Investigators paid the engineer more than $100,000 in cryptocurrency as part of the investigation, money that he has agreed to help officials recover. ''We have cash and passports set aside for th purpose' of having to flee the United States,' he wrote in a message on his third drop. The documents also suggest that Toebbe was ready to abandon his life in the U.S. The plea agreement references agents posing as representatives of 'COUNTRY1.'īefore making the four drops, Toebbe traveled to Washington, D.C., around the end of May 2021 to view a 'physical signal … that had been placed at a location associated with COUNTRY1' as a way of assuring him of their legitimacy. Prosecutors have not revealed for whom Toebbe believed he was spying. The next two drops involved Toebbe hiding SD cards in packets of chewing gum.

Navy 'lessons learned' that will help keep your sailors safe,'' according to the plea document. 'The message also included statements that the information 'was slowly and carefully collected over several years' and 'smuggled past security checkpoints a few pages at a time' and that one of the sets of information 'reflects decades of U.S. On his second drop, Toebbe left behind a typed message that laid out a plan for him to leak '51 packages over time in exchange for a total of $5 million paid in cryptocurrency.' That SD card also contained a typed message that said: 'I hope your experts are very happy with the sample provided' and 'I want our relationship to be very successful for us both.' On his first drop, Toebbe put 'militarily sensitive design elements, operating parameters, and performance characteristics of Virginia-class submarine reactors on an SD card, which was wrapped in plastic and concealed between two slices of bread on a half of a peanut butter sandwich,' according to the plea. She received limited immunity in exchange for her plea.A dead drop is a spycraft term that describes the practice of one person leaving materials in a pre-arranged location for another person to pick up later, thus avoiding direct contact between them. Toebbe also faces a $100,00 fine and up to five years of supervised release. Toebbe had repeatedly tried to be released on bond, claiming until now that she did not know about her husband’s plans even though she accompanied him to the dead drops.Īs part of Toebbe’s plea agreement, she has agreed to cooperate with investigators, including sitting for a polygraph exam if requested, allowing them access to her electronic devices and accounts, and assisting them in retrieving the $100,000 in Monero cryptocurrency stemming from this case. She will remain in federal custody until her sentencing date. That judge will have the option to impose a different sentence than agreed upon by Toebbe and prosecutors. The couple allegedly went to great lengths to hide the SD cards at the dead-drop locations over the course of several months, tucking an SD card into a saran-wrapped peanut butter sandwich in one instance, while others were hidden inside a packet of gum and a sealed Band-Aid wrapper, according to prosecutors.įederal Magistrate Judge Robert Trumble accepted Toebbe’s guilty plea, days after accepting her husband’s.Īnother judge will sentence her at a later date.

They were eventually arrested on October 9 at what was to be a fourth dead-drop location.Īccording to the plea agreement, Toebbe acted as a lookout for her husband during three “dead drops” – two in West Virginia and one in Pennsylvania – where they delivered SD cards containing classified information about nuclear submarines to undercover federal agents. Toebbe pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to communicate restricted data, which typically carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.įBI agents were monitoring and surveilling the Toebbes for months after an undisclosed foreign government informed the FBI that Jonathan Toebbe had sent them a package offering to sell nuclear secrets, according to the criminal complaint. Toebbe, 46, will face up to three years in prison as part of the plea agreement. Diana Toebbe, the wife of a US Navy nuclear engineer who earlier this week pleaded guilty in a scheme to sell US naval secrets to a foreign country, pleaded guilty Friday in a federal courtroom in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

Navy nuclear engineer espionage