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Suburban Spies Are Us: Part 2
The unbelievable true story of a suburban Maryland couple who tried to sell U.S. nuclear military secrets to Brazil and failed miserably.
If only Jonathan Toebbe had obeyed his instincts, he and his wife Diana might have gotten away with the whole thing.
They might have abandoned their carefully devised plan to sell U.S. nuclear submarine secrets to a foreign nation and remained free to try again. But the plan was just too perfect- he being a nuclear engineer for the US Navy with Top Secret Security Clearance via the US Department of Defense and access to highly confidential materials through the US Department of Energy, she being an unemployed teacher with “no loyalty to abstractions”.
They just couldn’t walk away.
The instant their “contact” inside a Brazilian intelligence agency- in reality the FBI impersonating one, the Brazilian government having sensibly turned the anonymous offer to sell top-secret U.S. military secrets over to their American counterparts long since- asked for an in-person exchange of data for cryptocurrency, the couple should have known better.
“I am concerned that using a dead drop location your friend prepared makes me very vulnerable,” Mr. Toebbe complained in one email exchange, according to documents revealed this week in court. “For now, I must consider the…