Has there ever been a case where a person living in the US was kidnapped, abducted, or otherwise taken into custody by foreign agents on US soil?
Note that I’m not talking about cases where a foreign lawbreaker is captured by US authorities and handed over to his home nation.
Possible examples would include deserters of foreign militaries caught by agents of that military working in the US; foreign lawbreakers tracked down by their own government and arrested by that government’s agents; or political refugees forcibly returned to their homeland.
And yes, I’m aware of the impressment issues that were a bone of contention between the US and England around 1812.
Not exactly what you were asking for, but you might find the story of Bogdan Stashynsky of interest. He was a Ukrainian trained and ordered by Soviet authorities to kill dissidents living in Western Europe in the 1950s, with a James Bond-like device. Quite an important case for German law students, btw: Stashinsky defected to West Germany after his second murder, and the German courts had to interpret the law in a very unorthodox manner to avoid a life sentence.
Here’s a news strory about US citizens kidnapping a Canadian in Canada. Now, they were acting as private citizens and were arrested on their return to the States, so they werent ‘agents of a foreign power’, but from the Canadian point of view, it would be the same crime whether they were state agents or private citizens. Would not the same hold in the US?
As only one Nazi has ever been convicted in an Israeli court, I find that unlikely.
Now, If you said Mossad agents were hunting down and killing Nazis in the U.S., you might have a bit more of a case. I know for a fact that similar squads were active in post-war Europe and South America, but I doubt they bothered to work in the U.S. Not enough Nazis.
In 1970, a Lithuanian sailor attempted to defect from a fishing boat onto a U.S. Coast Guard cutter.
Long story short, the guy’s mom was a U.S. citizen, so he was a U.S. citizen and should have been allowed to stay. The state department and the Coast Guard dropped the ball, and allowed Soviet government agents to board the Coast Guard ship and forceably remove Mr. Kudirka. He got 10 years in Siberia, after which he came to the U.S.
Well, one of the things leading up to the war of 1812 was British ships impressing US citzens into the British military to fight Napoleon. One could say this was whole-sale kidnapping.
I’d been given the impression that Leon Theremin (inventor of the electronic music device called the “theremin”) had been kidnapped by Russians. Certainly the film Theremin: A Musical Odyssey gives that impression.
The Wikipedia article, citing a 2000 book, says that Theremin actually returned voluntarily because of tax problems. I find that kinda hard to believe, but it’s possible. Stalin had him imprisoned and sent to Siberia after his return to Russia, however it happened.