The brave Australians speaking out against the Iranian regime
They thought they were safe here. But Iranian Australians who joined a global fight for human rights say they are being subjected to the terrifying strong-arm — and long arm — of a foreign state.
Sara Zahedi hasn’t always looked over her shoulder. Apart from her first seven years in post-revolution Iran she has lived in assumed safety: in New Zealand for the second half of her childhood, and where she later studied law; in Canada with her family, and in Perth, where she moved with her husband in her 20s and where she envisaged they would build a quiet suburban life. But the death in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in Tehran, three days after being arrested by Iran’s morality police, jolted Zahedi from silence. In a matter of months she became a prominent human rights voice in WA’s 6000-strong Iranian community, cajoling supporters on her Instagram account, setting up a website encouraging Australians to contact their MPs and attracting more than 10,000 signatures to a petition requesting the federal government to denounce Iran for human rights violations. “As far as I can tell,” says Zahedi, 41, “I am the loudest activist in Perth.”
By November, she had roused so much attention that she was contacted by SBS Persian. “It’s not a cultural issue. It’s not a religious issue,” she told the broadcaster about the Iranian unrest. “It’s a human issue. So, it affects everyone equally.”
A few days after the interview was aired, Zahedi drove to work in East Perth. Arriving at the usual time, she parked in the usual area and as she walked to her office she noticed a man in her path. Slouched over his phone, he was loitering when others were rushing, and in his suit and tie he seemed overdressed for a late spring day in relaxed Perth. “People of the same ethnicity can pick each other out fairly quickly,” says Zahedi, a founder of the international activist group Iranian Justice Collective. “It was nine o’clock in the morning and he had a shadow of a beard. I looked at him and I instantly thought [he was] Persian – and dressed in a way a person who lives in Iran would think is how you dress when you go to the capital of Western Australia.”
As she neared the man, she became alarmed. “When he saw me he immediately became alert and his behaviour suggested he was waiting for me.” From being slumped over his phone, he suddenly started taking photos of Zahedi, who raced towards her office. When she turned around, shaking, the man was still photographing her, but with his phone angled as though trying to capture her with a sign bearing her company’s name in the same shot.
Although she has hardly lived there, Zahedi’s instincts zoomed to her birth country. “My first thought was this could be an IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] agent,” she says, still sounding distressed months later. “I thought to myself, ‘he’s trying to confirm that I am the Sara Zahedi on LinkedIn’,” she says of the one place online where she is connected to her workplace. “Oh my f..king god.”
On that otherwise benign weekday morning, the safety in which Zahedi assumed she was shrouded in Australia was fractured. In the months since it has shattered further. “A lot of strange things have happened,” she says of what she deems to be the fallout of her activism. “Nothing overt. But my telephone seems to be bugged. I say this to people and they laugh and they think I’m being paranoid.” Since November she has regularly heard static on her mobile. Calls randomly drop out. Speaking to fellow activists on WhatsApp, she sometimes has to reconnect six or seven times during a 10-minute conversation. And over several days in February she was inexplicably bombarded with Facebook friend requests from 400 unknown Iranian men around the world.
While she has not been physically harmed, Zahedi is living with a lingering sense of menace. And she is not alone. Amid the storm of international activism following the death of Amini, who was arrested for not wearing her hijab properly, many Australian Iranians who have joined local human rights protests are worried that they are under surveillance here. Beyond the intimidation, they are also feeling ignored. “The response of Australia for a long time left us feeling like second-class citizens in terms of not taking the threats seriously,” says Zahedi of a growing list of incidents that individually might be dismissed but en masse have generated a deep unease. “If this was happening to Ukrainians… I think we would have acted differently.”
It’s the nation’s biggest security threat, supplanting even terrorism on the list of risks that worry experts including ASIO’s director-general Mike Burgess. Clandestine and difficult to discern, foreign interference might not be a hot topic for most Australians, but in an increasingly interconnected world it has joined espionage as our most worrying and pervasive threat. “Australia is facing an unprecedented challenge from espionage and foreign interference and I’m not convinced we as a nation fully appreciate the damage it inflicts on Australia’s security, democracy, sovereignty, economy and social fabric,” Burgess said in his annual threat assessment in late February, also revealing he had been pressured by public servants, academics and business figures to “ease up” on foreign interference operations. “I am concerned that there are senior people in this country who appear to believe that espionage and foreign interference is no big deal.” Or as he put it in last year’s address: “It’s unacceptable that people who live in your street – and mine – might be subjected to the strong-arm and long arm of a foreign state.”
Yet that seems to be happening to an increasing number of the nation’s 80,000 Iranian-born Australians at the very time in which uprisings are mounting. From replicated social media profiles to strange phone calls, they have long shared menacing stories, but not quite like now.
Lawyer and activist Nos Hosseini left Iran as a seven-month-old in the late 1980s. As a five-year-old she remembers being met outside her Melbourne primary school by a man who said, in Farsi, that her parents had sent him to collect her. “He picked me up, put me in his van and drove me home. He knew exactly where we lived.” Years later her parents, who had been organising rallies against the Iranian government, told her that the man had threatened them. “He said, ‘You need to stop your political activities. We know where your daughter goes to school – we’ve just picked her up’.”
Another decade would pass before Hosseini first suspected she was being watched in Australia. In 2007, aged 21, she addressed a Palm Sunday human rights rally in Sydney. “My dad’s friend was there and he was saying, ‘Be careful, there are a lot of spies.’ And I didn’t believe him, until a few weeks later I was interviewed in The Australian.”
