Kylie Moore-Gilbert has revealed Iran asked her to become a spy during her drawn-out imprisonment, which she says was a torturous experience that gave her “prolonged anxiety” and “panic attacks”.
The 33-year-old British-American academic returned to Australia in November after serving two years and three months of a 10-year prison sentence in one of Iran’s most notorious prisons.
She was arrested at Tehran’s airport in 2018 on allegations of spying, though she and the Australian government have always denied the allegations.
Now, the lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Melbourne University has revealed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tried to recruit her as a spy “many times” while she was in prison.
“I knew that the reason that they didn’t engage in any meaningful negotiations with the Australians (for my release) was because they wanted to recruit me, they wanted me to work for them as a spy,” she told Sky News Australia on Tuesday night.
“(They said) that if I co-operated with them and agreed to become a spy for them, they would free me.”
Dr Moore-Gilbert said the country was trying to recruit her while at the same time trying to negotiate a hostage release deal.
But she says they weren’t particularly interested in using her to spy on Australia.
“They were more interested in me using my academic status as a cover story and travelling to other Middle Eastern countries and perhaps European countries, perhaps America, and collecting information for them there.”
She says she believes she was valuable to Iran.
“I think the Revolutionary Guards had told the prison, ‘If anything happens to this foreign woman, who is of high value to us, then there will be hell to pay,’” she said.
But despite her perceived value, Dr Moore-Gilbert has spoken out about her maltreatment in prison, which began as soon as she was detained.
The academic was sent to Tehran’s notorious Evan prison before being transferred to the remote Qarchak Prison, east of Tehran, as fears escalated over the spread of the coronavirus in the country’s crowded prisons.
Her incarceration began with four weeks of solitary confinement in small, cold cell where she was subjected to constant light and noise.
Dr Moore-Gilbert said she went “completely insane” during her time in jail.
“I’d lost it, I’d lost the plot. I was completely crazy. Just entertaining your brain for such a long period of time.
“I was never physically tortured with the things you think about like pulling fingernails or being electrocuted – that never happened to me – but I was beaten up once and forcibly injected with a syringe of tranquilliser against my will and that was in early 2020,” she said.
She says she suffered a “prolonged anxiety attack or panic attack” but as the months dragged on, she says she repeated a daily mantra: “I am free. Not matter what you do to me, I am still free.”
The Australian government has refused to confirm that the academic’s freedom was extracted through a prisoner swap.
Iranian media claimed three of the country’s citizens were released in exchange for Dr Moore-Gilbert. Thailand said it had transferred three Iranians involved in a botched 2012 bomb plot back to Tehran, but declined to call it a swap.
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