This week, Leon Panetta, Barack Obama’s unconventional choice to head the CIA, now his unconventional choice to head the Department of Defense, was unanimously approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee, and will be considered by the full Senate next week. I say “unconventional” because there’s nothing in Panetta’s background of an intelligence nature, and little evidence of military interest past a two-year Army hitch. But there’s something more troubling.
Researchers Cliff Kincaid and Trevor Loudon have dug up documentation in the archives of the University of Washington of a cordial, long-term relationship in the 1970s and 1980s between Panetta, a member of the Congress between 1977 and 1993, and Hugh DeLacy, a Communist Party USA member who was elected to one term in Congress while pretending to be a Democrat in 1944.
DeLacy later co-founded the Communist-penetrated Progressive Party that nominated Henry Wallace for president in 1948. By the 1970s, DeLacy was still politically active, with connections to known Soviet agents including Victor Perlo of the infamous Perlo spy group, and Frank Coe and Solomon Adler of the equally infamous Silvermaster spy group.
DeLacy also associated with suspected Soviet agent John Stewart Service of the Amerasia spy case. Moreover, DeLacy was of sufficient interest to Communist China to have scored a paid junket to the People’s Republic in 1974. There, Loudon reports, DeLacy met up with Service, Coe and Adler, who was then thought to be working for Chinese intelligence.
“Within two years,” Loudon said in a recent online interview with Jerry Kenney, “DeLacy was in regular contact with Leon Panetta, grilling him and regularly asking him for military and defense- and foreign-policy-related information, which Panetta heavily supplied him.”
The relationship continued. In 1983, Panetta extolled DeLacy and his wife, Dorothy, in the Congressional Record, noting they had been “tested by the dark forces of McCarthyism.”
Translation: Testifying before Congress in 1954, DeLacy kept silent on his membership in the Communist Party, which, people forget, was directly controlled by Moscow and dedicated to the destruction of the United States. In 1986, Panetta eulogized DeLacy at his funeral.
But there is more in Panetta’s background than a personal link to anti-American politics. Kincaid and Loudon cite Panetta’s extremely troubling ties to the Institute for Policy Studies, the pro-Soviet, anti-American think thank in Washington, D.C., that never met a communist dictatorship it didn’t like.
Neither, it seems, did Panetta, who openly supported the IPS (serving on an anniversary fundraising committee), while opposing Ronald Reagan’s efforts to bring down the Soviet-supported Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
Indeed, as Kinkaid reports, Panetta was in 1984 pulling for normalization of relations with the Sandinistas. The New American’s Christian Gomez points out that as a congressman, Panetta wanted to extend most favored nation trade status to the USSR and Eastern “Bloc” countries.
He also voted to cede control of the Panama Canal to the pro-Soviet Panamanian government, and against renewing our defensive treaty with anti-Communist Taiwan. In this late stage of the Cold War, Panetta, to boot, publicly extolled the work of a female constituent with a Soviet front group.
Questions your elected representatives neglected to ask: Does Panetta now consider himself to have been duped? Does he believe that he pursued policies placing himself on the wrong side of the Cold War?
Should he serve out his tenure at the CIA and begin another one overseeing the Pentagon without anyone bothering to inquire? More important, is he really the right man for this job?
No.
And what should we take away from the whole story? Our legislative branch is falling asleep on the job over stories that should be giving them — and us — night sweats.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
