A former Navy employee and his wife will go to prison for more than 19 and more than 21 years, respectively, for conspiring to sell nuclear-submarine secrets to a nation reported to be Brazil, a federal judge ordered recently.
Jonathan Toebbe, 44, a former Q-cleared Naval Reactors employee who smuggled technical data about Virginia-class attack submarines out of his workplace for years, got a 232-month prison sentence, equal to about 19 years and four months. He was also fined more than $45,000 and faces five years of supervised release.
His wife Diana Toebbe, 46, received a harsher sentence: 262 months, closer to 22 years than 21 years, and a fine of $50,000 for assisting with her husband’s scheme to sell the classified submarine data to people the couple thought were foreign government officials but were in reality FBI agents. Diana Toebbe faces three years of supervised release.
The two were sentenced Nov. 9 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia, Martinsburg. The court did not make the sentencing order public — only a summary from the court reporter — but the Justice Department issued a post-sentencing press release about the case.
The New York Times this year reported that the nation the Toebbes thought they were dealing with was Brazil. In its complaint against the Toebbes, the Justice Department did not identify the foreign national Jonathan Toebbe contacted in 2020 while seeking a buyer for the stolen data.
Jonathan Toebbe formerly worked at the Navy’s Reactor Engineering Division and the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin, Pa., near Pittsburgh. Fluor Marine Propulsion manages the site for the National Security Administration.
In the course of its sting operation, the FBI transferred some $100,000 worth of the cryptocurrency known as Monero to Jonathan Toebbe, who collected the digital currency as payment for a series of encrypted SD cards, one hidden inside a sandwich, delivered to the agents at dead drops in West Virginia.
