This month in 1799, George Washington died of illness at his Mount Vernon home. His death might have come decades earlier -- greatly changing America’s history -- if not for the actions of John Jay, the founding father of U.S. counterintelligence. intel.gov/index.php/wall… Patriot, statesman & diplomat, John Jay’s foray into counterintelligence began in 1776, when he headed a NY State executive body called the Committee for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies -- the nation’s first dedicated counterintelligence agency.

Earlier this week, the White House unveiled the National Strategy to Secure 5G, outlining a vision to lead the development, deployment, and management of secure & reliable 5G communications infrastructure worldwide, arm-in-arm with our partners. See: whitehouse.gov/wp-content/upl… “Malicious actors are already seeking to exploit 5G technology. This is a target-rich environment for those with nefarious motives due to the number and types of devices it will connect and the large volume of data that those devices will transmit,” the President noted.

Foreign influence efforts, including disinformation campaigns, have long been a tool of our adversaries, and they remain so today with COVID-19. The National Counterintelligence Strategy identifies foreign influence as an enduring threat to our nation. dni.gov/files/NCSC/doc… In classic “dezinformatsiya” campaign in 1980s, KGB introduced idea that US govt created AIDS. The opening salvo was launched in 1983 when an obscure newspaper in India, the Patriot, printed an anonymous letter: “AIDS may invade India: Mystery disease caused by US experiments.”

OTD in 1942, four Nazi spies and saboteurs led by George Dasch disembarked their U-Boat on a Long Island, NY beach. 4 days later, a similar group landed on a Fla. Beach on a mission to create chaos in the US through bombings and sabotage for Nazi Germany. fbi.gov/history/famous… The Nazi saboteurs’ objective was to cripple America’s war machinery, primarily by sabotaging industrial manufacturers, hydroelectric power plants and by terrifying the American populace so they'd turn against the war. They were quickly spotted and reported by a Coast Guardsman.

1/ #OTD IN COUNTERINTELLIGENCE & SECURITY HISTORY: On 21 Aug. 1776, the Continental Congress enacts the first law in America against espionage, authorizing the death penalty for the crime. The promulgation of this law was hastened by the continuing imprisonment of... 2/ Dr. Benjamin Church, chief physician of the Continental Army - and a British spy. There was no civilian espionage act and the provisions of military law did not provide a sufficiently strong incentive against committing the crime. Although Congress had actually added the...

1/ #OTD IN COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY HISTORY: On July 17, 1950, Soviet spy Julius Rosenberg was arrested for espionage. The Army Security Agency and FBI had been cooperating in the decryption of intelligence messages -- a portion of which were collectively referred to... 2/ as "VENONA" -- exchanged by the Soviet KGB and GRU with their agents in the Western Hemisphere. Some of these messages incriminated Rosenberg, but this highly classified evidence could not and would not be used during his trial.

1/ #OTD IN COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY HISTORY – On July 9, 2010 -- after a multi-year investigation by the FBI and other elements of the US Intelligence Community -- ten deep-cover Russian “illegals” (operatives of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR)) were... 2/ exchanged in Vienna, Austria, for four individuals who had been jailed in Russia for alleged contact with Western intelligence agencies. The day before, the Russian illegals pleaded guilty in federal court in NYC to conspiring to serve as Russian agents in a case that...