On Wednesday (9), a US court sentenced a nuclear engineer and his wife for trying to sell American military secrets to Brazil for two years. The plan was not consolidated, since at the time the Brazilian government informed the FBI, the American federal police, about the case.
According to The Washington Post, Jonathan Toebbe, 44, a top-secret security clearance professional in the US Navy, has admitted to trying to sell sensitive data about the technology behind the nuclear reactors that power the country’s fleet of attack submarines. . The technology costs about US$ 3 billion (R$ 16 billion).
For this, he enlisted the help of his wife, Diana Toebbe, a teacher at a private school in Annapolis (Maryland).
The identity of the country approached by the Toebbes was not revealed, but according to a member of the Brazilian government and people briefed on the investigation, Jonathan Toebbe approached Brazil two more years ago, offering thousands of pages of confidential documents about nuclear reactors he had stolen from the US Navy center in Washington for several years.
After Jonathan sent a letter offering the secrets to Brazil’s military intelligence agency, in April 2020, the country’s authorities delivered the letter to the FBI’s legal attaché in the country. Then, starting in December of that year, an undercover US police agent posed as a Brazilian authority to gain Toebbe’s trust and convince him to deposit the documents in a location chosen by the investigators.
The engineer eventually agreed to supply the material and offered technical assistance to Brazil’s nuclear submarine program, using confidential information he had obtained during years of working for the Navy. Jonathan and Diana were arrested in October 2021 and pleaded guilty to espionage charges just last year.
In Wednesday’s trial, District Judge Gina Groh called the Toebbes “confessed traitors” who committed “horrific acts against this nation.” The magistrate also said that the couple’s crime was one of the most serious she has seen in her career and could cause “damage to American soldiers, military and civilians”. The technology sold by Jonathan allows the submarines to stay submerged for longer periods and move more stealthily, according to court documents.
Prosecutors accuse Jonathan of offering 51 packets of classified information to the undercover FBI agent in exchange for $5 million paid in cryptocurrency.
Diana, in turn, acted in the delivery of the classified material. In June 2021, her husband arranged with the undercover agent to leave an SD card wrapped in plastic and placed in the middle of a peanut butter sandwich. At the time, his wife was responsible for watching over the material until the agent harvested it.
At some point, the prosecution says, Jonathan Toebbe left a message that he and his wife were prepared to flee the United States: “We have money and passports reserved,” he wrote.
Defense lawyers argue that the Toebbes were trying to leave the US because they opposed then-President Donald Trump. An FBI search of their Annapolis home found passports, thousands of dollars in cash, shredded documents and a purse with a USB flash drive and latex gloves inside. The couple has two children, aged 12 and 16.
“I believed that my family was under terrible threat, that democracy itself was on the brink of collapse. And that kind of catastrophic thinking overcame me,” Jonathan said at the hearing. He described himself as an overworked family man who “self-medicated with alcohol” during a depression.
The crime provides for life imprisonment, but in the end Jonathan was sentenced to 19 years in prison and his wife to almost 22 years. The difference is justified because investigators discovered that Diana tried to communicate with her husband through letters she wrote from prison. In the documents, she asked him to plead guilty and tell authorities that she had nothing to do with the plan.
In the end, everything went wrong. “The defendant abused his position of trust in a way that looks like a detective novel or a movie script,” the judge concluded in her sentence.
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