Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

With the exposure of Ben-Ami Kadish, 84, as an alleged Israeli spy, there is sure to be a fresh round of consternation in the United States about Israel’s past machinations. The Justice Department is charging in four conspiracy counts handed down Tuesday in New York that Kadish handed over a variety of documents, including some on nuclear technology, to his Israeli handler from 1979 to 1985. This agent also supervised Jonathan Jay Pollard, the U.S. citizen currently serving a life sentence for spying for Israel. But for all the condemnation, spying is something even the friendliest nations have always done to each other. Despite all the professions of friendship, the council of nations often resembles a den of thieves.

No matter how cordial relations are, suspicions always lurk that even best friends may have cherished secrets that they’re hiding from allies. No government wants to be caught surprised or, when it comes to military technology, left behind. More important than an ally’s wounded feelings is the instinct of self-preservation — one reason why Israel, Britain, and Taiwan keep trying to ferret out official U.S. secrets.

The surprising thing, then, would be if spying between the United States and its close allies were not taking place. Washington, you might say, resembles a kind of “Rear Window” writ large — with nation after nation deploying spies to ferret out what’s taking place behind official doors. Like Jimmy Stewart in that Hitchcock movie, they try to pull back whenever they sense that the objects of their attention are becoming aware of the surveillance, and are mortified when they’re caught red-handed. They want to act like they’re just another friendly neighbor, not an intrusive snooper.

But unlike Stewart, spies ultimately don’t have the police to rescue them once they’re in peril. Like the nations they serve, spies have to rely on their own wits for survival. More often than not, spies have no loyalty to anyone but themselves. After they’ve been exposed, they’re often cast aside once their usefulness is at an end. But that’s never stopped new ones from signing up—or nations from exploiting them.

Consider the United States. Since the American Revolution, it has relied on intelligence agents to spy on friends as well as foes. In the 19th century, according to the historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones in “American Espionage,” “during the next 75 years, presidents used their executive power to send secret agents to Mexico, Canada, the West Indies, Latin America, Europe, Turkey, the Far East, Hawaii and elsewhere.” Whether they functioned as quasi-diplomats or simply information-gatherers, the temptation to use such agents was clearly irresistible. They could provide a fund of information, not, obviously, on the order of modern intelligence services, with their panoply of technological devices, that might prove useful in crafting treaties or deciding when to embark upon war.

No matter how cordial relations are, suspicions always lurk that even best friends may have cherished secrets that they’re hiding from allies.

America’s closest ally has perhaps been Britain, but that didn’t prevent mutual spying during World War I. Before America’s entry into the war to end all wars, the British did not tell the State Department that they had broken the German codes. London didn’t alert Washington about German intentions in Mexico until it was sure of an opportune moment to lure the U.S. into the war. Even after America entered the war, Jeffreys-Jones writes, Washington rightly assumed that the British were spying on them, partly because London remained reluctant to share cryptological expertise.

What about World War II? Chums or not, the fact is that once again the British were spying in America, on a greater scale than ever before. In May 1940, Winston Churchill directed the British Intelligence Service to launch a massive covert operation called British Security Coordination, based in Manhattan, to influence U.S. opinion in a push toward war. It was a masterful black ops program. Essentially, it cooked up bogus documents and planted news stories in the U.S. media, often with the connivance of the Roosevelt administration. But by 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s close adviser Adolf A. Berle, an assistant secretary of state in charge of security, expressed his extreme displeasure at the “very considerable espionage” the British were conducting on U.S. soil.

The British kept spying on the United States during the Cold War. Kim Philby, one of the turncoat “Cambridge spies,” was stationed in Washington, in 1949, where he became close friends with his contact, James Jesus Angleton, head of counter-intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency. Philby, as a double-agent for the Soviets, turned over much information to Moscow about U.S. knowledge of communist spy networks. Or did he? A revisionist account by S.J. Hamrick called “Deceiving the Deceivers” argues that MI5 was running a disinformation campaign, and knew Philby was a Soviet spy, if one of marginal importance. But, in any case, part of Philby’s job was keeping his ostensible employer, MI5, informed about Angleton’s activities.

