Yeah, that's the ticket.

(I wrote that a couple minutes after Jim's comment. The combination of the Preview feature and a wonky internet connection made it not go through.)

Okay, but not a conversation he should’ve been having, period.

Why not? As James pointed out, they weren't covert, they were doing what soldiers do while in a war zone. The interview sounded like he was describing his daily routine, nothing secretive. Iran surely knew they were being watched without him having to tell them.

That was my initial reaction as well but, re-reading the piece, it's clear that the conversation occurred a few days before the capture and the report was embargoed until their safe return.

What’s problematic here is the loose way in which language about intelligence operations is used.

Absolutely. As I was taught by the Navy during the Cold War, "Loose lips sink ships".

Uniformed military personnel operating in marked vessels in waters they have every right to be in using the naked eye to observe a hostile power are not, however, in any meaningful sense, “spies.”

Absolutely!

Unless they were in fact in Iranian waters, though the border is under such dispute that I doubt you can really say some patches are "Iraq" or "Iran" with neutral certainty. Or if someone aboard ship - say, a military intelligence officer or MI6 guy in an ensign costume - was using all those meetings with fishing boats to run agents into Iran.