Spy passions in the USA
On Saturday October 9, the FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigation Service arrested Jonathan and Diana Tobbe.
Tobbe, 42, a naval nuclear engineer with top-secret security clearance, sent a classified data packet “to an unidentified country” in 2020 and then began selling secrets for tens of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency to an undercover FBI agent posing as a foreign official - reported in the US Department of Justice.
When opening a criminal case detailing the espionage charges against Jonathan Tobbe, the government claimed that he sold the information to a contact that it believed represented a foreign power. This country was not named in court documents.
Recently, it is a rare case when it is not Russia or China that is accused of espionage against the United States.
Nevertheless, a couple of American initiators who tried to sell the atomic secrets of an American submarine fleet, face serious troubles up to life imprisonment.
A married couple from the suburbs of the United States was accused of conspiracy of high treason.
The American couple from Maryland was charged with trying to sell military secrets to a foreign government, for which they face life in prison if convicted.
The case in American society and the media raised questions about the motives of the seemingly humble couple, who were allegedly willing to risk it all, believing they could do it as super spies.
Attempts to espionage began in April 2020 when, according to the Justice Department, Jonathan Tobbe, a U.S. Navy employee, contacted an official working for a foreign government by mailing a parcel with a note stating that he could provide them with information on nuclear submarines. boats and proposals for the organization of spy communications.
As an expert with clearance from the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, he claimed to have access to information on nuclear power plants used on submarines.
Pages from biography
Tobbe has worked in the military as a civil servant since 2017. He was accepted into the navy and rose to the rank of lieutenant before transferring to the naval reserve, which he left in December 2020.
According to court documents, he has been working on naval nuclear power plants since 2012. including over technologies designed to reduce the noise and vibration of submarines - factors that can give away their location.
There are not many details in the public records of the Navy. It is only known that he worked on naval reactors in Arlington, Virginia from 2012 to 2014.
He then attended the Pittsburgh Naval Reactor School and then returned to Arlington to work on reactors again.
Nuclear secrets
Nuclear propulsion systems are one of the most closely held records of the US Navy, in part because the reactors run on highly enriched uranium, which can also be converted into fuel for nuclear weapons.
Building compact and safe offshore reactors is also a challenging engineering challenge. Prior to the agreement with Australia, the United States had only shared technology with the United Kingdom since 1958.
The story of betrayal
According to court documents, the investigation into the case began in December 2020, when the FBI received a package sent to another country with instructions for use, technical details and a proposal to establish a secret relationship.
The package was intercepted in the postal system of another country and sent to the FBI legal attaché.
“Please forward this letter to your military intelligence,” reads the note in the package. “I believe that this information will be of great value to your people. This is not a prank. "
The FBI followed the instructions in the packet and began an encrypted conversation in which the sender offered the Navy's secrets in exchange for $ 100 in cryptocurrency.
According to court documents, Ms. Tobbe acted as an observer when Tobbe left the SD card hidden inside a half of a peanut butter sandwich in a plastic bag.
After the undercover agent took the sandwich, Tobbe was sent $ 20.
The agents then set up another cache in Pennsylvania and a third in Virginia, where they said Tobbe had put an SD card hidden in a package of gum.
Apparently, the government to which Tobbe tried to sell the secrets maintains friendly relations with the United States.
That is, it is definitely not Russia.
But no one confirmed which country was involved.
Officials "working for a foreign government" collaborated with American investigators when they set a trap for a married couple of frustrated spies.
The FBI received information a few months ago and sent agents posing as foreign officials to contact Tobbe, stating they were interested in what he had to offer.
Thus began the months-long story the couple's failures when Tobbe left secret files on SD cards at locations used by spies to deliver intelligence material.
According to the government's accusations, his wife acted as an observer (here it is appropriate to use the Russian term - she stood on the naughty side).
Officials said Tobbe and his wife from Annapolis, Maryland, were arrested after placing another memory card in a cache at an agreed location in West Virginia.
According to a federal court affidavit, the memory card contained “militarily important structural elements, operating parameters and performance characteristics of the Virginia-class submarine reactors.
According to a federal court affidavit, the memory card contained “militarily important structural elements, operating parameters and performance characteristics of the Virginia-class submarine reactors.
PLA type "Virginia"
The propulsion technology he was reportedly trying to sell is one of the war's closest secrets and has been at the center of a high-stakes deal the US and UK recently struck with Australia.
According to the investigation, Tobbe secretly took documents from work several pages at a time in order to pass through the checkpoints.
“I was extremely careful to collect the files I have slowly and naturally in the course of my work so that no one would suspect my plan,” he wrote in a note to his alleged accomplice.
Court documents say the clumsy attempts to convey secrets were to hide the SD card in half a peanut butter sandwich or in a pack of chewing gum, or cover it with a patch in a refrigerator bag.
According to investigators, Tobbe was shy at first, but in the end it seems that he became comfortable with the "foreign official" to whom he was being sold, not suspecting that it was the FBI.
He even seemed to love them, writing in a note:
"One day, when it's safe, maybe two old friends will have the opportunity to bump into each other in a cafe, share a bottle of wine and laugh at the tales of their common exploits."
Mystery man
Many wondered how a couple who seemed to be doing well could be accused of trying to sell some of the country's military secrets to a "foreign nation."
Tobbe in West Virginia Federal Court. Image source - Reuters
According to neighbors, the couple were not particularly sociable, but they were not considered secretive either.
Tobbe was interested in medieval weapons and was an active member of the local branch of the enthusiast's organization, the Historical Fencing Society. Ms. Tobbe, 45, had a doctorate from Emory University in Atlanta and taught at a private school.
A neighbor said that if inconspicuousness is a desirable trait for a spy, it didn't fit the bill - she had bright purple hair that made her easily recognizable.
The opinion of the “expert” neighbor:
"She had to be a spy, not stand out."
"She had to be a spy, not stand out."
Money and motives
By American standards, the Tobbe family was fairly well off.
With such a personal and professional status, why would a Tobbe couple do this?
“It's a bit of a mystery,” said David Charney, a Alexandria, Virginia psychiatrist who has spent decades studying espionage cases. - But there are similarities in many such cases.
According to Charney, people are often a bundle of conflicting impulses, usually associated with a desire for money or perhaps a desire for revenge. Some are motivated by the desire to prove that, no matter how average they may seem, they are in fact outstanding personalities with a great secret.
Officials who work for the intelligence services and study the psychology of betrayal have come up with an abbreviation to describe such motives: MICE is money, ideology, compromise and ego. According to bureaucrats, these are the reasons why people commit treason.
State prosecutors indicated that Tobba needed money. According to affidavits compiled by federal investigators, he asked for $ 100 in cryptocurrency in exchange for his nuclear secrets.
The investigation has speculations that he and his wife could have financial problems.
Still, money seemed to be only part of the story, Mr. Charney said, given, as he noted, that Tobbe seemed relatively wealthy.
Safety measures
Tobbe explained to a "representative of an unknown country" how he got all the classified information, saying:
"I do not believe that any of my former colleagues will suspect me if there is an investigation in the future."
Experienced spies also wondered how Mr. Tobbe thought his tricks would work.
His methods were not sophisticated, and they highlighted a more important question: why would an unskilled office worker undertake such a risky operation?
"He's an amateur spy," says Jack Devine, a former senior CIA operations officer. "He had no training."
“If you rely on spy movies as a teaching tool, you have to be very talented or lucky,” said American intelligence veteran Devine.
The Tobbe couple, it is said, were neither.
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