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For almost five years, Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Delisle got away with selling official secrets to the Russian military, causing what the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has called “severe and irreparable damage.”

As a Canadian naval intelligence officer with a Level 3-Top Secret clearance, Delisle had access to the files of CSIS, the CIA, FBI, British and Australians. As a Russian spy, he leaked them monthly to Moscow.

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But as he is scheduled to appear in Halifax court next week for a sentencing hearing that could see him imprisoned for life, the details of Canada’s biggest espionage case since the Cold War are almost a disappointment.

No danger, no excitement. No evasive driving to shake counter-intelligence agents on his tail, no secret exchanges of briefcases. Even the alias he was to use if he got in trouble, Alex Campbell, lacked mystique.

“It was just … get copies of whatever, put it on a [memory] stick, put it in an e-mail,” he told Jim Moffatt, the RCMP officer who questioned him at the detachment in Lower Sackville, N.S., following his arrest a year ago.