To leave Tehran’s Evin prison is never as simple as to walk out of its gates. The British-Australian academic Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert survived 804 days as a defiant hostage to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), accused variously of being a Mossad agent, an MI6 agent or a spy for Australia, and held in the Guard Corps’ notorious 2A wing of Evin.
Two years since Moore-Gilbert won her freedom, reminders of the cruel capriciousness of Iran’s hostage diplomacy are all around.
This month, two British nationals, including Iran’s highest-profile political prisoner, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, were freed after the UK paid Iran a decades-old £400m debt. But two more Britons remain held by the country.
Days later, an Iranian-Australian man, Shokrollah Jebeli, died in Evin.
Moore-Gilbert knows how lucky she is.
“I can’t just switch off and move on with my life and forget my friends there and forget the horrible stories I heard and the things I’ve seen,” she tells Guardian Australia. “I have to use my voice to speak out.”
Moore-Gilbert says she is “absolutely stoked” that Britons Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori are free, but furious that some in the British establishment celebrated “like it’s some victory for British diplomacy”. She calls it “shameful” that the debt repayment did not secure the release of all four Britons.
“Nazanin served both sentences in full … six years. It’s not a victory …. if British diplomacy really was effective, they would have got her out before her sentence ended.”
And Moore-Gilbert worries about what comes next.
She argues paying cash to the Revolutionary Guards will “entrench the practice” of hostage diplomacy: arbitrarily arresting foreign citizens on spurious charges in order to leverage a diplomatic advantage, or simply a high price, in exchange for their release.
“This incentivises hostage-taking. It’s the same faction within the IGRC every time, they brag about it, they say ‘look at all the money we’ve got just because we arrested a couple of spies’.”
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was formed in the aftermath of Iran’s 1979 revolution, charged with upholding the ideals of the Islamic republic and defending it from foreign and domestic threats. It was the Guards who arrested, tried and held Moore-Gilbert for the majority of her time in prison.
Moore-Gilbert says they are a law unto themselves, “a state within a state”: ruthless, brutal, but also riven by factionalism and ideological inconsistencies, and in thrall to conspiracy theories and paranoia.
The Guards have been proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the US and other countries. More money in their hands, Moore-Gilbert argues, makes the world less safe.
“The Revolutionary Guards believe this is their money. The Iranian people won’t see a penny of it. The IRGC will use it to buy weapons, they will use it to kill people on the streets next time a protest movement erupts in Iran. They will funnel weapons and send more mercenaries to Syria, to Palestine, to Yemen, to Iraq, wherever else they are interfering.”
The red line
Moore-Gilbert had travelled to Iran to attend an academic conference in the city of Qom. But she was a spy, the Guards insisted. Isolated from any contact with the outside world, Moore-Gilbert was told again and again that no one would come for her: her country had abandoned her, her family would forget.
Over more than two years, through hundreds of hours of interrogations, she rejected the ever-shifting allegations; she made no confessions; she refused repeated overtures to spy on the Guards’ behalf.
No evidence was ever presented that Moore-Gilbert, a lecturer in Islamic Studies at Melbourne University, was a spy for any country. The Australian government dismissed the charges as baseless.
She was nonetheless tried by justice Abolqasem Salavati – known as “the hanging judge” for the number of capital sentences he has imposed – inevitably convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Moore-Gilbert’s freedom was ultimately secured by a complicated prisoner swap involving four countries. Three Iranian terrorists, convicted of an attempted bombing on the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, were freed from a Thai jail and welcomed back to Iran with garlands of flowers in a macabre, mocking felicitation.
Moore-Gilbert draws a distinction between a prisoner swap and acquiescence to demands for money – “essentially blackmail”.
“I know it’s a bit rich of me to say this when I was in the same situation, and it is a moral quandary because innocent people are suffering and you want to alleviate that suffering, but there has to be a red line somewhere. And I think money exchanging hands is that red line. Because you don’t know what they’re going to use that money to do.
“I’m very keenly aware that three convicted terrorists were exchanged for me. While assurances were given to the Australian government that these guys would never leave Iranian territory … if one of those three conducted an attack or killed someone, obviously I would feel somehow personally responsible or implicated in that because it’s because of me that they’re not behind bars. That’s hugely worrying to me.
“And I do have some moral qualms about that. But I also think if you look at the other prisoner swaps that have occurred, it’s rare that it’s been terrorists, it’s often been Iranians convicted in the west of breaking sanctions.”
Moore-Gilbert argues the rest of the world needs to act collectively to halt the practice, to make the price Iran and other states pay for engaging in hostage diplomacy too high.
“Every western country who has citizens taken hostage in Iran just kind of reinvents the wheel, they don’t seem to learn from each other’s mistakes or collaborate at all.”
‘It was a nightmare’
The capriciousness of the Iranian regime emerges throughout Moore-Gilbert’s new memoir, The Uncaged Sky, in the erratic attitudes and contradictory demands of her jailers.
Interrogators switch, day to day, hour to hour, from oleaginous to threatening, from flirtatious to curtly dismissive.
At one point, Moore-Gilbert’s captors want her to entice her then-husband – Israeli dual national Ruslan Hodorov – to Iranian territory. When that is refused, they demand she submit to being filmed for short propaganda films, denouncing the west.
