No joke, if anyone had asked me about Fico before, I would have said my credit is actually pretty good.
Not that you’re wrong, but I feel like maybe the West should publicize some of their triumphs a little, if only to build a bit of legend and fear (a-la the Mossad). Right now, it seems like maybe the West in general have a sort of moral/ethical reluctance to engage in the more shady aspects of spycraft/intelligence gathering, and that only the Russians and Israelis don’t shy from it.
I doubt that’s actually true; I suspect that the Western agencies are supremely competent, but they’re probably more subtle and much more invisible than relatively ham-handed stuff like gunning down a sitting Prime Minister and getting caught. They’d have made this look like a heart attack or car wreck, or something mundane like that, and nobody would have been the wiser.
No disagreement, but I would gather said same agencies under our adversaries’ watch know the score, and when there is a win or a loss. It’s those eyes and ears that need to know how capable our said agencies are. Having Joe Biden spike the ball every time we thwart some terrorist plot would probably be counter-productive (except in extraordinary situations like the neutralization of Bin Laden with Obama). But, we are starting to drift from the OP, so I will leave it there.
Saw a follow up on this in my Vietnamese news source:
Looks like it was principally related to Fico’s stance on Ukraine, but no indication as yet that it was anything other than a personal, independent action.