A Navy nuclear engineer and his wife have been charged with repeatedly trying to pass secrets about U.S. nuclear submarines to a foreign country in an espionage plot discovered by the FBI, according to court documents.
Authorities say Jonathan Toebbe, who has a top-secret clearance, "has passed, and continues to pass, Restricted Data as defined by the Atomic Energy Act ... to a foreign government ... with the witting assistance of his spouse, Diana Toebbe," according to a criminal complaint filed in West Virginia and unsealed Sunday.
The court papers state that in December, an FBI official received a package that had been sent to the foreign country. The package contained U.S. Navy documents, a letter and instructions for how to conduct encrypted communications with the person offering the information, the court papers said.
The letter in the package said: "Please forward this letter to your military intelligence agency. I believe this information will be of great value to your nation. This is not a hoax."
Members of the FBI then posed as spies for the foreign country and began communicating by email with the person, suggesting a meeting, but the person raised concerns about the risks.
The court papers show an email conversation that began nearly a year ago in which Jonathan Toebbe allegedly discussed espionage tradecraft and payments with someone he thought was a foreign spy but was in fact an undercover FBI agent.
The emails show that Toebbe was cautious at first but that he came to trust the undercover agent in part because of the money he was paid and because the FBI arranged to "signal" Toebbe from the country's embassy in Washington over the Memorial Day weekend. The papers do not describe how the FBI was able to arrange such a signal.
According to the court papers, Toebbe asked for $100,000 in cryptocurrency, saying: "I understand this is a large request. However, please remember I am risking my life for your benefit and I have taken the first step. Please help me trust you fully."
The undercover FBI agent persuaded Toebbe to conduct a "dead drop" of information in late June in West Virginia's Jefferson County after Toebbe received about $10,000 worth of cryptocurrency, according to the charging papers.
With Diana Toebbe acting as a lookout, Jonathan Toebbe left a memory card concealed inside half a peanut butter sandwich in a plastic bag, according to the court documents. After the undercover agent retrieved the sandwich, Toebbe was sent $20,000, the documents say.
Agents then set up another dead drop in Pennsylvania and a third in Virginia, where they said Toebbe deposited a memory card concealed in a package of chewing gum.
After receiving $70,000 in cryptocurrency, Toebbe provided a decryption key to read the contents of one of the data cards, officials said.
Toebbe and his wife were charged with conspiracy to communicate restricted data and communication of restricted data. The couple were arrested Saturday in West Virginia and are due to make their first court appearance Tuesday.
The information Toebbe turned over included details of the design, operations and performance of Virginia-class nuclear submarine reactors, according to court papers.
Virginia-class subs carry cruise missiles and incorporate "the latest in stealth, intelligence-gathering, and weapons system technology," according to court papers. Each costs about $3 billion to build.
The technology is at the heart of a recently announced deal with Britain and Australia.
While rivals like Russia and China have long sought details of U.S. submarine propulsion, it was unclear whether the unsolicited offer was to an adversary or an ally.
While working at the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, a little-known government research facility in West Mifflin, Pa., Toebbe would have had access to the documents that he is accused of passing to the undercover FBI officer.
Many of the details of the exchanges were redacted in the court documents, but there was a reference to scaled drawings and maintenance details. One cited a note, which the documents suggest was written by one of the Toebbes, that the information "reflects decades of U.S. Navy 'lessons learned' that will help keep your sailors safe."
The classified material in question included designs that could be useful to many different countries building submarines. In the Australia deal, the United States and Britain are to help the country deploy nuclear-powered submarines, which are equipped with nuclear propulsion systems that offer limitless range and run so quietly that they are hard to detect.
Nuclear propulsion is among the most closely held information of the U.S. Navy because the reactors are fueled by highly enriched uranium, which can also be converted to bomb fuel for nuclear weapons. Building compact, safe naval reactors is also a difficult engineering task. Until the deal with Australia, the United States had shared the technology with only Britain, starting in 1958.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said the charges show "a plot to transmit information relating to the design of our nuclear submarines to a foreign nation."
The court papers do not identify the foreign country that Toebbe was said to have thought was buying the secrets, nor do they explain how the FBI came to possess in December the package that was first sent to an embassy, but the filings note the postmark on the package was many months earlier -- April 1, 2020.
Toebbe, 42, has worked for the Navy since 2012. He and his wife, 45, live in Annapolis, Md., where she works as a high school humanities teacher.
Authorities said they were arrested after they placed another data card at a secret dead-drop site. After the arrest, their home was searched by FBI agents and Navy investigators, according to officials.
Toebbe is accused of providing thousands of pages of documents, and officials said his espionage ambitions had been building for years.
"The information was slowly and carefully collected over several years in the normal course of my job to avoid attracting attention and smuggled past security checkpoints a few pages at a time," Toebbe wrote to the foreign country, according to the filings. He added that he no longer had access to classified data but could answer any technical questions the foreign country might have, the filings say.
The filings say he also wrote that he hoped the foreign government would be able to extract him and his family if he was ever discovered, adding, "We have passports and cash set aside for this purpose."
Information for this article was contributed by Devlin Barrett and Martin Weil of The Washington Post and by Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger of The New York Times.