Is it possible that there is a connection between the leak in 2002 about the highly classified U.S. intelligence program — which the paper chose to publish despite the fact that it knew it was creating trouble for U.S. intelligence — and the recent arrests of Esfandiari and the others?  ~Gabriel Schoenfeld

I can see a reasonable argument for why it was probably not the best idea to have a big news story on a CIA recruiting operation, but it is a bit rich that we’re supposed to think that one newspaper story did more to put Iranian-American visitors under suspicion of espionage than, oh, the last five years of official sabre-rattling, “axis of evil” speeches, and loose talk about the use of tactical nukes…and a little thing called the invasion of Iraq.  Tehran might have deduced from these other things that the United States government was going to try to infiltrate and spy on their country quite apart from anything they learned in the newspapers here.  In Schoenfeld’s view, it is presumably not Washington’s belligerence and threats that would make Tehran suspicious of Americans in Iran, so why would a single newspaper story have made that much difference?  If government policy does not provoke hostile responses–if anti-American hostility just sort of happens for no rhyme or reason–what could one newspaper story do? 

If Tehran is so paranoid about the CIA, and I don’t doubt that it probably is (unlike Americans, people in other countries seem to be under the impression that the CIA is competent and good at what it does), why do we need to look any farther than the unreasonable, unrealistic anxieties of Iran’s government?  Surely, the Times story should have been confirmation of the appalling limits of the CIA’s reach into Iran.  If I were an Iranian government official, I would feel very relieved that this was the best the “Great Satan” could manage.  It might even make me lower my guard.  Who knows?  

Could it be that Schoenfeld takes the Iranian regime to be a relatively rational state actor when it allows him to score points against the supposedly subversive media?  Besides, to hear the Commentary crowd tell it, Iran is a totalitarian nightmare state filled with the very vapours of Hell (this is only a very slight exaggeration of what they and their allies say), so why would they expect there to be a rational reason for the regime’s behaviour that could be traced to a newspaper story?  They are not exactly the people who believe that activist U.S. foreign policy has adverse consequences for us, so why would they assume that U.S. journalism has adverse consequences for Americans overseas?  It sounds a bit like blaming American journalism first! 

On a more serious note, as anyone who reads the papers these days knows, Tehran is cracking down on everyone in the country, and has been tightening the screws on the population for many months, and for the last couple of years it has been an unusually poor time to be an American visiting Iran given the heated rhetoric of Ahmadinejad and steady efforts in some parts of the American press to gin up a new war fever against Iran.  Weak, repressive regimes also tend to be rather jumpy about foreigners, especially citizens of major powers whose governments have made it clear that they intend the destruction and/or overthrow of the regime.  It is quite possible that the causes of the current crackdown and the general anxiety about American spies that Tehran must have (given that we have two major military deployments on either side of their country and a small armada in the Persian Gulf) would have resulted in the arrests of these citizens in any case. 

Look at this another way.  Instead of giving the Times grief for reporting news, however unwise the decision may well have been, we should ask the obvious question: this is the CIA’s idea of developing human intelligence “assets”?  No wonder we never know what’s going on in other countries, since the cunning plan for extracting information from countries such as Iran is to ask ethnic Iranians to spy on the old country.  This is not exactly an unexpected way of gathering information in another country.  The Iranian government must already presume every American visiting is a potential spy; this story simply confirmed what they were already going to assume anyway.  Note that this is another bad consequence of maintaining a sanctions regime that makes the presence of Americans in Iran highly unusual and therefore that much more subject to official scrutiny and paranoia, since the reasons for Americans being in Iran today are very few. 

You pretty much have to laugh when you read this bit, though it is actually quite depressing:

The article explained just how the agency hoped to use emigres to get at their relatives in Iran. “If family members trust each other, they’ll tell you things you can’t know otherwise, can’t get [from satellites]. If you’re really lucky, you might recruit somebody involved in the nuclear-weapons program,” was how one former CIA officer explained it.

Sure, Cousin Mahmoud might even take you on a tour of Natanz! 

The question we should really be asking at this point is: why on earth should the public have ever believed intelligence claims about Iraqi WMDs when it comes via unreliable channels similar to those being encouraged here?  For that matter, given the still-parlous state of our human intelligence resources in Iran, why should we trust government claims about Iranian weapons programs now?