Dream of suburban bliss took nightmarish twist with trumped-up charges for Kylie Moore-Gilbert

Kylie Moore-Gilbert and her husband were blissfully unaware that their love would pitch the young woman into a living nightmare.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert and husband Ruslan Hodorov shown in a propaganda video linked to Iran after her release.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert and her husband­, Ruslan Hodorov, were building a quiet life together in suburban Melbourne. Then the British-Australian academic was arrested in Tehran, and along with Hodorov was accused by Iran of involvement in covert operation­s spanning the Middle East.

Moore-Gilbert, then 31, was a richly-credentialled scholar. The couple had just bought a house in Belgrave, in the city’s east.

But by that time, according to Iran, she had already been recruited into Israeli intelligence and gone behind the lines in Syria. Her husband was the purported ­puppet master who had ­recruited her and induced her to convert to Judaism, Iran’s Fars news agency claimed.

From her arrest in September 2018, she was shuttled between some of the country’s toughest jails. Earlier this month, after 804 days, Moore-Gilbert was finally freed after Iranian authorities secured­ their terms — a prisoner swap for three terrorists jailed over a 2012 bombing in Bangkok.

The differences between mundane­ Melbourne suburbia and Iran’s telling of the Moore-Gilbert affair could not be starker. If Moore-Gilbert and Hodorov are indeed in the service of an inter­national intelligence operation, the clues of their past life would have to be the most elaborate of covers.

Because those remnants, in social­ media posts and writings, reflect who they purport to be: academ­ics who shared a passion for Middle Eastern studies, envis­ioning a well-lived life together in Australia.

Moore-Gilbert’s desperate letter­s, smuggled out of a grimy cell in Evin Prison, certainly show shock over her arrest. “They have … attempted to use me as a hostage­ in a diabolical plot to lure my husband, an Australian permanent resident, into joining me in an Iranian prison,” she wrote.

“The Australian foreign ministry (sic) needs to consider whether the actions that have been taken against myself and my husband by an entity backed and supported by the Iranian state are those of a friendly nation.”

Kylie Moore-Gilbert at Doha airport after being freed. Picture: Twitter

Moore-Gilbert and Hodorov, a Russian emigre to Israel, met on an expenses-paid summer study program in the West Bank centre of Alon outside Jerusalem in 2011 and married in 2017. For Moore-Gilbert, the Tikvah Israel fellowship was an opportunity to see up close some of the religious texts and sites she had been studying in distant Melbourne.

A dual British-Australian nationa­l, she grew up in Bathurst, entered Cambridge University in Britain and graduated with first-class honours in 2013 before earning her PhD in Middle East studies from the University of Melbourne.

Understandably, her family kept her connection to Israel under wraps during her long, dispiritin­g confinement. Moore-Gilbert’s conversion to Judaism was entirely voluntary and in keeping with an abiding interest and attachment to the Jewish faith and history, friends said, scoffing at the notion she was an undercover agent for Israeli intelligence.

Alan Rubenstein, director of the Tikvah Fund’s university programs­, told the Plus61JMedia website this week that Moore-­Gilbert had taken a journey of ­personal and academic discovery that led to Israel.

“She had a compelling story about her Jewish growth from a secular upbringing in Australia to a deep attachment to her people and to the story of the Jewish state,” he said. “I remember her passion for learning Hebrew and the wide range of her interests — theological, political, historical.”

Hodorov, relatively new to Israe­l, spoke Hebrew with a Russian­ accent and was preparing to enrol in a local university.

Those on the course remember him as smiling and friendly. If he had a hidden agenda, he disguised it well.

An early talking point for the couple would have been Moore-Gilbert’s 2014 study of Israeli-Russian emigre heritage, pub­lished­ in an Australian literary journal.

On his blog, Hodorov waxes lyrical about the home he found in Australia and new-found interest in Aboriginal culture.

“Indigenous Australians weren’t born with this knowledge,” he writes. “Rather it was learnt through their parents and exposure to nature.

“My own ancestors knew a lot about sustainability without calling­ it by this name.

“Every summer my family would travel to their village in Russia, where my mother’s family had lived for generations. For me summer was running barefoot on dirt paths, swimming in an ice-cold river and daydreaming on top of haystacks.”

In a lengthy article this week, Fars claimed that, after being recruited by her future husband­ to Shinbet, Israel’s domestic­ spy service, Moore-­Gilbert completed specialist espionage and military training in Israel and converted to Judaism. Her first assignment was purportedly in Syria.

She was then put in charge of interrogating Iranian immigrants and detainees to improve her knowledge of the people and country, as well as her command of Farsi, the news agency said.

Her “mission” in 2018 was to enter Iran during Muharram, a Shia festival, to gather economic and military intelligence for the Israelis and contact figures in the resistance to the theocracy in ­Tehran.

But from day one of her detention the Australian government rejected the suggestion that she was anything other than a blameless academic who had been charged without foundation with espionage by the Iranians.

Her colleagues, friends, ­supporters and loved ones never for a moment accepted the fiction spun by the mullahs and their agents.

Moore-Gilbert and those who know her maintain that she was flagged for some unknown reason by Iranian security after attending that fateful academic conference in the holy city of Qom, in northern Iran, in the early autumn of 2018.

Having an Israeli spouse was reason enough to throw her into the maw of Iranian “justice” and be cynically put into play as a hostage­ to Tehran’s crass ends, they say.