What follows is a comment on two papers by Colonel Lang

These remarks on the 1999 paper by Gary Schmitt and Abram Shulsky on 'Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence' come from a British perspective -- and also not from someone with any claims to intelligence expertise. It is clear from recent British experience that Straussians are in no way indispensable to intelligence disaster. However, when I first saw reference to Shulsky and Schmitt’s polemic against Sherman Kent and the conception of intelligence as research, I began to suspect that there might be a resemblance between what Kent was saying and the argument of an essay published back in 1968 by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford and wartime officer with the Secret Intelligence Intelligence service -- otherwise known as MI6. The essay was an account of why MI6 had been so successfully gulled by the spy Kim Philby, and also of its other failures in dealing alike with Soviet Communism and German National Socialism. When Colonel Lang kindly provided me with the full text of what Schmitt and Shulsky wrote, and I compared their account of what Kent wrote with what he actually wrote, it became clear to me how dangerous their paper is. It provides a superficially plausible but actually fundamentally misconceived rationale for the creation of an intelligence system combining elements of the intelligence approaches of the former Soviet Union, National Socialist Germany, and the unreformed MI6 described by Trevor-Roper. Appointing ...