Toebbe deposited an SD card hidden in a packet of chewing gum. Toebbe was sent $ 20,000.Īgents then set up another dead drop in Pennsylvania and a third in Virginia, where Mr.

After the undercover agent found the sandwich, Mr. Toebbe left an SD card in half a peanut butter sandwich in a plastic bag. Toebbe acted as a lookout, according to court documents, Mr. Toebbe and his wife Diana Toebbe at the site of the drop in West Virginia.

In a number of exchanges, the FBI persuaded the sender to leave the information on a deadlock in exchange for payments in cryptocurrency. The FBI followed the instructions in the package and started an encrypted conversation in which the sender offered Navy secrets in exchange for $ 100,000 in cryptocurrency. “I believe this information will be of great value to your nation. “Please forward this letter to your military intelligence service,” it says in a note in the package. The package was intercepted in the other country’s postal system and sent to an FBI legal attaché. Until the deal with Australia, the United States had only shared the technology with Great Britain from 1958 onwards.Īccording to the court records, the investigation into the Toebbes began in December 2020 when the FBI received a package sent to another country containing operating manuals, technical details and an offer to establish a covert relationship. Building compact, safe marine reactors is also a difficult engineering task. Navy because the reactors run on highly enriched uranium, which can also be converted into bomb fuel for nuclear weapons. Nuclear propulsion is one of the most closely held pieces of information in the U.S. As part of the Australia deal, the United States and Britain would help the country deploy nuclear submarines, which are equipped with nuclear propulsion systems that offer unlimited range and run so quietly that they are difficult to detect. The classified material in question included designs that could be useful in building submarines for many different countries. He has been working on nuclear ship propulsion since 2012, including technologies to reduce noise and vibrations from submarines, which can reveal their location. Mr Toebbe has been a civilian in the military since 2017 and was originally part of the active navy. submarine propulsion, it was unclear whether the unsolicited offer was directed at an adversary or an ally. While rivals like Russia and China have long searched for details on U.S. Virginia-class attack submarines – the technology at the heart of a recently announced deal with the UK and Australia. Navy nuclear engineer and his wife were charged with trying to share some of the United States’ best kept secrets about submarine technology with another country, according to court documents unsealed on Sunday.Įngineer Jonathan Toebbe has been accused of attempting to sell information about the nuclear propulsion system of U.S.

Navy nuclear engineer espionage fbi