Couple Charged With Trying to Sell Sub Secrets Sentenced to 41 Years in Jail

Former US Navy engineer Jonathan Toebbe and his wife Diana were arrested last year and charged with attempting to pass top secret information on the design of American nuclear submarines to undercover FBI agents posing as Brazilian intelligence officers.

Mr. and Mrs. Toebbe have been sentenced to a combined four+ decades in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to communicate restricted information related to the design of nuclear sub technology.

On Wednesday, US District Judge Gina Groh handed down a sentence of 19 years to 44-year-old Jonathan Toebbe, a nuclear engineer in the Pentagon’s Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, while his wife Diana, 46, received 22 years. The judge added several years to Mrs Toebbe’s sentence after she tried to illegally communicate with her husband and asked him to fib about the extent to which she was involved in the plot.

The Toebbes pled guilty to espionage charges in February, with Judge Groh denying plea deals for reduced sentences in August, arguing that their actions compromised the integrity of US military secrets and potentially undercut advantages enjoyed by the US military forged through decades of research.

Mr. Toebbe and his wife were arrested in October 2021 and accused of trying to hand secret materials on Virginia-class submarines – one of the most advanced types of nuclear-powered attack boats in the US arsenal, to the Brazilians in April 2020. The couple was found out after Brasilia informed Washington of the plot, prompting the FBI to start communicating with them, and eventually agreeing to sell $100,000-worth of information for Monero cryptocurrency. A total of $70,000 was paid out to the Toebbes before their arrest at a dead drop site in West Virginia. In a message left to whom the Toebbes thought were their foreign handlers, the couple requested a total of $5 million in cryptocurrency in return for 11,000 pages of classified information.

The Toebbes reportedly struggle with mental health and substance abuse issues, and defense lawyers made them out to be obsessed with the idea that Donald Trump sought to undermine American democracy. It’s not clear why the couple tried to sell their secrets to Brazil, which was led at the time by Jair ‘Trump of the Tropics’ Bolsonaro.