Oct 11, 2021: The U.S. Department of Justice says a U.S. Navy nuclear engineer and his spouse have been arrested on suspicion of spying for allegedly trying to sell classified information.

Jonathan Toebbe and his wife, Diana Toebbe, were arrested on Sunday for violating the Atomic Energy Act and charged with attempting to sell nuclear warships, according to unconfirmed court records on Sunday. They were trying to sell to a man they thought was a representative of a foreign power.

The couple were charged with conspiracy to communicate restricted data and communication of restricted data and are scheduled to make an appearance in federal court on Tuesday.

The department said Toebbe, who held a security clearance, unwittingly communicated with FBI agents and passed along sensitive military secrets, in a scheme that stretched nearly a year.

In Dece,ber 2020, the FBI received a package from someone attempting to establish “a covert relationship” with a representative from a foreign country, identified only as “COUNTRY1” in court documents.

Toebbe began corresponding via encrypted email with an individual whom he believed to be a representative of the foreign government, who was instead an undercover FBI agent, and continued a correspondence for several months before reaching an exchange agreement for thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency.

The undercover agent sent $10,000 in cryptocurrency to Toebbe as “good faith” payment before he agreed to travel to a location in West Virginia to complete the transaction. With his wife acting as a lookout, he concealed an SD card within a peanut butter sandwich at a prearranged “dead drop” location.

The undercover agent sent Jonathan Toebbe a $20,000 cryptocurrency payment and received in return a decryption key for the SD card, which contained restricted data on US submarine nuclear reactors.

Toebbe was an employee at the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, also known as Naval Reactors, and had access to information related to military sensitive design elements, operating parameters and performance characteristics of the reactors for nuclear-powered warships.

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