He even asked his contact, who was really an FBI operative, to leave him a sign on the embassy in Washington, D.C.
“The signal will be inside our main building from Saturday morning until Sunday evening Memorial Day weekend,” the FBI wrote in May 2021. Then the FBI posing as a foreign government placed a signal “at a location associated with the unnamed country”, according to the complaint.
Dead drops and cryptocurrency
Court documents claim the Navy engineer agreed to sell restricted data to the undercover agent for payments equaling tens of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency.
He was arrested after a series of “dead drops” where he left information at secret locations in Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Spies use dead drops to avoid the two parties directly meeting.
The dead drops got more elaborate. And in one, Toebbe placed a memory card inside half a peanut butter sandwich. And in others, he concealed memory cards inside a sealed Band-Aid wrapper and a chewing gum package.
Wife denies guilt
Prosecutors allege Dianna Toebbe acted as a lookout during some of the dead drops. But she is pleading not guilty to the charges against her.
