Terror attacks are spreading like wildfire in the United States and across Europe as radical Islamic terrorists target and kill innocent civilians.

Paris, Brussels, Orlando, New York, and even St. Cloud, Minnesota have come under attack by ISIS and its sympathizers recently – but there’s one nation that has been largely spared.

Russia has been leading a military campaign against ISIS, bombing the terrorists as they try to overrun Syria, yet radical Islamists have largely avoiding attacks inside Russia.

Why?

It may be because of an incident that took place more than 30 years ago – a moment in history so chilling that it can make even a terrorist’s blood run cold with fear.

A counter-terrorism move so bold, President Barack Obama wouldn’t dare try it himself.

In 1985, four Soviet diplomats were kidnapped by Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Beirut.

In a demand that sounds like it could have been ripped from today’s headlines, the militants ordered the Soviets to stop Syrian forces from attacking Islamic militants.

When the Russians didn’t respond, the militants shot and killed one of the diplomats with a machine gun – and left his body in a Lebanese garbage dump, according to published reports from 1985.

But it turns out there was a reason the Russians weren’t quick to respond.

They were busy taking a hostage of their own as the KGB snatched a male relative of a high-ranking Hezbollah official.

“They then castrated him and sent the severed organs to the Hezbollah official,” Jerusalem Post reporter Benny Morris, who broke the story, wrote the following year.

The KGB wasn’t done “negotiating” yet.

With their own diplomat dead, they shot and killed the relative – then, they made sure the Hezbollah official understood that they knew the names and locations of plenty of other relatives, too, and that they were willing to send more packages as proof.

But the world’s most feared spy agency STILL wasn’t done.

KGB station chief Yuri Perfilyev arranged for a meeting in Beirut with Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, often called the “spiritual leader of Hezbollah,” to ask for his help.

According to the book “The Secret War With Iran,” Perfilyev called the situation tragic – then said it would also be tragic if a Soviet missile “by chance, purely by chance, would fall on the holy city of Qom in Iran, close to the Soviet border.”

“Apparently, it had some effect,” Perfilyev laughed as he relayed the conversation to the book’s author, Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman.

The threat against a holy city meeting with an “accident” combined with the horrific treatment of the Hezbollah leader’s relative had just the effect the Soviets were hoping for.

The terrorists continued to hold onto their European and American hostages – the Russian diplomats even reported hearing people speak English in another room in one of the places they were held – but the three remaining Soviets were quickly released.

“This is the way the Soviets operate,” Morris quoted a source as saying in the Post. “They do things – they don’t talk. And this is the language the Hezbollah understand.”

Should the United States sink to the Soviets level in dealing with terrorists? Comment below.

— The Horn editorial team