A Babysitter and a Band-Aid Wrapper: Inside the Submarine Spy Case

[Zorro]

Jonathan and Diana Toebbe seemed like an ordinary suburban couple, but the F.B.I. said they were would-be spies — and sloppy ones.

WASHINGTON — On July 28, Diana Toebbe posted a Facebook message looking for a babysitter to take care of her children early on the coming Saturday morning for five to six hours.

Later the post, visible only to friends, was updated with the word “*FOUND*.” And on that Saturday, Ms. Toebbe accompanied her husband, Jonathan, to south-central Pennsylvania.

Unbeknown to Ms. Toebbe, she and her husband were being watched by the F.B.I. as they left their home in Annapolis, Md. And the bureau’s agents continued to watch in Pennsylvania as Jonathan Toebbe removed from his shorts pocket a 32-gigabyte memory card hidden in a sealed Band-Aid wrapper, which he then, according to court papers, placed in a container set up by an undercover F.B.I. operative.

The Toebbes, accused by the U.S. government of trying to sell some of America’s most closely guarded submarine propulsion secrets to a foreign government, are scheduled to appear in federal court in West Virginia on Tuesday. They will face charges related to violating the Atomic Energy Act’s prohibition on sharing nuclear know-how.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/us/politics/inside-submarine-spy-case.html

Traitors.

[Sanity Claws]

1. Have there been any hints on who the recipient country would have been?

[hunter]

4. I don't think it matters much.

Whichever foreign bureaucrat received that bundle of crazy probably rolled his or her eyes, said, "Nope!" and forwarded it immediately to the FBI.

[Klaralven]

5. They sent the bundle April '20. The FBI received it December '20.

No doubt the foreign country scrutinized it carefully, investigated Toebbe, and decided that it wasn't worth pursuing.

[hunter]

6. Ah.

It was the Zootopia Department of...

w

[Larissa]

2. Tinker Tailor

Idiot, dumbbells.

[lagomorph777]

3. Yikes! That's almost as bad as what Trump did.

Of course, he seems to have gotten away with it.