In the spy versus spy world, it’s often hard to know who is fooling whom, who the double (or triple) agent might be. Was Philby’s main role, in fact, to pass on to MI5 information about the CIA and Angleton? In the hall of mirrors that constitutes the intelligence world, no theory is too baroque or outlandish not to merit consideration.

After the Cold War ended, the focus on spying turned to business espionage. Sure, the Western alliance had faced down the Soviet threat. But that was partly because of its industrial prowess, and the attention of spy services focused on finding out what advances their allies might be have developed. Stealing secrets, as the Israelis knew (and know), can speed up industrial development. In Germany and other European countries, the CIA directed its efforts toward industrial espionage.

In his 1993 book “Friendly Spies,” Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution examined Japanese, French, South Korean and Israeli economic espionage directed against America. Washington, however, was as much perpetrator as target. In 2000, the French, for example, complained that the CIA was using a signals intelligence program called Echelon to spy on European corporations.

But Washington, as usual, steadfastly denied it. Former CIA director — and current defense secretary — Robert M. Gates claimed, in effect, that America was an innocent: “I can assure you that no American intelligence agency conducts industrial espionage against foreign companies to advantage U.S. companies,” Gates said at the time. “What we do is support the efforts of our own government, and that information is not shared with American companies.”

Gates went on to state that it was China, Russia, Germany, Israel, South Korea, Argentina and other countries that were engaged in such naughty practices. France, he said, was probably the “most egregious offender.” Indeed, French intelligence had recruited agents at IBM and Texas Instruments.

Today, spying continues — whether it’s Taiwan seeking access to military secrets or Israel seeking to keep tabs on the U.S. Or the U.S. trying to keep tabs on Israel (After Pollard was exposed as a spy in 1985, then-Republican Sen. David F. Durenberger said that the CIA had had its own spy in Israel).

But the problem for a country with as close a relationship to Washington as Israel has, isn’t that it has spies. The real problem is when it suborns American Jews, of all people, to act on its behalf. Nothing could be more calculated to damage Israel’s relations with its most important ally, for it evokes the old canard of dual loyalty.

Still, friend or foe, the desire to look behind the curtain and see what’s happening has always tempted nations — even if Washington. has sometimes been loath to admit it. So tempting is spying, some nations don’t simply snoop on their friends, but also even closer to home: their own citizens.

Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest, is the author of “They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons.”

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) (WDCpix)

As the presidential campaigns head toward the Democratic and Republican conventions, the candidates are making new promises about how they’ll end the war in Iraq, revive the economy, fix the schools, end the threat of nuclear proliferation and get everyone else to either love (Barack Obama) or respect (John McCain) the United States. No matter what the specific details are, these promises have something in common: they’re sweeping, eye-catching, and unlikely to be realized. They should be viewed as aspirations rather than concrete pledges.

And thank goodness for that. The truth is that campaign promises have become the equivalent of subprime mortgages—enticing and dangerous. As any salesperson knows, you can’t sell someone something they don’t want to buy. The candidates are engaging in wish-fulfillment even as they know fulfilling those wishes is probably next to impossible. No matter. It feels good for both the candidates and the public, at least until rude realities, at home and abroad, intrude.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Does anyone really want Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) to hike taxes in the middle of recession—or for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to plunge the economy into further debt by enacting a round of fresh tax cuts? No way. Nor should anyone put much stock in Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest attempt to revive the ailing health-care system. Whatever emerges will be a product of compromise — not a quality Clinton is famous for — or, as with her last attempt to change the system, there will be no movement on health care. For all her talk of results versus lofty talk, it’s not clear what she can deliver. Anyway, rather than a fantastically baroque Clinton plan, better the devil you know, I say, than the one you don’t.

