RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am

In 2018, Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert was arrested, charged with spying and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in an Iranian jail.

But after languishing in detention for more than 800 days, she was released in a diplomatically fraught prisoner swap involving four different countries.

Today, world editor for The Saturday Paper Jonathan Pearlman on Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s imprisonment, and what her freedom means for the other foreign citizens still jailed in Iran.

---

RUBY:

Jonathan, can you start by telling me who Kylie Moore-Gilbert is and how she came to be in Iran?

JONATHAN:

So Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a 33 year old lecturer in Islamic studies at Melbourne University. She grew up in Bathurst in New South Wales and did very well at school, top of her year in high school certificate.

Archival Tape -- Newsreader

“Joining me in the studio is Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, thank you for coming on the show.”

Archival Tape -- Kylie Moore-Gilbert

“Thank you for having me.”

JONATHAN:

Then she went studying overseas after finishing high school

Archival Tape -- Kylie Moore-Gilbert

“So I travelled to a lot of Middle Eastern countries and this was pre-Arab Spring. The Middle East was a little bit more stable than it is today.”

JONATHAN:

and spent some time in the Middle East.

Archival Tape -- Kylie Moore-Gilbert

“And yeah, I just really fell in love with the people, the culture, the food, the languages. It really piqued my interest.”

JONATHAN:

And really fell in love with it. And so she decided to study Middle Eastern studies. She studied at Cambridge. She learnt Arabic, she learnt Hebrew. And during a visit to the Gulf, she was in Dubai after the Arab Spring had broken out when she saw a protest there in support of the uprisings in Bahrain.

Archival Tape -- Kylie Moore-Gilbert

“I remember watching Al Jazeera from my hotel room seeing Bahrainis or Bahraini supporters in the streets. But I remember seeing people walking through the streets with Bahraini flags draped across their shoulders and being kind of interested in what's going on.”

JONATHAN:

So she became interested in that and decided to pursue her PHD in that which she completed at the University of Melbourne, looking at the uprising in Bahrain and became a Gulf studies expert. Towards the end of 2018, she travelled to Iran for a very short English language course at a university outside Tehran in the city of Qom. And it was just going to be a brief course, really fairly standard type, of course, that someone in her position would do.

But allegedly she came to the suspicion of someone on the course that she'd attended. She may have had a conversation with someone. She may have been interviewing someone as part of her own research. But someone has alerted the authorities and suggested that she seemed suspicious. And as we now know, she went to the airport after finishing her course and was arrested at the airport as she was about to fly back home.

RUBY:

Mhm. And so can you talk me through what happened after her arrest?

JONATHAN:

Well actually, for a long time the public didn't even know about her arrest. That only came out about a year later when a British newspaper reported that she was in prison and then the Australian government confirmed it.

Archival Tape -- Australian Newsreader

“An Australian academic detained in Iran for 12 months is being held on suspicion of spying. Iran has finally confirmed its holding Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert.”

JONATHAN:

So all that we really know is that she spent a long time in prison. Most of it was in Evin Prison in Tehran. She was held in a section with notoriously terrible conditions and usually reserved for political prisoners.

Archival Tape -- Former Iranian Prisoner

“Imagine being kept in a confined space 23 hrs a day. It’s the epitome of toture.”

JONATHAN:

There's very little information about the actual legal process that she was subject to. She was apparently charged with espionage, possibly espionage for Israel. But there’s still very little information about what exactly landed her in prison and with this 10 year jail sentence.

Archival Tape -- Former Iranian Prisoner

“It's 700 days that she’s in prison. That is mind boggling. It’s unexceptable. It's the sort of thing that no public should be comfortable with.”

JONATHAN:

Some letters emerged from that time that she was in prison and show that she was becoming increasingly desperate about her plight. She was suffering health problems in there, I think related to her diet. And she was just suffering terribly and felt, as she wrote in one letter, I'm entirely alone in Iran. And concerns for her well-being escalated in August when we learnt that she'd been transferred to Qarchak. That is a prison in the desert in Iran.

Archival Tape -- Australian Newsreader

“Currently she’s being held in an unimaginably squad coronavirus-infested jail outside the capital Tehran.”

JONATHAN:

It's known to be one of the worst prisons in the world for women. It seemed like very bad news for Kylie Moore-Gilbert at a time when we hadn't really heard much about what was happening to her, that she's now been transferred from one terrible prison to another in Iran. At that point, her fate and her future were looking really grim.

RUBY:

Mmm. Let's talk a little bit about that, because for the past few months, especially since that transfer, all of the reporting on her case really did focus on how there was diminishing hope about her being able to to leave Iran and return home. And there was a sense, I think, that she might not be released at all. Is that the sense that you got?

JONATHAN:

Yes. And you saw her colleagues and supporters becoming increasingly vocal.

Archival Tape -- Former Iranian Prisoner

“Kylie's situation was terrible to start with. It remained terrible for nearly two years and it just got worse.”

JONATHAN:

Starting to go on the record for the first time and starting to form groups and even starting to protest on her behalf.

Archival Tape -- Friend of Kylie Moore Gilbert

“There's a person involved at the heart of this. So anything that they can do to bring her home sooner and to ensure that she has anything that she could need is is really important”

JONATHAN:

Because it just seemed like her case was really going nowhere.

Archival Tape -- Friend of Kylie Moore Gilbert

“We’re extremely concerned for her physical and mental safety at the moment.”

JONATHAN:

And then last week, really, the news came out of the blue that Kylie Moore-Gilbert had been released from prison and that she was going to be able to return to Australia and that after more than two years in prison, she was now free.

