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Suburban Spies Are Us
A Maryland couple has been convicted of trying to sell U.S. nuclear submarine secrets to Brazil in a tale too strange to be anything but true.
In a plot that seems destined to be a made-for-tv movie, a nondescript, average couple from suburban Maryland thought they’d hatched the perfect plan to get rich.
In April of 2020, Jonathan Toebbe was a naval nuclear engineer working for the U.S. government. His wife Diana Toebbe was an ordinary housewife with a teaching degree collecting dust and a blistering hatred for Donald Trump on par with the fire of a thousand suns.
The Mueller Report was a complete bust, as were two impeachments against Trump and subsequent investigations since then. Somewhere along the line, politics pushed a seemingly normal couple with no criminal record to decide to…cold call a foreign government with an offer to sell classified U.S. nuclear military secrets.
During the process of discovery, in building the government’s case against the Toebbes, a veritable treasure trove of information was unearthed. Text messages exchanged, communications between the couple and those to whom they hoped to sell U.S. military secrets; everything.
The couple selected Brazil to approach with their nefarious offer: Classified information about U.S. nuclear warships and submarines in return for money. Selling to China or Russia, the couple had decided, would have been “immoral”.
“[Selling to Brazil] is not morally defensible either,” Mr. Toebbe mused in one text message to his wife. “We convinced ourselves it was fine, but it really isn’t either, is it.”
“I have no problems at all with it,” answered his wife and partner in crime, unequivocally. “I feel no loyalty to abstractions.”
Just in case other U.S. employees with access to state secrets are feeling, “no loyalty to abstractions,” the details recently released about the case have been positively hair-raising.
In April of 2020, Mr. Toebbe, under the call sign ALICE, sent a parcel of secret documents to Brazil’s military intelligence agency with promises of more to come…for a price.
Brazilian intelligence officials very promptly and intelligently decided to alert their law enforcement counterparts in the…
