A U.S. Navy nuclear engineer and his wife, a teacher, were arrested after trying to sell secret submarine plans to a foreign official who was actually an undercover FBI agent, the Justice Department said.
Jonathan Toby, 42, and his wife, Diana, 45, were caught in West Virginia handing over an SD card with information.
The indictment alleges that Toby, who, according to his LinkedIn page, had been a member of the Navy since 2012, had been selling information to a single agent of an unnamed foreign state for more than a year.
Three days before the arrest, the couple agreed to leave SD cards containing secret schemes of a nuclear submarine. Instead, they were to receive $ 100,000 in cryptocurrency.
The cards were hidden in a sandwich with peanut butter, a pack of chewing gum and a box of patches.
I tried to sell you information about “militarily important structural elements, operating parameters and performance of Virginia-class submarine reactors,” the indictment said.
According to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the couple will be tried for conspiracy to pass information to a foreign state related to the design of American nuclear submarines.