SUB SECRETS
Who is Jonathan Toebbe’s wife Diana?
DIANA Toebbe, along with her husband Jonathan, have been accused of trying to pass information about nuclear submarines to a foreign government.
The person they were in contact with though was actually an undercover agent and the pair were arrested on October 9, 2021.
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Who is Jonathan Toebbe's wife Diana?
Diana Toebbe, 45, is a humanities teacher at Key School, a private school in Annapolis, .
The K-12 school said on Sunday, October 10, 2021, that she had been suspended indefinitely.
The Toebbes live in Annapolis and have two children.
Her husband is a nuclear engineer, working for the US government since 2012, specializing in naval nuclear propulsion, the FBI says.
Toebbe also worked on naval reactors in Arlington, , from 2012 to 2014.
According to public Navy records, he worked for 15 months in the office of the chief of naval operations, the top officer in the military's branch.
He has also been assigned to a government-owned laboratory in the Pittsburgh area that officials say works on nuclear power for the US Navy.
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What has Diana Toebbe been accused of?
It is unclear precisely what charges the couple face or how many counts, other than espionage-related charges.
On Sunday, October 10, 2021, the Department of Jusztice released a statement saying: "Jonathan and Diana Toebbe, both of Annapolis, Maryland, were arrested in Jefferson County, West Virginia, by the FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) on Saturday, Oct. 9.
"They will have their initial appearances on Tuesday, Oct. 12, in federal court in Martinsburg, West Virginia."
In a criminal complaint, the government said he sold information for nearly the past year to a contact he believed represented a foreign power.
That country was not named in the court documents.
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Toebbe was arrested in on October 9, 2021, along with his wife, Diana, after he had placed a removable memory card at a prearranged “dead drop” in the state, according to the Justice Department.
The FBI says the scheme began in April 2020 when Jonathan Toebbe sent a package of Navy documents to a foreign government and wrote that he was interested in selling to that country operations manuals, performance reports and other sensitive information.
Authorities say he also provided instructions on how to conduct the furtive relationship, with a letter that said: “I apologize for this poor translation into your language. Please forward this letter to your military intelligence agency. I believe this information will be of great value to your nation. This is not a hoax.”
That package, which had a return address in Pittsburgh, was obtained by the FBI last December through its legal attache office in the unspecified foreign country. The court documents don’t explain how the FBI came to receive the package or from whom.
In any event, the FBI used Toebbe’s outreach as the launching pad for a months-long undercover operation in which an agent posing as a representative of a foreign contact made contact with Toebbe and agreed to pay thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency for the information that Toebbe was offering.
After weeks of back and forth over email, the undercover agent in June sent Toebbe about $10,000 in , describing it as a sign of good faith and trust, the FBI says.
Weeks later, federal agents watched as the Toebbes arrived at an agreed-upon location in West Virginia for the exchange, with Diana Toebbe appearing to serve as a lookout for her husband during a dead-drop operation for which the FBI paid $20,000.
The FBI recovered a blue memory card wrapped in plastic and placed between two slices of bread on a half of a peanut butter sandwich, court documents say.
The records on the memory card included design elements and performance characteristics of Virginia-class submarine reactors.
The Justice Department describes those submarines as “cruise missile fast-attack submarines, which incorporate the latest in stealth, intelligence gathering, and weapons systems technology.”
The memory card also included a typed message that said, in part: “I hope your experts are very happy with the sample provided and I understand the importance of a small exchange to grow our trust.”
The FBI conducted similar dead-drop exchanges over the next several months, including one in August in eastern Virginia for which Toebbe was paid roughly $70,000.
In that instance, prosecutors say, he concealed in a chewing gum package a memory card that contained schematic designs for the Virginia-class submarine.
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The complaint alleges violations of the Atomic Energy Act, which restricts the disclosure of information related to atomic weapons or nuclear materials.
Espionage carries a maximum sentence of ten years under US law.
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