Gabriel Schoenfeld, writing in the Contentions blog at Commentary, wonders if leaked information published in the Los Angeles Times had anything to do with the arrest of 4 Iranian-Americans currently being held in Iran. He writes:

Leaks of vital U.S. intelligence secrets can get Americans killed. They can also place Americans in a great deal of danger.

As of yesterday, Iran has seized four Iranian-Americans and charged them with spying. They are Haleh Esfandiari of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban-planning consultant associated with George Soros's Open Society Institute; Parnaz Azima, a journalist who works for the American-financed Radio Farda; and Ali Shakeri, a "peace activist" from the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine. In addition, Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who is reported to have traveled to Iran on private business, has been missing since March.

Do these developments have anything to do with a 2002 leak about a highly classified U.S. intelligence program?

On January 15, 2002, under the headline "CIA Looks to Los Angeles for Would-Be Iranian Spies," the Los Angeles Times disclosed on its front page that the CIA was recruiting Iranian-Americans in southern California, home to the largest concentration of Iranian émigrés in the United States. According to the paper, the agency was "offering cash for useful information" to Iranian-Americans who "have business connections [in Iran] or relatives in [a] position to provide valuable information from inside the largely impenetrable republic." The article went on to give more details.