![]() It wasn’t immediately clear whether either Toebbe had a lawyer. Toebbe, 42, was arrested in West Virginia on Saturday along with his 45-year-old wife, Diana, after he had placed a removable memory card at a prearranged “dead drop” in Jefferson County, according to the Justice Department. That country was not named in the court documents. In a criminal complaint detailing espionage-related charges against Jonathan Toebbe, the government said he sold information for nearly the past year to a contact he believed represented a foreign power. 14 plea agreement, he identified one lone co-conspirator in his plot: His wife.WASHINGTON - A Navy nuclear engineer with access to military secrets has been charged with trying to pass information about the design of American nuclear-powered submarines to someone he thought was a representative of a foreign government but who turned out to be an undercover FBI agent, the Justice Department said Sunday. Originally, Diana Toebbe had pleaded not guilty, and Jonathan Toebbe expressed optimism she could be exonerated. Over the course of his faux-espionage, Jonathan Toebbe divulged thousands of pages of classified documents with schematic designs, operating parameters and performance characteristics of the submarines to FBI agents posing as foreign agents. “I no longer have access to classified data so unfortunately cannot help you obtain other files.” “This information was slowly and carefully collected over several years in the normal course of my job to avoid attracting attention and smuggled past security checkpoints a few pages at a time,” the FBI quoted Toebbe as messaging them, according to court records. Jonathan Toebbe would download the classified materials onto SD cards, secreting them away in peanut butter sandwiches or bubblegum packages and leaving them at predetermined locations. In December 2020, days before his stated deadline, the foreign recipient shared the letter and documents with the FBI, which then launched an investigation into the couple.įor more than a year undercover agents communicated with Jonathan Toebbe using an encrypted email service, posing as foreign agents and facilitating four document drops in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Virginia. ![]() I believe this information will be of great value to your nation. “Please forward this letter to your military intelligence agency. “I apologize for this poor translation into your language,” Jonathan Toebbe wrote in that letter. In April 2020, Jonathan Toebbe sent his first letter to the unnamed government with a sampling of some of the information he had, telling the recipient to contact him by the end of the year if they wanted to purchase more information. “A critical component of national defense has been irreparably compromised.” Toebbe captured some of the most secure and sensitive information about our nuclear-powered fleet,” Houston wrote. ![]() William Houston, who commands the Navy’s Atlantic-based submarines, said in a statement to the court that Jonathan Toebbe’s attempted espionage would have threatened the country’s naval advantages. Prosecutors said Jonathan Toebbe’s cooperation post-guilty plea in recovering money and documents warranted the proposed sentence. Jonathan Toebbe had been smuggling out information about the Navy’s Virginia-class attack submarines, a highly-sophisticated nuclear-powered boat carrying cruise missiles that can run for 33 years without refueling. Groh also thought Jonathan Toebbe’s proposed sentence, between 12 1/2 and 17 1/2 years, was light considering the extent of his espionage. ![]()
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