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US navy engineer Jonathan Toebbe facing up to 17 years in jail after admitting to selling nuclear submarine secrets - ABC News
US navy engineer Jonathan Toebbe facing up to 17 years in jail after admitting to selling nuclear submarine secrets
A US Navy engineer has pleaded guilty to passing information about American nuclear-powered submarines to someone he thought was a representative of a foreign government, but who was actually an undercover FBI agent.
Key points:
- The country to which Toebbe wanted to sell the classified information was not revealed
- Toebbe stashed memory cards inside a chewing gum wrapper and a peanut butter sandwich
- The FBI said Toebbe was paid $US100,000 in cryptocurrency by one of their undercover agents
The sentencing range agreed to by lawyers calls for a potential punishment of between 12 years and 17 years in prison.
Toebbe and his wife, Diana, were arrested last October after prosecutors said he abused his access to top-secret government information and repeatedly sold details about the design elements and performance characteristics of Virginia-class submarines.
Toebbe acknowledged during the plea hearing that he conspired with his wife to pass classified information to a foreign government in exchange for money with the intent to "injure the United States".
"Yes, your honour," Toebbe said when asked if he considered himself guilty.
Assistant Attorney-General Matthew Olsen, the Justice Department's top national security official, said information about nuclear-powered submarines was among the US government's most closely held secrets.
"The defendant was entrusted with some of those secrets and instead of guarding them, he betrayed the trust placed in him and conspired to sell them to another country for personal profit," Mr Olsen said.
Memory card hidden in sandwich
The FBI said the scheme began in April 2020, when 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.
He included in the package, which had a Pittsburgh return address, instructions to his supposed contact for how to establish a covert relationship with him, prosecutors said.
That package was obtained by the FBI last December in the unspecified foreign country.
That set off an undercover operation in which an agent posing as a representative of a foreign country made contact with Toebbe, ultimately paying $US100,000 ($140,350) in cryptocurrency in exchange for the information Toebbe was offering.
Diana Toebbe is accused of serving as a lookout at several prearranged "dead-drop" locations at which her husband left behind memory cards containing government secrets — devices concealed in objects such as a chewing gum wrapper and a peanut butter sandwich.
She has pleaded not guilty and the case against her remains pending.
The couple was arrested in West Virginia on October 9 after Jonathan Toebbe placed a memory card at a dead-drop location.
The country to which Toebbe was looking to sell the information has not been identified in court documents and was not disclosed in court during the plea hearing.
Toebbe, who held a top-secret security clearance through the Defense Department, agreed as part of the plea deal to help federal officials with locating and retrieving all classified information in his possession, as well as the cryptocurrency paid to him by the FBI.
FBI agents who searched the couple's Maryland home found a rubbish bag of shredded documents, thousands of dollars in cash, valid children's passports and a "go-bag" containing a USB flash drive and latex gloves, according to court testimony last year.
ABC/AP
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