Virginia Class Submarine

Half of a peanut butter sandwich in a plastic bag was left at an agreed location in West Virginia by a Navy nuclear engineer. Inside the sandwich, wrapped in plastic, was a 16 GB memory card containing detailed secret information about the US Navy’s Virginia-class submarine reactors.  In subsequent drops, more memory cards containing submarine secrets were left in a bandaid box and a chewing gum container at sites in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The engineer, Jonathan Toebbe, and his wife, Diana Toebbe, thought that they were giving the information to a foreign country in exchange for cryptocurrency payments. Instead, the FBI had intercepted their correspondence and impersonated foreign agents. 

The F.B.I. and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service arrested the Toebbes on Saturday. They will appear in federal court in Martinsburg, W.Va., on Tuesday.

The New York Times reports that there is no allegation from the F.B.I. or the Justice Department that the foreign country obtained any classified information. But Mr. Toebbe had high-level clearances in nuclear engineering, and his service record showed that as a member of the Navy Reserve, he worked for 15 months from the office of the chief of naval operations, the top officer in the Navy.

Mr. Toebbe has worked for the military as a civilian since 2017. He was commissioned in the Navy and rose to the rank of lieutenant before moving to the Navy Reserve, which he left in December 2020 — the month the F.B.I. began contacting him.

According to court documents, he has worked on naval nuclear propulsion since 2012, including on technology devised to reduce the noise and vibration of submarines, factors that can give away their location. There is not much more detail in public Navy records. He worked on naval reactors in Arlington, Va., from 2012 to 2014. He then was a student at naval reactor school in Pittsburgh before returning to Arlington to work on reactors again.

The Washington Post notes that Toebbe allegedly provided 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 allegedly wrote to the foreign country, adding that he no longer had access to classified data but could answer any technical questions the foreign country might have.