(NOIR For USA) When the prison doors shut on insider spy and former Canadian Navy Sub-Lieutenant Jeffery Delisle, he left behind four children and a budding relationship with a woman who loved him. Delisle had a history of marital and financial problems that included declaring bankruptcy and discovering his wife’s adultery, which created the conditions that might be considered a psychological perfect storm.
Overwhelmed by events and acting on emotion, he came to the ill-conceived conclusion that volunteering to spy for the Russian military intelligence service (GRU) would solve his financial problems and give him a measure of control in his life, a sense of effectiveness.
Rather than being the solution to his problems, it set him on a downward spiral that ended with his arrest, separation from the children he loved and the promise of a new romantic relationship, and the loss of what little freedom he had not already sacrificed to his GRU handlers.
Of course, it did not have to end this way.
Even in his desperate, emotional state, he might still have chosen not to betray his country and her allies by volunteering to the GRU. At several points in his life he might have made other decisions and taken other actions that could have avoided the particular combination of internal and external circumstances, the specific confluence of events and Delisle’s personal perception of reality, which culminated in treason, regret, and finally prison.
However, the day Delisle walked into the Russian embassy in Ottawa he effectively sealed his own fate. Espionage is not a choice that lends itself to many options. . . . (read the rest)
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