The wife of a U.S. Navy engineer has admitted that she helped her husband try to sell secrets related to nuclear submarines to a foreign country for $100,000 in cryptocurrency.
The BBC News website reported that Diana Toby, 46, carried out the surveillance, while her husband, Jonathan Toby, 42, who works as a specialist in submarine nuclear propulsion systems, hid classified information in a peanut butter sandwich and left it in hiding.
BBC News reported that the US Department of Justice had confirmed that Toby was trying to sell secret information about the nuclear submarines to a foreign country, and he sent messages to someone who he thought was a foreign agent, when in fact that person was an undercover FBI agent.
The BBC noted that the couple lived with their two children in Annapolis, Maryland (headquarters of the Naval Academy) before their arrest, when they were brought before a federal court in West Virginia on charges of conspiracy to disclose confidential data.
It was decided to imprison the woman Diana for a period of up to three years, and in addition, to imprison her husband Jonathan for a period of between 12-17 years, based on a deal they made with the prosecution, where he pleaded guilty. The penalty in such cases is life imprisonment.
The site noted that Jonathan served in the U.S. Navy before joining the U.S. Army Reserves, and worked in the Commander of the Naval Operations Command in Arlington, Virginia, while Diana worked as a history and English teacher in a private school, and that she holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Emory University in Atlanta.
Smuggling of nuclear documents
BBC News has confirmed that the American husband has over the years collected information on nuclear submarines and smuggled documents from his workplace, several pages at a time, so he could go through the testing instruments, then handed them to a customer he thought was a foreign agent by burying them in a peanut sandwich.
Daniel Richard - a law professor at Columbia University in New York explained that the prosecution may waive the requirement for maximum punishment if defendants agree to provide information that may help locate similar traitors in the future.