The day after a Nova Scotia man pleaded guilty to charges of espionage, the Tories are staying mum on how the navy intelligence officer was able to sell military secrets to Russia.

Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Delisle maintained a top secret security clearance which allowed him to smuggle a treasure trove of data on a USB stick from his Halifax base and get it to a contact at the Russian Embassy.

The 41-year-old father of four apparently walked into the Russian Embassy in Ottawa in July 2007, showed his navy identification and offered his services as a spy.

“The GRU has been in existence even during the Cold War and it operated alongside the KGB focusing more on military intelligence,” explains Dalhousie University’s Ken Hansen. “Now, in this new age of information marketing they’re looking abroad for all kinds of things.”

During Delisle’s March bail hearing, an FBI agent testified that the GRU is more aggressive now in its information gathering than during the Cold War, that the agency is bigger than the FBI and that it is gathers information on other governments as a way of predicting military actions in the event of war.

“They’re doing something called Maritime Domain Awareness, which is principally commercial information about which ships are going where,” the expert testified. “But more particularly, what we’re interested in, what looks peculiar to us.”

The Crown attorney alleged that between 2007 and 2011, the Bedford man also compiled classified information in a draft email in an account he shared with his Russian contact. Creating a draft email meant no transaction occurred making the leak harder to detect.  

Delisle was apparently paid $3,000 monthly for the information.

“We won’t know until he’s sentenced exactly what they knew and what precautions were being taken,” Hansen told the talk show. “But no one in the international community seems to be getting in a flap over it. That’s a flag to me that this is not big stuff.”

Delisle’s lawyer commented following his client’s guilty plea Wednesday.

“I can say this, the information that was leaked in no way, at any point, jeopardized the lives or safety of any of the men and women operating with the Canadian Armed Forces,” Mike Taylor told reporters.

Critics and intelligence experts alike have been calling on the Harper Government to explain how the security breach was able to happen.

As far as Delisle’s motivation goes, The Globe and Mail reports that Delisle committed “professional suicide” because his marriage was unraveling.

He avoided a trial by pleading guilty to two counts of passing information to a foreign entity and one count of breach of trust. He will be sentenced in January.