It’s something that Americans and their presidents seem to know — even if they don’t want to acknowledge it publicly. It isn’t that candidates are simply liars — though that can sometimes be the case. It’s that they’re confronted with realities that differ wildly from being on the hustings as a carefree candidate.

Consider the record, whether it’s Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. They’ve always made extravagant promises to their followers, only to back away from them once on office. Most often, their promises have centered on war—either claiming they’ll keep America out of one or end a war that it is already entangle in.

Perhaps one of the most flagrant examples is Wilson who won the presidency by declaring that he would keep the U.S. out of war. He ended up, of course, fighting the “war to end all wars,” as the European aristocracies slaughtered each other in a kind of civil war. Wilson set the U.S. on the path to becoming a great power—he intervened, among other places, in Cuba, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti and Nicaragua. So much for his campaign pledge to stick to domestic rather than foreign affairs.

Then there is Roosevelt. He, too, stated that American boys would not be sent to Europe on his watch in 1940. Of course, Roosevelt was already conniving in every way possible to support the British with Lend-Lease and to stop Nazi influence in South America. The Roosevelt administration even falsely claimed that it had found a secret plan for a Nazi empire in South America. Of course, Roosevelt was right about the need for U.S. intervention to stop both Japanese and German aggression. But Americans clearly wanted to wallow, as long as possible, in the illusion that they could remain divorced from international realities — and in his campaign Roosevelt was happy to oblige them.

During the Cold War, the issue of contention wasn’t always whether the United States should enter conflicts, but, rather, the strength of its military arsenal. Kennedy ran in 1960 denouncing Dwight D. Eisenhower for failing to match the Soviets in the nuclear arms-race. It was malarkey, but it worked. As his opponent Nixon fumed, Kennedy made outlandish promises about reviving America. Once in office, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara acknowledged that there was no missile gap. The one campaign promise that Kennedy did keep, however, was to counter the Soviet Union in the Third World, in contrast to the Eisenhower administration. America’s involvement in Vietnam had begun. Sometimes the worst thing is when presidents do keep their word.

But didn’t Reagan satisfy his followers by winning the Cold War? Isn’t that a sign of a campaign promise fulfilled? Not exactly.

While Reagan upped the defense budget, he performed a U-turn in his second term—to the intense dismay of his loyalists. They saw him as betraying his principles by agreeing to arms-control agreements with the Kremlin. In a sense, he was. But once again, it was a very good thing that he did. Peaceful coexistence rather than confrontation ensued, even if the cold warriors grumbled about it.

The zig-zagging of presidents continued after Reagan. George H.W. Bush raised taxes after he stated he wouldn’t. Clinton ran by promising a new social compact and ended up slashing the welfare rolls. He also promised he would punish the “butchers of Beijing” and did nothing of the sort. Instead, trade with China became the mantra of his administration.

In 2000 George W. Bush said America needed to be “humble” in its approach abroad. A cynic might suggest that the best way to determine the policies of a future president is to look at what they’re saying and expect the opposite.

Indeed, the recently defrocked Obama advisor, Samantha Power, was on to something when she told the BBC that his administration would not be able to pull out of Iraq as quickly as he was pledging. Quite correct.

But don’t blame Hillary Clinton or Obama for their stretchers. Unlike the peddlers of subprime mortgages, they don’t assume there’s someone to bail them out if they flop once in office. They know they can’t pass the problem off the others. The good news, then, is that, more likely than not, they will conveniently forget most of what they promised back on the campaign trail.

That’s not hypocrisy. It’s realism.

Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest, is the author of “They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons.”

Samantha Power (Omnibus Lecture Series)

In telling a Scottish newspaper that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is “a monster,” Samantha Power, who is a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School and a columnist for “Time,” has become a victim of the very politics of personal destruction that Clinton is often accused of practicing and that Sen. Barack Obama has been decrying.

