A Maryland woman just sentenced to prison for her role in attempting to sell U.S. nuclear submarine secrets to a foreign country has lodged an appeal, court documents filed Tuesday show.
On Nov. 9, Diana Toebbe, 46, was sentenced to more than 21 years in prison by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia, Martinsburg. Toebbe was part of a husband-wife team, with ex-Navy employee Jonathan Toebbe, 44, who from 2018 to 2020 attempted to sell technical data about Virginia-class submarines to people they thought were agents of a foreign nation but were really agents of the FBI.
Diana Toebbe gave the trial court notice of her appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. As of Wednesday evening, the case had not been docketed in the higher court and Toebbe’s attorney had not published an appeals brief.
Diana Toebbe drew a harsher sentence than Jonathan Toebbe, who got more than 19 years. Jonathan Toebbe, who used to work at the Navy’s Reactor Engineering Division and the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin, Pa., near Pittsburgh, smuggled submarine data out of secure facilities in bits and pieces.
The FBI busted both Toebbes in 2020 after two years of scheming and amateur spycraft involving trashcan dead-drops of data hidden in half-eaten peanut butter sandwiches, among other things. During the sting, the FBI baited Jonathan and Diana Toebbe with more than $100,000 of the cryptocurrency called Monero. The Justice Department unsealed the FBI’s complaint against the Toebbes in 2021.
