Even from her prison cell, Diana Toebbe was relying on spy tradecraft to secretly correspond with her husband Jonathan, her co-conspirator in a sensational 2022 espionage trial involving stolen US nuclear secrets hidden in a peanut butter sandwich and a gum wrapper.
"My roommate works in the laundry and can intercept and deliver messages,” Diana wrote to Jonathan in December 2021. “If your laundry bag has a note for me, tie a sock around the knot of the bag. That way she will know to get the note before it goes in the wash."
When there was no reply Diana wrote a second letter, again pressuring Jonathan to plead guilty and tell the court she was an innocent bystander. “My lawyers aren't so sure of my chances unless you plead guilty and tell the truth that I had nothing to do with this and give up the locations and/or passwords for where you've hidden the money and the secrets.”
This time, Diana put her message in a ‘boomerang’ letter - posting it to a non-existent person at a fake address but using Jonathan’s name and return address so the letter would bounce back to him in prison. No go. Both letters were intercepted and the judge sentenced Diana to 21 years for conspiring with her husband to sell the designs of nuclear-powered US warships. Jonathan received only 18 years.
Although Jonathan stole the designs while working as a US Navy physicist, the judge noted that Diana wasn’t simply a naive schoolteacher and housewife - in fact, she had a Ph.D. and was most likely in the driver’s seat. “It's clear to this court that it was most probably Mrs. Toebbe that was driving the bus. While Mr. Toebbe had access to the information, she was a big part of the plan - not only in carrying out the plan but also in the cover-up story.”
The sentencing was the latest twist in a sensational espionage case that even the judge described as “right out of the movies”.
Suburban spycraft: mom and dad style
The court heard how the Maryland couple employed Cold War-style dead drops that included stuffing a computer flash drive into a peanut butter sandwich and leaving it in a public location for collection by ‘foreign agents’. The ‘foreigners’ in this case happened to be the FBI, however.
Jonathan, a nuclear engineer in the US Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, spent years plotting his treachery. He wrote to a foreign government - believed to be Brazil - suggesting he supply nuclear designs for money. Instead, the foreign government contacted the FBI who obtained a dozen search warrants as they tracked their suspect and his tradecraft.
Jonathan traveled to Pittsburgh to mail his initial package although the Toebbes and their two sons lived in Annapolis, Maryland. He refused to accept cash, preferring cryptocurrency that would be more difficult to trace. He bragged to his ‘handler’ about how he’d stolen the intel: “This information was slowly and carefully collected over several years in the normal course of my job to avoid attracting attention and smuggled past security checkpoints a few pages at a time.”
To help protect his privacy online, Jonathan used end-to-end encrypted ProtonMail accessed through TOR (the onion router) and public Wi-Fi - and he bragged about that too: “My new Proton is actually an old one I established quietly with a cash-only burner phone while on vacation several years ago.”
When the FBI finally convinced Jonathan to use a physical dead drop to deliver the designs, Jonathan insisted the packages be dropped at locations he’d normally visit so he could create a ‘natural legend’: “Hiking and visiting historical sites is easier to explain than unexpected stops during rush hour if they ever take a special interest in me.”
