The American Spectator

President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense had a previously undisclosed friendship with Communist Party USA figure Hugh DeLacy, according to a new report.

The nominee, Leon Panetta, is currently director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He previously served in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The article by researchers Trevor Loudon and Cliff Kincaid states:

DeLacy visited such countries as China and Nicaragua and was himself a personal contact of identified Soviet spies Solomon Adler and Frank Coe and accused spy John Stewart Service. Panetta spoke at DeLacy’s memorial service, directed a series of letters to him personally as “Dear Hugh,” and placed a tribute to him in the Congressional Record.Former Washington State Rep. DeLacy, named by Communist Party lawyer John Abt as a fellow member of the party, remained a communist operative until his death in 1986.

One “Dear Hugh” letter from then-Rep. Panetta to DeLacy offered a summary of a report on U.S. military operations that Panetta said was “unavailable for distribution.” Panetta concludes the March 24, 1977, letter, “If there is anything I can do for you in the future, Hugh, please feel free to call on me.”

They continue:

Like DeLacy, Panetta shared a preference for communist regimes in Latin America, including the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. DeLacy had visited Nicaragua and had honored the Sandinistas, who were pawns of the Soviets and Cubans in Central America, while Panetta, as a member of Congress in 1983, strongly opposed President Reagan’s effort to undermine the Sandinista regime through CIA covert action. In addition, Panetta actively collaborated with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a Washington, D.C. think tank that provided a cover for Chilean Marxist and Cuban agent Orlando Letelier to conduct communist political influence operations in the nation’s capital. Panetta, a member of Congress from 1977 to 1993, was a vocal opponent of Chile’s anti-communist government. In 1986, Panetta publicly endorsed protests against Reagan’s “illegal and extraordinarily vicious wars against the poor of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.”

“Panetta’s bias in favor of revolutionary Marxist movements in Latin America helps explain why the CIA has been spectacularly unsuccessful in stopping the advance of Hugo Chavez and his minions south of the U.S. border,” Trevor Loudon and Cliff Kincaid said in a joint statement. “His only apparent success as CIA director has been the killing of Obama bin Laden, an impressive operation that has nevertheless backfired in the sense of sending a nuclear-armed Pakistan into the arms of Communist China.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee will consider the Panetta nomination tomorrow morning.

While we’re on the topic of communists, I will be talking about the small-c communists of ACORN on the Fox Business show “Follow the Money” with Eric Bolling and Juan Williams at 10 o’clock Eastern tonight.

ACORN, President Obama’s former employer and legal client, has metastasized overseas. Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chavez may have funded the radical group.

All these juicy tidbits and so much more are in my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

(The Fox segment was prerecorded. I won’t be able to watch because I’ll be doing a radio interview about the book at that time with Barbara Espinosa on KFNX talk radio in Phoenix, Arizona.)