[fsloth]

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.