Secret plan ‘made prison term worse’: Kylie Moore-Gilbert

The university lecturer, sentenced to 10-years jail for spying in Iran, makes her first criticism of Canberra’s strategy over her case.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert believes the 10-year jail sentence she received for allegedly spying in Iran would have been less severe had there been immediate publicity about her detention.

Dr Moore-Gilbert, in her first criticism of the Australian government’s strategy to withhold details of her arrest at Tehran Airport in 2018 and the subsequent court case, said the secretive plan was against her wishes.

The University of Melbourne lecturer wanted her story be to told to the media and she demanded in phone calls to her family that they release as much information as possible.

Her claims, in a Sky News Australia interview to be aired on Tuesday, will put pressure on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s handling of another Australian woman detained in Iran on spurious charges.

The Australian has previously written about the second academic, but unlike in Dr Moore-Gilbert’s case, friends claim she doesn’t want publicity, fearing it could affect her arrest conditions.

In the interview, Dr Moore-Gilbert says it was only when two West Australian video bloggers Mark Firkin and Jolie King were detained nearly a year after her ­incarceration, that her dire situation was made public.

Dr Moore-Gilbert was arrested as she was leaving the country for Melbourne after attending an ­academic tour in September 2018 and within weeks was sentenced to 10 years’ jail for spying. “The line being run by the (Australian) government was that trying to find a solution, diplomatically ­behind the scenes with Iran, was the best approach for getting me out and that the media would complicate things and could make Iran angry and piss them off and make things worse for me”, Dr Moore-Gilbert says.

“I took a very different view of the situation based on my own ­experience being inside there.

“But that was the view of the government and the media played ball for months at least at the ­beginning until I think these two backpackers got arrested and the media already knew my name and knew I was there too.’’

Kylie Moore-Gilbert before her arrest.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert before her arrest, at a shrine in Iran.

Firkin and King were released several months after their arrest for flying a drone near a military installation.

Inside Evin Prison, however, Dr Moore Gilbert endured four weeks of brutal solitary confinement in a small room without a window and interrogation by the Islamic Revolution Guards.

“I’d lost it, I’d lost the plot. I was completely crazy. Just entertaining your brain for such a long period of time,” she says.

“They wouldn’t come every day for interrogation toward the end so I’d have days and days … where I was just alone in this room … with nothing to do. So, I was by the end of it a crazy lady.”

Even when Dr Moore-Gilbert’s plight was openly discussed there was angst in Canberra about the media coverage.

One report published in The Australian last July detailed how she had been suddenly transferred from Evin to Qarchak prison, described as one of the world’s worst for female prisoners. Hours after publication, officials in Canberra expressed dismay such information had been disclosed, insisting that it would harm efforts to release Dr Moore-Gilbert.

Dr Moore-Gilbert was freed after spending more than 800 days in jail, on November 25, 2020, in complicated swap of three Iranian prisoners who had been held in Thailand for a botched Bangkok bomb plot to assassinate Israeli diplomats.

She tells Sky News that “had my ordeal been made public, there’s no way I would’ve got 10 years”.

Melissa Doyle and Kylie Moore-Gilbert. Picture: Sky News Australia

Kylie Moore-Gilbert with Prime Minister Scott Morrison after her release.

She says once her name was made public “much greater attention was paid to my health and my condition”.

“I certainly saw benefits from that (publicity) and I’m not convinced that the quiet diplomacy argument stacks up in such a case although each case is different,” she says.

Despite these criticisms, Dr Moore-Gilbert is thankful to the Australian government for freeing her, specifically naming Foreign Minster Marise Payne, former Australian Secret Intelligence Service director-general Nick Warner and the Australian ambassador to Iran, Lyndal Sachs.

She came home to Australia to discover that her husband Russian-Israeli Ruslan Hodorov had been having an affair.

She is now filing for a divorce.

WATCH: Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s world exclusive interview with Melissa Doyle on Tuesday night on Sky News at 7pm (AEDT)