that. Redacted RCMP documents confirm he was not acting alone, though. His colleagues prepared background documents and analysts were involved in the deconfliction process, meaning he was using official channels to support his objective.

The question remained: Why didn’t he brief his superiors about OR Nudge? There were two reasons, he said: First, he’d agreed not to. Second, he’d received information about an insider threat, which he feared could thwart his own efforts.

At trial, Ortis repeatedly took full responsibility for his actions and expressed regret over the unforeseen consequences. But he steadfastly maintained that his intention was only ever to protect Canada’s national interests.

Prosecutors insisted throughout the trial that Ortis was an enemy of Canada, working for the benefit of criminals. And yet, in her closing argument, prosecutor Kliewer told the jury, “The very, very, very narrow issue that you need to decide in this case is whether Mr. Ortis acted with authority.”

In other words, Ortis was convicted of overstepping his authority, with no accounting for intention. Even the Crown admitted they had not established a clear motive.

There was a way to resolve the fundamental disconnect between his actions and the absence of motive. Early on, Ortis’s lawyers proposed a “mistake of fact” defence, making the case that he honestly and reasonably misunderstood the level of authority attached to his role. This was rejected by the trial judge, as were concerns they raised about Ortis’s ability to mount a full defence.

At the sentencing hearing, prosecutors doubled down on their “bad actor” argument. He should serve the maximum 28 years in prison, they argued, because his conduct “betrayed” the RCMP and Five Eyes.

Leniency, they maintained, would signal to allies that we can’t protect information, and sentencing should reflect that he “could” have endangered the life of an undercover officer. Sentencing should also account for what’s still in his mind and what could be “in the cloud.”

Defence lawyer Mark Ertel said repeatedly that Ortis was “defending himself with one hand tied behind his back.” In reality, barred by oath from defending himself, and proper access to a lawyer, forced to script and hand over his own defence, and deprived of access to key evidence to support his case, he never stood a chance.

In March, Ortis was transferred from OCDC to the Joyceville Assessment Unit in Kingston, to be assessed and assigned to a “parent” institution. In April, motion judge J. A. Thorburn granted Ortis bail on the grounds that his appeal raises new and important issues, including the interpretation of the word “authority” in Section 14 of the Security of Information Act, whether Section 14 is void for “vagueness,” and “whether the redactions made to the applicant’s evidence impeded his right to make full answer and defence …”

The ruling also highlighted Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger’s sentencing note that there was no tangible evidence of a motive: “The why here in my mind remains a mystery,” he wrote.

In an agonizing, highly unusual decision, Ortis turned bail down after consulting with his family. He felt the conditions imposed by house arrest would place another undue burden on his parents. He remains at Joyceville awaiting transfer to a B.C. institution.

The delays continue. His appeal faces logistical hurdles because of the clearance required for judges to access classified information. In May, his access to legal aid was abruptly suspended, his family and lawyer say, owing to an “enhanced review” that determined a small locked-in investment in his name disqualified him — even though the eligibility criteria for Legal Aid Ontario exclude such funds.

When asked, Legal Aid Ontario advised Ortis that one option was to wait to pursue his appeal until age 65, when the funds would be released. He is 52.

Zoom out and you see a tragedy still unfolding.

Ortis worked night and day to effect the change his superiors demanded in a “no-fail” environment. They placed a civilian at the centre of a hidebound paramilitary institution and invested him with a mission and the authority to carry it out, both real and perceived. They rewarded his initiative, praised his judgment and benefited from his stellar work for 13 years — in a culture profoundly hostile to him and his assignment.

What he’s endured, viewed through this lens, is beyond unjust. He has lost everything: his job, reputation, privacy, colleagues, financial security, and his freedom. He’s also been “de-banked,” meaning he can never again open an account with a Canadian financial institution.

The outcome is also tragic for his family. According to Ortis’s sister, their parents were shocked last year to be told they were no longer welcome at their longtime credit union, Envision Financial.

His 14-year sentence is substantially longer than the 68-month sentence handed to Khanani in 2017, or the nine-year sentence given to Ramos in 2019. And yet the Crown appealed, saying it is “demonstrably unfit, given the gravity of the offences and moral blameworthiness of the offender.” The defence is also appealing, based on what it says is the manifest unfairness of the proceedings.

This episode is, finally, a tragedy for the Canadian intelligence community. Ortis was the best and the brightest the RCMP had, utterly dedicated to the cause. In exchange, the systems he devoted his life to protecting turned the full force of their machinery on him, exposing their own flaws and vulnerabilities for all to see.

Gillian Burnett is a former journalist and a friend of a friend of Cameron Ortis.

* Indicates subject to publication ban before trial

Aug. 26: Covert search of the home of Cameron Ortis, director-general of the National Intelligence Co-ordination Centre (NICC) in Ottawa

Sept. 12: Arrested

Oct. 22: Granted bail

Nov. 8: Sent back to Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre after bail revoked

March 6: Ontario Superior Court judge issues order allowing Ortis to speak with attorneys and outlining a place where he could speak with them.

July 13*: Federal Court publishes order and reasons prohibiting disclosure of information and evidence

Feb. 8*: Federal Court makes amended order and reasons prohibiting disclosure of information and evidence

April 8*: Director of Public Prosecutions issues order and reasons relating to application by attorney general to prohibit disclosure of information and evidence

Dec. 21: Ortis granted bail in advance of trial

Jan. 16: Trial judge publishes reasons for decisions on bail review (explains oral reasons bail was granted on Dec. 21, 2022)

Aug. 30*: Federal Court publishes order and reasons prohibiting disclosure of information redacted from documents in Appendix A

Sept. 26: Ruling grants Crown’s application for order excluding media and public from parts of the trial

Oct. 3: Trial begins

Oct. 12*: Federal court makes order and reasons confirming prohibition on disclosure of information identified by attorney general

Oct. 20*: Director of Public Prosecutions makes court order covering disclosure of documents including, “What OR does abroad”

Nov. 22: Cameron Ortis found guilty of breaching secrets law

Feb. 7: Trial judge issues reasons for sentence

March 28: Trial judge issues reasons for decision on constitutional challenge raised by defence pre-trial

April 5: Justice J.A. Thorburn grants bail pending appeal