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Jonathan Toebbe sold the design of the nuclear-powered warship to a foreign official who was an FBI undercover agent.
The U.S. Department of Justice stated that a U.S. Navy nuclear engineer and his spouse were arrested on espionage charges on suspicion of trying to sell classified information.
According to court records released on Sunday, Jonathan Toby and his wife Diana Toby were arrested and accused of violating the Atomic Energy Law after trying to sell the design of the nuclear-powered battleship to someone they believed to be a foreign representative.
The department stated that Toby, who had a security clearance, inadvertently communicated with FBI agents and passed on sensitive military secrets. This plan lasted for nearly a year.
In December 2020, an FBI official received a package in which someone tried to establish a “secret relationship” with a foreign representative, which was only identified as “COUNTRY1” in court documents.
Toebbe listed a return address in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which contained a sample of restricted data and instructions for establishing a secret relationship to obtain more information.
He began communicating via encrypted email with an individual who he believed to be a representative of a foreign government. The person was actually an undercover agent of the FBI. After several months of communication, he finally reached an encrypted currency exchange agreement of thousands of dollars.
Before Toby agreed to go to a location in West Virginia to complete the transaction, the undercover agent sent Toby $10,000 in cryptocurrency as a “good faith” payment. Under the supervision of his wife, he hid an SD card in a peanut butter sandwich and placed it in a pre-arranged “dead spot” position.
The undercover agent sent Jonathan Toebbe a $20,000 cryptocurrency payment and received the decryption key for the SD card, which contained restricted data about the nuclear reactor of a US submarine.
The FBI arrested Toby and his wife on Saturday, and there were two more “deads” after that.
Attorney General Merrick B Garland welcomed the arrest. “The work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice prosecutors, Naval Criminal Investigation Service, and Department of Energy is essential to thwart the conspiracy alleged in the complaint and take the first step to bring the perpetrators to justice,” he said.
Toebbe is an employee of the Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion Program (also known as Naval Reactor) and has access to information related to military-sensitive design elements, operating parameters and performance characteristics of nuclear-powered battleship reactors.
The couple are charged with conspiracy to disseminate restricted data and dissemination of restricted data, and plan to appear in federal court in Martinsburg, West Virginia on Tuesday.
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