What do the Neocons have Against the CIA?

Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt credit the teachings of Leo Strauss, a German Jewish émigré philosopher, with helping them conceptualize their understanding of good intelligence. Shulsky received his doctorate from the University of Chicago studying under Strauss, who attracted a cult following of neocons with his theories about politics and human nature. Shadia Drury, author of several books on Straussian political philosophy, said that Leo Strauss believed that “truth is not salutary, but dangerous, and even destructive to society--any society.” 1
In their joint 1999 essay, “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence,” Shulsky and Schmitt observed that CIA analysts “were generally reluctant throughout the cold war to believe that they could be deceived about any critical questions by the Soviet Union or other Communist states.” But “history has shown this view to be extremely naïve.” 2 Unlike the Soviet Union, which operated with Machiavellian sophistication, according to Shulsky and Schmitt, the U.S. government was constrained by its democratic and moral principles during the cold war.
A political philosophy more closely hewed to the classic philosophers, particularly Plato, and the realist philosophers, such as Strauss, could provide an “antidote” to the CIA's failings, the authors claimed. Such a philosophy of intelligence would help the U.S. government understand Islamic leaders “whose intellectual world was so different from our own.” To truly grasp a given situation, contend Shulsky and Schmitt, it is necessary to penetrate the surface of information to uncover what Strauss called “the hidden meaning” in political dealings. Such a perspective, they said, “alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.”