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In his book, The Prince of Darkness, the late journalist Robert Novak described how the Washington Post, which carried his columns, censored one of them. The censored column concerned the activities in Washington, D.C. of Cuban agent-of-influence Orlando Letelier. Novak describes how the Post's editorial page editor, Philip Geyelin, "spiked" the column because of "displeasure with the column's content."

Letelier, a Chilean Marxist working for Cuba, had been manipulating the media and Congress before his death from a car bomb in 1976. Novak had received Letelier's incriminating briefcase papers, recovered after his death.

"I retell this story because the incident was so unusual in my long, friendly relationship with the Washington Post," Novak said. Novak was always a strong anti-communist, just like Accuracy in Media founder Reed Irvine, who also covered the significance of the Letelier briefcase papers.

The story is worth retelling now, not only because of the passing of this great journalist, but because America's enemies continue to be very well organized in Washington, D.C., especially in regard to the "new Cuba"―Venezuela.

The Post has long been blind to the activities of communist agents in the nation's capital. Consider the coverage of Hugo Chávez's Venezuela. The August 24 edition of the paper has an excellent editorial (web site) about what Chávez is doing to silence the opposition in Venezuela, threaten his neighbors, and oppose America's national security interests in Latin America. The editorial is even critical of how the Obama Administration has handled the problem.

But the paper has failed to tell the story of what the Chávez regime has been doing here.

The Latin America Information Office, once known as the Venezuela Information Office (VIO), is the official registered agent for the Chávez regime in Washington.

Natali del Carmen Fani, former associate director of the VIO, told me in a telephone conversation on August 14 that the VIO would not have sponsored the trip to Venezuela made by communist terrorist and now Professor Bill Ayers back in 2006. She said the regime's Ministry of Education probably sponsored and paid for Ayers' trip. Ayers has said this was his fourth trip to Venezuela.

Our previous column (web site) goes into detail about the role played by Ayers' son Chesa Boudin, the Red-diaper baby of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, both of whom went to prison for murder. Boudin worked for Chávez in the presidential palace and was an interpreter for Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn when they traveled to Venezuela in 2005 and talked to various audiences concerning a film about their days as members of the communist terrorist Weather Underground.

Hugo Chávez's attempts to win friends and influence people have been mostly associated with the highly-publicized efforts of the Venezuela-owned Citgo Petroleum Corp. to provide cheap oil in the United States to poor people through former Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II and his Citizens Energy Corporation.

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