RUBY:

We'll be back after this.

[ADVERTISEMENT]

Archival Tape -- Australian Newsreader 1

“Dr Kylie Moore Gilbert has been released from detention in Iran.”

Archival Tape -- Australian Newsreader 2

“Iranian state media followed every step of her release which began outside her prison.”

Archival Tape -- British Newsreader 1

“A British Australian academic has expressed relief and thanks for her release from 2 years detention in Iran for espionage.”

Archival Tape -- Australian Newsreader 3

“An airbus leased by the Australian government waits to fly Dr Moore-Gilbert to freedom. For now, all that matters is that Kylie Moore-Gilbert is coming home.”

RUBY:

Jonathan, late last week, it was announced that Kylie Moore-Gilbert would be released from jail in Iran and she has now arrived back home in Australia. So what do we know about the details of the deal that was made to secure her release?

JONATHAN:

The government likes to say there was no deal because it doesn't want to suggest that it's engaging in or encouraging Iran's hostage diplomacy. But we do know that there was a deal that three Iranian prisoners who were being held in Thailand were released and flown to Iran to secure Kylie Moore-Gilbert's release. These three men were planning to bomb, we think, the Israeli embassy in Thailand. But whilst they were preparing this, the bomb went off and the plot was exposed. And so these three Iranians had been held in prison in Thailand. And it was their release that secured Kylie Moore-Gilbert's release last week.

This was treated as a bit of a public relations coup for the Iranian government, the securing of these three prisoners. They were seen celebrating on their return to Iran and Iran has trumpeted this deal and its ability to secure the release of these three.

But other governments have remained very quiet about it, including Australia's government, at least publicly, because they don't want to encourage this sort of hostage taking from Iran.

RUBY:

Ok, and this must have been in the works for a while. There must have been a lot of negotiations happening in the background that we weren't aware of?

JONATHAN:

It seems like the plan to arrange this transfer may have begun about a year ago. The Australian government looked around for potential prisoners who might be able to secure Kylie Moore-Gilbert's release. So it took a while to find the right sort of prisoners that might work for this. And then they had to negotiate with the Iranian government, with the Thai government, with the Israeli government. It was a very complicated deal. We know that Nick Warner was involved.

He's the head of Australia's Intelligence community effectively, but he was an ambassador to Iran, a diplomat in Iran in the 1990s, sort of also a head of Australia's Foreign Spy Service. So the right sort of person to become involved in these negotiations. But various diplomats and various ambassadors were involved. It was a lengthy and complicated process. But this was all going on really in secret and very little has been said publicly about it.

RUBY:

Jonathan, the Iranian government is adamant that Kylie Moore-Gilbert was a spy and she and the Australian government have denied that. Has there ever been any evidence to support those claims?

JONATHAN:

There's no evidence of it at all. If you speak to some of her academic colleagues, they find this laughable and certainly say that there's absolutely nothing that would have suggested that she was a spy.

Archival Tape -- Family member of Kylie Moore-Gilbert

“It's important for the public to know that, you know, Kylie was only 10 months out of grad school, only 10 months to finish with her PhD when she did this trip to Iran.”

JONATHAN:

She appears to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had an Israeli partner, which presumably the Iranians found out about. Wouldn't have been that hard to find out. And it's not like she's the only person who's been held in Iran on trumped up charges. So there's really nothing to suggest that she was a spy. And there's a lot to suggest that this was just part of Iran's pattern of hostage taking.

RUBY:

Hmm. And the reason that the Australian government doesn't want to talk about this publicly, is because of that concern that it could encourage hostage taking. But do you think that the fact that this deal has been made at all, will set a precedent?

JONATHAN:

I think it does set a precedent. I also think it's understandable that the government would do this in the way that it's done, which is to do it secretly and quietly and to deny officially that there's been a deal. It is understandable that they would do absolutely everything that they can to try to secure their own citizens' release. But it is concerning because, yes, it will encourage this sort of behaviour by Iran. It's a country that continues to do it. Has other prisoners being held in similar fashion. And there have been Australians released in similar fashion as well. There were two Australian travel bloggers who were detained in Iran about a year ago and released effectively in exchange for a prisoner that was being held in Australia, a much lower level sort of prisoner.

But these deals have occurred and they'll continue. And, yes, it sets a precedent, but it also just seems sadly understandable.

RUBY:

Right, and so for those who are in prison in Iran - because there are other Westerners currently imprisoned, on similar charges to Kylie Moore-Gilbert - does this deal represent hope for them?

JONATHAN:

It's hard to say whether it represents hope, because it seems like each of these cases are individual cases and that the prisoners that you need to secure the release of these detainees, these Western detainees in Iran, depend on the individual case. So it's a matter of trying to find the right chips to bargain with Iran. And that really depends on the individual case. And in Kylie Moore-Gilbert's case, it took a long time to find the right sorts of Iranian prisoners who were going to be able to secure her release.

So I think, unfortunately, this case has raised the hopes of some of the prisoners in Iran. But unfortunately, I think it shows that each case is going to depend on the individual circumstances of the person who's been detained over there.

RUBY:

Jonathan, thank you so much for your time today.

JONATHAN:

Thanks, Ruby.

[ADVERTISEMENT]

RUBY:

Also in the news today

Western Australia has announced a re-opening of its borders, with people in NSW and Victoria able to travel to the state from next Tuesday. However borders remain closed to South Australian residents.

And, the Bureau of Meteorology has confirmed that Australia recorded it’s hottest November on record for maximum, minimum and average temperatures. The Bureau also found that it was Australia’s warmest spring on record.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.