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.

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.

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

> which they do.

Citation sorely needed

When has the West sent assassins to Iran or Russia?