Toebbe’s Valentine’s Day plea deal does not resolve the charges against his wife of more than 18 years who worked as a private-school teacher until her arrest. But it does undercut her claims of innocence.
In a court filing last month, Diana Toebbe’s lawyers argued there is “no dispute in this case that Mrs. Toebbe went with her husband to three ‘dead drops’ that were apparently part of his scheme to sell classified information to some third country. … Yet the issue in this case will be whether or not Mrs. Toebbe was complicit in her husband’s alleged espionage scheme.”
Jonathan Toebbe had previously maintained that his wife did not know what he was doing. But prosecutors have called those statements “conveniently timed and clearly biased,” and he said in court Monday, as part of his plea, that he “conspired with Diana Toebbe.”
A lawyer for Diana Toebbe declined to comment.
Under the terms of Jonathan Toebbe’s plea agreement, he faces a likely prison sentence of roughly 12 years to 17½ years. He also agreed to help authorities recover all restricted or sensitive government data, as well as the money that an undercover FBI agent gave him as part of a sting operation to gather evidence.
David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department national security lawyer now in private practice, said the plea sends “an incredibly loud message that the government would not settle for anything less than a heavy sentence. Even at 12 years, the bottom end of the sentencing range, that’s heavy time.”
Authorities say the Toebbes, of Annapolis, Md., schemed together to offer to sell government secrets about nuclear propulsion systems on U.S. submarines to an unidentified foreign country. According to court papers, investigators learned of the plot after the country forwarded the couple’s sales pitch to the FBI. The agency set up a sting operation that allegedly caught the Toebbes going to “dead drop” sites within driving distance from their home.
Diana Toebbe tried repeatedly to be released on bond, saying she did not know of her husband’s spy plans and needs to be home with their two school-age children. But the couple were denied bail after prosecutors said they might flee the country rather than face trial.
In court filings and hearings, prosecutors have painted a portrait of a seemingly normal suburban couple who carefully planned for years to sell secrets about Virginia-class nuclear submarines to a foreign country.
Diana Toebbe was known at her school as a meticulous humanities instructor who shared her liberal politics and pushed students to think differently. When she was not teaching, she posted knitting videos online. Jonathan Toebbe held a top-secret security clearance and was part of the Navy’s multibillion-dollar effort to build submarines that could remain submerged and undetected for the longest time possible. Both come from families with considerable military ties.
In a package postmarked April 1, 2020, Jonathan Toebbe offered to sell nuclear sub secrets to the foreign government, which has not been named in public court filings or proceedings. He included in his introductory letter a small sample of Navy documents.
“If you do not contact me by Dec. 31, 2020 I will conclude you are uninterested and will approach other possible buyers,” the letter allegedly said. The receiving country held onto the package for nearly nine months before handing it over to the FBI less than two weeks before Toebbe’s stated deadline.
FBI counterintelligence agents quickly launched an investigation designed to lure Toebbe out into the open. The agents allegedly recorded Toebbe and his wife leaving data cards for their supposed handlers, hidden inside a peanut butter sandwich, an adhesive-bandage wrapper and a package of gum.
In truth, Jonathan Toebbe’s foreign handler was an undercover FBI agent. Emails cited in court papers show that Toebbe came to trust the undercover agent in part because of the money he was paid and because the FBI arranged to “signal” Toebbe from the country’s embassy in Washington over Memorial Day weekend. The papers do not describe how the FBI was able to arrange such a signal.
The court papers note that Toebbe had worked for the Navy for almost a decade on nuclear propulsion for submarines, a technology that the United States recently agreed to provide to Australia. Previously, the United States had only shared the technology with Britain, also a partner in the deal with Australia. The agreement scuttled an Australian deal with France, igniting a diplomatic row between Washington and Paris.
In correspondence with his “handler,” Toebbe claimed to have spent years formulating his “spy for hire” plan. In total, 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, adding that he no longer had access to classified data but could answer any technical questions the foreign country might have.
Read more: