Former colleague of ex-intelligence official on trial says RCMP unit was kept separate from criminal probes

An RCMP employee who worked under Cameron Ortis — the former high-ranking intelligence official accused of leaking information to police targets — says their unit was purposely separated from those investigating criminal activity, according to a transcript of his testimony. 

Daniel Morris worked as Ortis’s second in command when the RCMP’s national security operations research (OR) unit was in its infancy. Morris eventually succeeded Ortis as director of the OR in 2015.

His former boss has pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of sharing operational information with people on the RCMP’s radar. Ortis’s lawyers say they’ll argue he had the authority to do what he did.

Morris said members of the team weren’t supposed to contact targets of a criminal investigation.

“Operations Research was set up to be completely separate from criminal investigations,” said Morris, according to a transcript provided by the court.

“It wasn’t for OR to be even close to a criminal investigation and there were various reasons for that.”

The civilian member of the RCMP testified before the jury Monday but members of the public, including the media, were locked out of the courtroom.

A consortium of media organizations that includes CBC News fought the move to keep Morris’s testimony confidential, calling it an egregious restriction on open courts. The consortium lost. Other details of the secrecy measure are covered by a publication ban.

Instead, the Crown sent a transcript of Morris’s Monday morning testimony to reporters Tuesday. The transcript of his afternoon testimony has not yet arrived.

RCMP may be sitting on puzzle piece: Morris

Morris said one of the goals of the OR was to brief senior decision makers within the RCMP on threats and opportunities in ways that wouldn’t expose top-secret information in open court.

“Keeping that material protected throughout the course of the investigation is extremely difficult and extremely high-risk. So we do not touch, we do not go near the criminal investigation,” he said.

Much of Morris’s testimony touched on what’s known as the “intelligence-to-evidence” problem — the conflict between protecting secret information from open court and pursuing prosecutions related to terrorism and national security.

The problem lies in striking a balance between protecting sensitive information coming from Canada’s intelligence agencies — things like tactics, methods and where spies are located — and the RCMP’s need to lay out their evidence and casework in court to secure prosecutions.

Morris suggested throughout his testimony that the OR was set up to bridge that gap.

He offered a hypothetical example — classified intelligence indicating that a person may be planning to conduct a terrorist attack in Canada.

“If the information is restricted so that we can’t actually launch a criminal investigation, that’s obviously a real problem for the RCMP,” he said. 

Morris told the jury the OR unit would look for other, unclassified information already in the hands of law enforcement.

“Sometimes, the RCMP may be sitting on a piece of the puzzle and doesn’t even know it,” he said.

“So, let’s say this particular subject had been contacted before by police or had surfaced on the police attention or radar at some point in the past. There may be ways for us to find opportunities for the RCMP to take another look at this person without using the classified information.”

Witness says OR could point bosses in right direction

Morris told Crown prosecutor John MacFarlane the OR largely worked in secret, separated from those working in criminal investigations. The intelligence they looked at was housed on separate drives on the Canadian Top Secret Network, a computer network operated by the Communications Security Establishment (CSE).

The OR would brief the assistant commissioner and other senior officials, and sometimes the commissioner, he said.

“We could essentially point them in the right direction,” he said.

But Morris said they would never brief what’s called the “command triangle” — the key Mounties investigating a case.

“We would hope that they wouldn’t even know we exist,” he said. “The material we worked with, what we were working on, needed to stay within essentially a bubble.” 

Ortis is accused of sharing special operational information “intentionally and without authority” with Salim Henareh and Muhammad Ashraf. He also faces one count of attempting to share special operational information with Farzam Mehdizadeh.

RCMP intelligence reports entered into evidence during the trial show the RCMP was investigating those three men and their money services businesses for potential links to Altaf Khanani, an internationally-wanted man suspected of laundering money for terrorists.

Ortis is also accused of leaking special operational information to Vincent Ramos, the head of a company that was accused of selling encrypted phones to criminals, including the Khanani network and drug cartels.

Ortis is expected to testify during the trial.

His lawyer Mark Ertel suggested the defence’s case will look at the pressures the OR was under.

“The case is all about authority, who was in charge, who was in a position to give authority,” he told reporters earlier this month.

When asked if the case will hear from someone who will vouch that Ortis had authority, Ertel said, “Stay tuned.”

Undercover operations needed approval, Morris says

Morris said that during his eight years with OR, he has never heard of someone reaching out to targets.  

“OR didn’t develop evidence,” he said. “Contacting a target, if there was any sort of deception involved, that makes it an undercover operation by RCMP definition under undercover policy.

“There’s very clear rules on how undercover operations can be performed within the RCMP and who can perform those operations.”

Morris said multiple decision makers would need to be briefed on any such operation and would need to approve it.

The transcript of his testimony notes in spots that the audio was “indiscernible.”

At one point, Morris was describing the priorities of the OR when he first joined in 2010.

“Indiscernible … coughing in background; poor audio set up; channel recording levels not functional — unable to isolate speakers,” says the transcript.