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Comment by 0xDEF | Hacker News Reader

I remember a few years back Iran send assassins to kill Iranian dissidents in Germany, Austria, and Belgium. The assassins were caught and politely returned to Iran on a private plane.

No punishment for planned/attempted murder.

The West is hopelessly naive about sophisticated and brutal adversaries like Russia and Iran.

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Is it possible they had diplomatic passports?

Most spies are known to the host nations as they work out of the embassy under cover jobs with standard diplomatic passports, therefore they have diplomatic immunity if they run into trouble and the best the host country can do is permanently evict them.

It’s not naïvety, it’s that that west would appreciate the same treatment when they send spies and assassins, which they do.

Or maybe they manage to recruit some of the spies/assassins to work as double-agents?

Another distinct possibility.

When has the West sent assassins to Iran or Russia?

What’s the point? Assassinate one dictator and in a few months they’ll have a new one, or the country devolves into a hell of fighting for the next 5 years until one can crown themselves king.

The West prefers more refined tactics like missiles- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Qasem_Soleima...

> which they do.

Citation sorely needed

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nuc...

That was by Israelis, not Western Europeans.

The US tends to use drones these days eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qasem_Soleimani

Again it is extreme naïveté, those assassins when caught are summarily executed. Iran will pick people off the street, accuse them of working for Israel and kill them, just to send a message to their own people. They’re not politely returning western assassins.

I don’t think it is naivety really, Western countries mostly don’t have to “send messages” to their own citizens. Summarily executing assassins or random people you claim to be assassins is just throwing away negotiating chips.

And it's your belief that the State Department-- let alone the CIA-- are totally ignorant of what Iran does to its staff?

Nope, I think the politicians at the top are hopelessly naive or simply too maliciously self involved to care. And are more concerned with appearances than any of the values they claim to espouse.

Exactly. It’s a newtonian game where an action creates a counter action. “You take off one of our field agents, we take off one of your. You return our agent to us, we probably return your agent to you” I have no idea of the recruitment pool but I would imagine operatives who can perform assassinations and are not total loose cannons are in finite supply.

Without experience in this domain, I could fermi-guess optimal ones probably come from the few percentages of population who don’t suffer of PTSD after violence. So if you want a person of above average intelligence, who does not mind going to plausibly suicidal missions, and is able to keep it all together, AND has decided to take a career in cloak&dagger… I’d say such fields agents are not trivial to replace. Hence you probably want to issue the courtesy of returning opposing forces, rather than having to find a new field agent (or whatever they are called) or several.

It is more general than the west, it is that Good people are naive. They don't understand how many people are willing to lie and kill to get even petty gains from it. The USA is struggling with this asymmetry internally right now too. We are slowly and politely trying to prosecute people who attempted to overturn an election while they incite civil unrest and pass laws protecting themselves from prosecution

Integrity is often confused with naivety in light of desired animalistic revenge.

Part of the problem is that if you do it their way, you become them. What’s the point of winning if you get the same outcome as not winning? USA doesn’t need a left/center authoritarian regime just as much as it doesn’t want a right authoritarian regime.

So let’s not advocate for the left becoming authoritarian shall we? [parts of] Europe tried that already, it doesn’t work either.

It is good to be thorough with this stuff, and sometimes that means things go more slowly than we’d like. But the end result is that nobody reasonable could think it is a partisan witch hunt. It might be the case that a significant chunk of the populace is unreasonable, but that isn’t something that can be solved by changing courtroom procedures.

It’s truly shocking how much misinformation people will believe because it jives with their current beliefs.

> The USA is struggling with this asymmetry internally right now too. We are slowly and politely trying to prosecute people who attempted to overturn an election while they incite civil unrest and pass laws protecting themselves from prosecution

This is an interesting statement to me, because the right uses very similar language in the opposite direction. To paraphrase: "we're playing by the rules while the left is using the federal government to silence political adversaries."

From where I sit, those statements don't seem entirely accurate, but they also are not mutually exclusive.

The idea that the CIA is naive to what Russia does is pretty amusing.

Yes, if only they frequented social media, they might have some clue what Chinese, Russian, and Iranian security services were up to. Alas for their naivete...

Do you have a source for that? Because the story as told seems vanishingly unlikely. Maybe nothing could be proven but that they were there illegaly?

And how would the inevitably resulting prisoner exchange later benefit anyone?

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