After the Clinton campaign denounced Power, Obama, who has based his campaign on the contention that he can usher in a new era of political hope, harmony and comity, didn’t simply distance himself from her remarks. Within a few hours, he had Power’s resignation in hand. Power, who was considered to be headed for a top government post, not only wounded the Obama campaign, but perhaps also her own career.

But no matter how ill-conceived they may have been, Power’s bellicose words aren’t an aberration. Instead, they highlight the adversarial style of a new generation of Democratic foreign-policy mavens who have more in common with the raucous world of bloggers than the somber, oak-lined environs of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has been notoriously frank with the media, shunning diplomatic circumlocutions in favor of brash assertions.

While top Obama advisor Anthony W. Lake is a descendant of New England aristocracy and prides himself on his self-effacing courtliness, Power is a fierce advocate who relishes confrontation. John Adams may have warned America against seeking out monsters abroad, but Power seems to disagree. She apparently sees monsters everywhere that need to be slain, at home as well as abroad.

Though she is a Harvard professor, Power isn’t even really an academic. She’s an advocate who has taken a starring role in the intellectual wars of the past decade. Not for her slogging away, as did former secretary of state and Clinton chum Madeleine Albright, in the academic trenches writing dense articles about relations between the United States and NATO. Instead, like many in her generation of foreign-policy players, Power, 37, rose to prominence by way of journalism.

Her career testifies to the sway that journalists exercise in foreign policy— in Power’s case, it’s almost as though the English writer and grande dame Rebecca West had signed on to serve as advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. Like West, who traveled widely and wrote a classic work on the Balkans, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” Power garnered attention by covering the Balkans wars in the 1990s, denouncing, not the right, but the liberal Clinton administration for its passivity in both the Balkans and Rwanda. “Slobodan’s Willing Executioners,” was the title of a cover story she wrote for The New Republic. While the right was complaining that Clinton was doing too much abroad, the humanitarian left complained that he wasn’t doing enough.

In short, Power is a humanitarian interventionist. She believed, and continues to believe, that it’s America’s mission to help the afflicted around the globe by emphasizing human rights rather than traditional great power politics and spheres of influence. In her gripping book, “A Problem From Hell,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, Power amplified her critique of U.S. foreign policy all the way back to the Turkish genocide against the Armenians during World War I.

Once again, Power’s approach was simple but powerful—to condemn the West, and the United States in particular, for failing to prevent the murder of helpless innocents. She traced a pattern of indifference in U.S. administrations down to the Balkans, arguing that United States needed to take an interventionist stance, whether it’s in Darfur or the Middle East. As a humanitarian interventionist, then, it’s a second reflex for Power to denounce and decry those who fail to meet her standards.

What Power does admire is crusaders, which is clearly the persona that she identifies Obama with. Her new book about the assassinated U.N. diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello is subtitled the “Fight to Save the World.” Power’s idea of politics is as a battle to the finish for grand ideals. Power wasn’t just writing about what she saw as a great U.N. diplomat, but also revealing how she sees herself—as a crusader for humanity.

Consequently, that could be why she continues to see many Democrats as squishes. Writing in 2006 in The Los Angeles Times (in a piece co-authored with Morton Abramowitz), Power declared that it was time for Democrats to “Get Loud, Get Angry!” According to Abramowitz and Power, “If the Democrats stand any chance of improving U.S. foreign policy in the near term, while also positioning themselves to conduct it in the medium term, it will not be by making nice. It will be by adding another truth to the administration’s absolutist gospels: If you screw up monumentally, you — like those harmed in your wake — will pay a price.”

Now Power has paid the price for getting loud and angry. Very undiplomatic, you might say. But Power may have burnished her own bona fides with the Democratic left by doing what Obama has rejected — come out swinging against Clinton. As Power’s numerous admirers lament her banishment from the Obama camp, she may even come to resemble something she’s only previously written about—a martyr.

Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the National Interest, is the author of “They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons.”