Dead Drop: October 22

MORE CRUMBS FROM THE PEANUT BUTTER SUB SANDWICH: This week, some additional delicious morsels emerged about allegations that civilian Navy nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebbe and his wife Diana’s attempted to serve up submarine secrets to some foreign nation.  The couple pleaded not guilty on Wednesday and will be tried separately.  Ms. Toebbe’s lawyers threw her husband under the bus, saying in court that Jonathan’s tradecraft was terrible. Crackerjack writer Fred Kaplan, in Slate, tried to ferret out what nation might have been on the receiving end of the reported tradecraft using a half peanut butter sandwich with a surprise inside (restricted data about U.S. nuclear powered subs.) Kaplan noted, as The Dead Drop did last week, that the intended receiving country appeared to have been cooperating with the FBI, since they flew some sort of signal from their “main building” in Washington as a sign they were hungry for what Toebbe is accused of selling.  Kaplan relied on some thin evidence though to suggest that the country involved might have been France – since a note allegedly from Toebbe quoted in DOJ documents included the line: “One day, when it is safe, perhaps two old friends will have a chance to stumble into each other at a café, share a bottle of wine, and laugh over stories of their shared exploits.” Who else has cafés, wine and an interest in submarines, right?  Kaplan did discover an amazing fact, however.  He found that some of Toebbe’s notes cited in the DOJ filing “seem to lift entire quotes from The Courier,” a movie about the Oleg Penkovsky case. For example, at one point, Toebbe allegedly wrote: “Should that ever become necessary, I will be forever grateful for your help extracting me and my family.” This, Kaplan notes, “is a near-verbatim quote from The Courier.” Perhaps Toebbe did not follow that real life story to the end where the Soviets arrested Penkovsky for treason and executed him.

HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT:  The military services have been doing a good job of getting their troops to line up for the COVID vaccine. Why are they doing better than many other organizations?  In part – the armed forces are presenting arms simply because they tend to follow orders.  But a recent Navy message to sailors worldwide gives another hint. At last report, 94% of active-duty Navy personnel were fully vaccinated and 99% had gotten at least the first dose.  In their message to the fleet, the Navy said that for those who don’t go along – in addition to being tossed out of the service, the Navy, “…may seek recoupment of applicable bonuses, special and incentive pays, and the cost of training and education for service members refusing the vaccine.” That could be expensive. Reenlistment bonuses in some specialties can run from $30,000 to $40,000.  And we’re not sure what it costs to train a naval aviator, for example, but numbers we saw from a few years ago, suggest that the price for training USAF pilots ran from $5 million to $10 million.  It would take most of us a while to have to pay back that kind of coin.

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