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Jonathan Toebbe sold the nuclear-powered warship design to a foreign official, who was an undercover FBI agent.
A US Navy nuclear engineer and his wife have been arrested on charges of espionage after allegedly attempting to sell confidential information, the US Department of Justice has said.
According to unsealed court records on Sunday, Jonathan Toebbe and his wife, Diana Toebbe, were arrested and charged with breaking the atomic energy law after attempting to sell the design of nuclear-powered warships to someone that they believed to be a representative of a foreign power. .
The department said Toebbe, who held a security clearance, unintentionally contacted FBI agents and passed on sensitive military secrets, in a scheme that lasted nearly a year.
In December 2020, an FBI official received a package from someone trying to establish “a secret relationship” with a representative of a foreign country, identified only as “COUNTRY1” in court documents.
Toebbe had listed a return address in Pittsburgh, Pa. Containing a sample of restricted data and instructions for establishing a secret relationship in order to obtain additional information.
He began corresponding via encrypted email with someone he believed to be a foreign government official, who was more of an undercover FBI agent, and pursued correspondence for several months before making a deal to swap thousands. dollars in cryptocurrency.
The undercover agent sent Toebbe $ 10,000 in cryptocurrency as a “good faith” payment before agreeing to travel to a location in West Virginia to complete the transaction. With his wife acting as a lookout, he hid an SD card in a peanut butter sandwich at a pre-established “dead drop” location.
The undercover agent sent Jonathan Toebbe a payment of $ 20,000 in cryptocurrency and in return received a decryption key for the SD card, which contained restricted data on US submarine nuclear reactors.
The FBI arrested Toebbe and his wife on Saturday after two more “dead drops”.
Attorney General Merrick B Garland welcomed the arrest. “The work of the FBI, Department of Justice prosecutors, the Navy Criminal Investigation Service and the Department of Energy has been essential in thwarting the conspiracy accused in the complaint and in taking this first step in bringing the perpetrators to justice. in court, ”he said.
Toebbe was an employee of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, also known as Naval Reactors, and had access to information relating to sensitive military design elements, operating parameters and performance characteristics of warships’ reactors at nuclear propulsion.
The couple have been charged with Conspiracy to Release Restricted Data and Disclosure of Restricted Data and are scheduled to appear in federal court in Martinsburg, West Virginia on Tuesday.
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