BALTIMORE — A former Navy nuclear engineer from Annapolis pleaded guilty to espionage Monday, admitting in federal court that he tried to sell classified military information to a foreign government.
Jonathan Toebbe entered the guilty plea in the W. Craig Broadwater Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Martinsburg, West Virginia, which is not far from where he and his wife, Diana, were arrested in October.
Having worked since 2012 on projects related to naval nuclear propulsion, Toebbe held a top-secret security clearance, according to federal investigators. They said it’s possible he’d been collecting information related to the Navy’s nuclear endeavors throughout his tenure and, at some point in 2020, sought out a foreign country to share it with.
In April 2020, Toebbe sent a sample of restricted data to a country not identified in court records, asking the recipient to share it with their country’s military intelligence agency and promising his information would “be of great value to your nation,” according to court records. Toebbe’s letter was shared with an FBI attaché, prompting federal agents to launch an undercover operation.
Over more than a year, undercover agents communicated with Toebbe over an encrypted email service and facilitated the displaying of a discrete signal in Washington, D.C., as well as a series of “dead drops” in 2021 in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The agents would transfer cryptocurrency to Toebbe after picking up the SD cards he left in predetermined locations.
Toebbe concealed the digital memory devices in a peanut butter sandwich, a Band-Aid wrapper and a chewing gum package.
In sum, the government paid Toebbe the equivalent of $100,000 in cryptocurrency. Federal prosecutors said in October the government has not located the money it paid Toebbe.
With each exchange of information, agents gleaned more about the people they were dealing with: Jonathan, the nuclear engineer, and Diana, 46, a humanities teacher at the Key School in Annapolis.
The FBI followed the couple to the drop sites and watched them deposit the information, accusing Diana Toebbe of acting as a lookout. Jonathan Toebbe wrote in an encrypted email “only one other person I know is aware of our special relationship” and federal agents wrote in their original complaint they believe that person was his wife.
A federal grand jury indicted the couple Oct. 19.
The husband and wife have insisted Diana Toebbe is innocent. Her attorneys pushed for her release pending trial, arguing she wasn’t privy to her husband’s scheme to divulge classified information. A magistrate judge denied that request and she appealed.
It’s unclear what, if any, implications Jonathan Toebbe’s plea has on his wife’s case.
According to court records, Jonathan Toebbe provided thousands of pages of documents with schematic designs, operating parameters and performance characteristics about “nuclear-powered cruise missile fast-attack submarines,” known in the military as “Virginia-class submarines.”
Toebbe signed every encrypted email as “Alice,” describing the format of the information he provided and often expressing concerns about the possibility that he may be communicating with law enforcement, which he regularly referred to as “adversaries.”
“Thank you for your partnership as well, my friend,” Jonathan Toebbe wrote in an encrypted email to a federal agent. “One day, when it is safe, perhaps two old friends will have a chance to stumble into each other at a cafe, share a bottle of wine and laugh over stories of their shared exploits.”
