It's Open Season on America's Secrets: the Case of U.S. Traitors
The FBI is struggling to keep up with the seemingly unending queue of Americans eager to sell out their country
This week my article with the working title, “Is U.S. Counterintelligence Up to the Task of Protecting America’s Secrets? The Jury is Out” will be published in Washington Monthly. I’ve done extensive reporting on spies and espionage for the Monthly and in my blog, DIPLO DENIZEN. I’ll reproduce my piece in this newsletter - stand by. To my surprise, the U.S. State Department posed no objections (yes, alas, I must run my stuff by government censors prior to publishing lest I spill any official secrets. I can show you reams of blacked-out redactions from past experiences with the green-eye-shaders.) The plus-or-minus thousand-word limitation editors impose on articles in most magazines these days often compels writers to leave out quite a bit of information. I carried out interviews with intelligence officers and FBI special agents, as well as extensive research for my upcoming piece. I therefore decided to share some of it with you in this space. Look at these additional comments as side dishes to the main course.
Here, I zero in on American traitors, a subject that’s always fascinated me, beginning with Benedict Arnold.
A former senior counterintelligence official told me, “The good news is that we are catching them. The bad news is that there are more of them out there. This is less about our effectiveness at counterintelligence than it is about the width and breadth and persistence of the threat.”
He’s referring to a) the threat, mainly from Russia and China; and b) the seemingly unending stream of Americans and others who hold no compunction about betraying Uncle Sam for a buck. Overwhelmingly, American traitors are motivated by cold hard cash over ideology. As John le Carré reminded us, “Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.”
The latest example: Jonathan and Diana Toebbe, arrested by the FBI last month for trying to sell nuclear submarine secrets to an unidentified foreign power. Jonathan, 42, was a Naval nuclear sub engineer. Diana, 45, taught at an exclusive DC-area private school. They have two children, aged 11 and 15.
So, what drove a suburban engineer and his schoolteacher wife, dual income professionals, to try to sell out their country? Both come from a long line of patriotic military families. The Washington Post reports:
“We strongly believe in duty and honor,” said Jonathan’s father, Nelson Toebbe, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve Medical Service Corps, who declined an interview.
Jonathan’s grandfather served in the Navy during World War II, and his great-grandfather was a veteran of World War I. Jonathan himself served five years on active duty as a Navy nuclear engineering officer and more than two years in the Navy Reserve.
Diana’s family was similarly filled with veterans.
In World War II, her grandfather served on four different submarines in the Pacific, according to relatives and public records. He volunteered for dangerous assignments that tested just how long and deep the boats could stay submerged, relatives said, and passed on his love for submariner culture to his son, Douglas C. Smay, Diana’s father.
Smay served mostly on surface-level naval vessels instead of submarines, but he created a memorial to honor submariner veterans called “52 Boats,” named for the number of U.S. subs lost in World War II.
The couple, like most homeowners, had a house mortgage, a couple of cars, children’s expenses - the typical middle class financial package. At least on the surface, they did not appear to be be underwater financially. Yet, they wanted $5 million paid in cryptocurrency in return for top secret data on U.S. nuclear submarines.
One tidbit that leaked out after their arrest was a statement caught on an FBI bug of Diana telling her husband, “I feel no loyalty to abstractions,” apparently referring to the United States.
They carried on an extended secret correspondence with FBI handlers who posed collectively as a foreign intelligence officer. But, as a backup plan, they packed quick-getaway bags, replete with passports for the entire family and $11,300 in cash.
But as amateurs, the Toebbe’s were no match for the FBI. As one former FBI special agent with 20 years experience working undercover told me, “All they know about tradecraft is what they read in John LeCarré’s books. They’re just not as smart as a highly trained team of 25 FBI agents.”
Their reputations now ruined, having brought shame upon their families, with relatives now having to sort out who will raise their kids, Jonathan and Diana Toebbe are facing decades behind bars.
Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Montes spied for Cuba for 16 years. Unlike the Toebbe’s, she spied out of ideological conviction. She was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in 2001. But she shares one thing in common with the Toebbe’s: family service to the country’s defense. Montes is the daughter of a U.S. Army colonel, and has a brother who is an FBI agent and a sister who is an FBI counterintelligence official. Another spy for Cuba, State Department analyst Kendall Myers, is a grandson of National Geographic founder Gilbert Grosvenor, great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell and is related to President William Howard Taft. Blood doesn't get much bluer in the United States. He was sentenced in 2009 to life without parole at a federal supermax prison.
Despite these and many other U.S. counterintelligence successes, Americans and legal U.S. residents —some with distinguished family pedigrees— like some crazed addictive gamblers, continue to line up at the gaming table of treason to try their luck — knowing the odds favor the house. As LeCarré also said, “Treason is very much a matter of habit.”
Over the past 22 months, there have been 22 publicly reported cases of Chinese espionage against the U.S. At least six American citizens were involved. Four U.S. ex-intelligence officers also have been handed lengthy prison sentences in the past two years after being caught spying for Beijing. “The FBI opens a new China-related counterintelligence case nearly every 10 hours,” FBI Director Christopher Wray stated last year.
I’ll address overseas espionage, including Beijing’s roll-up of the CIA’s agent networks in China not long ago, in my next Dispatches From Exile. I’ll throw in as well some of my personal run-ins with spies over the years, including a doppelganger of me who turned out to be a Russian KGB officer. Rest assured, everything I say has been cleared by Big Brother State Department.
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.