An American couple appeared before a federal judge in West Virginia on Tuesday, two days after being arrested for attempting to sell military nuclear secrets to a foreign country. The hearing was brief and did not provide answers to the many questions surrounding this mysterious case.
Jonathan Toebbe, a 42-year-old naval engineer, and his wife Diana, a 45-year-old teacher, were brought to the courtroom handcuffed and dressed in orange prison attire, appearing separately before the judge. During the session, the judge reviewed financial documents and announced that the defendants have the right to appoint a lawyer paid for by the state, indicating that their financial situation is poor. This may explain why they tried to sell secrets related to American nuclear-powered submarines to a currently unnamed foreign nation.
Court documents merely state that this nation is a U.S. ally, as it cooperated with American investigators, and its residents do not speak English.
Last September, a diplomatic crisis erupted between Washington and Paris over U.S. submarines after Australia joined a strategic partnership with the United States and Britain, leading to the cancellation of a substantial contract it had with France for traditional submarines, to be replaced with American nuclear-powered ones.
According to the charges against the couple, Toebbe had been working since 2012 on the design of reactors for Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines, the latest generation of attack submarines in the U.S. fleet. In April 2020, this engineer sent a package to a third country containing a sample of documents and a letter with instructions on how to communicate with him.
In his letter, the engineer stated, “I apologize for this poor translation into your language,” promising to provide “valuable information.” In December 2020, the package reached the U.S. federal police attaché in that country, according to the complaint, which did not specify how this happened.
Subsequently, an investigator from the FBI contacted Toebbe, pretending to be a representative of the foreign nation that cooperated extensively with U.S. authorities to the point of displaying a flag at its embassy in Washington to gain the engineer's trust.
Through this communication channel, the engineer repeatedly sent classified Navy information to whom he believed was the foreign representative between June and August, receiving payments totaling $100,000 in cryptocurrency.
The couple was storing this classified information on encrypted memory chips and delivering it to their supposed client without any direct meeting, as they would leave it in a pre-agreed location and conceal it in a sandwich, a gum box, or a band-aid wrapper.
In his letter, the engineer expressed his hope to meet his client “one day in a café over a bottle of wine.” Toebbe and his wife are parents to minor children and were arrested by the FBI on Saturday, facing a possible life sentence for the charges against them.
