Treasonous Traps

Makes sense, doesn't it?  When someone's personal life gets trashed, and emotional upheaval results, then nothing else goes right.  If there's a professional life it too suffers because the person undergoing such emotional distress has struck a visceral landmine of dysfunction.  An incapacity to deal with life.  An inability to see his way clear to solving personal problems.  Making his professional problems irrelevant.

An unhealthy psyche is incapable of functioning to the best of its human capacity.

So here was a man who had a responsible position within the Canadian military, a naval officer privy to controlled secret documentation, who had lost his interest in life, whose state of mind was so confused that he contrived to go out of his way to compromise and confuse his professional life as well.  And in so doing created a long-lasting situation that placed the security of his country in jeopardy.

His marriage had failed.  Not because he failed the marriage contract necessarily, for he hadn't a mind to.  His teen-age sweetheart held him in contempt as a wife, leaving him, having a relationship with another man, becoming pregnant with that man.  In the process leaving Jeffrey Delisle with the remains of his failed marriage, in the form of dependent children themselves unhappy at the failure of their parents' marriage.

His suicidal mindset was offset by his care and love of his children.  They were his responsibility and he took that seriously.  But even his love for his children, left in his sole care, seemed insufficient to draw him out of his emotionally drained lethargy of existence.  An emotional derangement that seemed to prod him to approach the Russian Embassy in Ottawa to offer secrets for cash.

A fragile financial situation was another of his problems, and that decision to surrender his country's security for his need for additional income seemed some kind of solution.  Perhaps he thought he could control the situation, informed himself that the data he passed on was not critical and wouldn't matter, that when he felt the time right to leave it all behind him, he could and he would.

But the grim, dark, sometimes lethal underworld of espionage has its own rules, and they include blackmail, threats and fear.  Subtle indications that he was no longer master of his own destiny; he had made that proverbial pact with the devil.  In so doing he betrayed his country through his sensitive exposure to classified data which he then casually passed on as an traitor unconcerned for the damage he wrought to his country's reputation with its own allies.

He carefully selected what he would share with his interlocutors, in the realm of counter-intelligence, hugely benefiting Russian spymasters, and in the process upsetting the international network of like intelligence communicators.  In the process making his own life more complex and unlivable.  So can it be assumed that he felt a sense of relief when he was taken into custody by the RCMP?