She was given vanishingly little information about her situation or the world outside. Cellmates turned out to be spies and the one person within the regime in which she placed some faith – a Mr Hosseini – was summarily removed after she attempted to smuggle out a letter pleading for help. That, she writes, marked a moment of crisis.
“Whatever thin tendril of hope I still clutched at slipped from my grasp and I entered a place of blind, unrelenting pain ... I don’t know how it happened, but I found myself beating my own skull against the wall of my cell. Dozens of times.
“There was no hope.”
A year of Moore-Gilbert’s sentence was spent in solitary confinement, “in some sense worse than physical torture”.
“It eats you away from the inside and you go crazy inside your own head. You become your own worst enemy.
“For a couple of days, you can cope. But if you’re there for months and months on end, it is torture. For me, the beginning was really rough because I had no idea where I was or who had captured me or why I was there. I didn’t understand the rules of the place. I didn’t have any language at all. It was a nightmare.”
The memoir’s other recurrent theme is Moore-Gilbert’s repeated pleas for her case to be made public.
She had been in prison a year before it was reported, and then only because two other Australians were arrested (then relatively swiftly released).
Moore-Gilbert pleaded with her family to go to the media, to campaign publicly, to bring pressure to bear on the Australian government to negotiate, and on the Iranians to respond.
Another letter – successfully smuggled out – urged Scott Morrison, “please, I beg of you, to do whatever it takes to get me out”.
But the government insisted “quiet diplomacy” was the most effective strategy and would see her home soonest.
Moore-Gilbert disagrees.
“Public attention and pressure really does help ... I think it played a really important role in my release.
“And I saw my prison conditions improve as a result. When it became public in the media, I saw that more attention was paid to my medical conditions.”
She says she is “heartbroken” by the death this month of Jebeli, an 83-year-old Iranian-Australian held in Evin over a financial dispute, made doubly tragic because it was avoidable.
“He died of neglect,” Moore-Gilbert says. “Had enough pressure been applied, had enough noise been made, to get him treatment, he could be alive still.”
Moore-Gilbert says one of the hardest parts of her incarceration was a sense nothing was happening outside Evin’s walls.
“When you have no information, and you’re told ‘no-one is talking about you’, there’s a feeling of abandonment,” she says.
Briefly granted her phone during an interrogation, she read articles on the ABC and in the Guardian on her incarceration. “It felt strangely like a validation, as though I now had permission to accept within myself that I was suffering.”
‘Nothing was left unaffected’
The two years trapped in Iran’s prison system “turned the fundamentals of my life upside down”, Moore-Gilbert writes in The Uncaged Sky.
Most dramatically, her marriage was ended. Having perceived her husband’s growing distance while in prison – “some sort of game was [being] played behind the scenes about which I knew very little” – Moore-Gilbert was confronted on her release with the news he had started an affair with her doctoral supervisor and university colleague Kylie Baxter.
Moore-Gilbert later marked her divorce on Twitter with a champagne bottle emoji, and now speaks about him with resigned indifference, despite, she says, “constant, awkward questions”.
But she emphasises it was everything that changed – “my career, my relationships with loved ones, nothing was left unaffected”.
“In times of crisis we discover who is prepared to fight in our corner, and who is missing in action, and often the results are surprising.”
She recognises that she, too, is changed by the experience.
“I’m still the same person I always was at my core [but] I’m definitely more assertive, more confident … I stand up for myself more.
“And I guess I’m a bit more solitary as well. I’m used to being alone.”
Friends remain in Evin. Two former cellmates, environmental activists Niloufar Bayani and Sepideh Kashani, remain in jail in Iran. It is it to them Moore-Gilbert has dedicated her memoir.
And still, her own freedom is not absolute. Moore-Gilbert has had her Twitter and email accounts repeatedly hacked, and she is aware there are Iranian nationals living in her city sympathetic to the Revolutionary Guards’ worldview.
She is acutely conscious now of video surveillance, no matter how benign: “I am always subconsciously aware of where any CCTV cameras are, I just clock them without even realising.
“These kinds of behaviours are just ingrained in me from prison, I don’t know if I’ll have them forever, or if they’ll fade with time.”
Towards the end of her incarceration, Moore-Gilbert was suddenly dragged from Evin prison and sent to Qarchak – routinely described as the worst women’s prison in the world – on the desert outskirts of Tehran.
It was intended as a punishment for some perceived slight against a jailor, and a power play against Australia as the negotiations for her liberty reached a critical point.
But it was a moment of almost-joyous solidarity for Moore-Gilbert. Removed from the isolation of Wing 2A for the cacophonous crowd of a general prison wing, she found sorority and friendship.
At one stage, she tells a fellow prisoner: “I am Iranian, I am one of you now.”
She tells the Guardian, “I can never fathom how such a warm-hearted, generous people can have a regime in charge which is the exact opposite: so cruel and brutal and inhumane.
“I was helped by a lot of Iranian people. A lot of them risked themselves to help me when, you know, they owed me nothing. I can’t ever forget that. I can’t forget my friends back there.”
Because to leave Evin prison is never as simple as to walk out of its gates.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert is the author of The Uncaged Sky, published by Ultimo Press, out now
