SpyTalk

"Get on my back and I'll swim us ashore," the frog says.

The scorpion hops on, but a few inches from safety sinks his deadly stinger into his pal's back.

"Why'd you do that!?," the frog yells, paralyzed and slipping beneath the waves.

"Because I'm a scorpion!"

Bada-bing.

I don't think Saberi was engaged in espionage, if only because Iranian counterspies never produced surveillance photos of her handing over a document to a CIA operative -- and believe me, they would have followed her to film it, and arrested them both. 

But the freelance journalist's near-death experience should serve as a warning to other would-be scoop artists to resist their inner scorpion in such places as Iran, North Korea, China, or any states of the former Soviet Union. 

Do not try to lift classified documents , even -- or especially -- if they're offered up by the most trustworthy-seeming sources.

You're most likely being set up.

For that matter -- and it should hardly need saying -- don't steal classified documents anywhere, including in the United States, even if you're just trying to impress AIPAC. 

You'll be arrested if you're caught, and go to jail, maybe for life.

Los Angeles Times reporters Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim nicely captured the political maze in which Saberi made her brazen grab, citing "the unpredictability of Iran's fragmented, multilayered political and security system, where dissidents, politicians and journalists are sometimes arrested for transgressing undefined ideological and national security rules, such as by having contact with the West." 

What was Saberi thinking? Or was she trying to be a spy?

(Corrections: Roxana Seberi (not Roxanne). She did not "steal" a confidential Iranian document, in the usual sense of the word, but copied it.)