When a copy of that article was republished on the website of Mohsen Rezaei – a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – accompanied by a grainy photo taken of Hosseini at the protest, seemingly on a mobile phone, she was terrified. “I thought I’ve come onto the radar of [this man], and I feared for my life,” she says. “You just take it for granted this is Australia, where we can have our say and use our voice… I didn’t expect to be monitored and photographed.”
For Hosseini, the daughter of a former Iranian union official, Jahangir Hosseini, who has had the bolts removed from his car wheels in Melbourne, and more recently found his tyres slashed, the sense of being watched in Australia has lingered. “It’s something that my family have experienced since coming here in ’89,” she says. But lately, these worries have multiplied.
“From my personal assessment, at a safe guess, it is probably 10 or 15 times more than before,” says Sydney-based human rights lawyer Faraz Maghami. He usually receives one or two calls a year from concerned members of the Iranian community. Since September, though, he has fielded more than a dozen calls about intimidating incidents, including one from a Brisbane woman who was followed by an unknown man and told, “Watch out, we know where you live and we know your children”, and a Sydney banker who received multiple threatening voice messages. “They said, ‘We will put you in a hessian bag and we will deal with you.’”
Masoud Modabber’s experience has been equally disturbing. A software engineer and now an Australian citizen, he arrived in Melbourne eight years ago from Iran and for the first time felt he could breathe. “It’s a freedom that just goes to your bones,” he says of moving here after growing up in a place where “there is no type of freedom whatsoever and you are always unsure of the intelligence police”.
For seven and a half years Modabber felt safe. “Until five months ago. Then everything changed.” He joined rallies in Melbourne and Canberra that were recorded by men unknown to the protesters. After fronting a days-long demonstration in December outside Victoria’s parliament, he was alarmed to hear a security guard declare: “There’s a guy that’s been filming you for three days straight.”
Modabber was horrified at the idea of being spied on in Australia. But even worse was to follow that month when his mother was seized at her workplace in Tehran and taken to the dreaded Evin prison. Over four weeks in solitary confinement she was interrogated for up to 14 hours at a time. Before she was released on bail, says her son, “they asked her lots about me and my partner. They put photos of us in front of her with circles around our heads and asked, ‘Who are these people?’ And my mum said that was the hardest part of it.” He weeps as he recounts her efforts to pretend not to recognise her own child. “She was so scared they might hurt us here.”
-
“He said, ‘You need to stop your political activities. We know where your daughter goes to school’”
-
Foreign interference may not be new. But the scale and speed with which incidents have recently been reported around Australia is alarming many. “We have also received concerning reports of surveillance and harassment of protesters in Australia – including threats made to their families in Iran,” Foreign Affairs minister Penny Wong said in November, on the same morning that Iran’s charge d’affaires was called by the Department of Foreign Affairs for at least the second time in several weeks. So concerned were some lawmakers by then that the Senate committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade convened an inquiry, ostensibly examining the human rights implications of the unrest in Iran – but also, as the committee’s chair Liberal Senator Claire Chandler said, the “genuine fear in the [Australian Iranian] community about the reach of the regime”.
While the committee would go on to hear from multiple individuals and organisations, one statistic was especially sobering. Worried about reprisals against loved ones there, or concerns about being intimidated here, about 400 of the 500-odd submissions were listed anonymously on the committee’s website. Several dozen were not published at all.
“Mostly they would have family back in Iran,” says academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who has an intimate knowledge of Iran’s judicial system, “or they would have uncertain migration status in Australia and they would face the prospect of having to return to Iran. And then to submit [their names] to an Australian government inquiry could land them or their family in prison in Iran. It’s very dangerous.”
Having spent more than two years in Evin prison, accused of espionage, Moore-Gilbert was finally released in a prisoner exchange in late 2020. Since returning to freedom in Melbourne, however, life has proven to be less comfortable than she had imagined.
“I have been targeted by the Iranian regime after my return to Australia,” Moore-Gilbert told the senate inquiry late last year. “I have had people attend events that I’ve spoken at, stand at the back of the room and record proceedings and ask intimidating and suspicious questions of some of the Iranian audience members at my events.” She also had financial details posted on a Farsi website after her phone and computer were hacked from Australia in 2021, she claims by Iranian authorities. “It really knocked me about because I did feel safe in Australia prior to that, and I just feel a lot less safe as a result,” she says now. “I was really upset and anxious... I [was] looking over my shoulder all the time.”
Then came the aftershock when she sought help from Australian authorities. “The first thing I did was to try and see whether I could contact a person within the security service that I had dealt with.” But the phone number was no longer connected. “So I then Googled and found there was a cybersecurity hotline.” There was little help there, either. “They just told me, ‘Oh sorry we can’t help you, just get antivirus software’ – which is a very upsetting thing when you’ve been hacked by a group that has held you hostage for years and held you in prison.”
Moore-Gilbert eventually managed to clean her technology, “to get them out of my computer and my phone”, and secured a new phone number – but only, she says, thanks to a contact who could get help from ASIO. “If I didn’t have that contact I wouldn’t have had help at all. It makes me feel if you’re an Iranian Australian and they’re in your phone… and you don’t have any contacts, you’re stuffed.”
Lawyer Faraz Maghami is outraged about the response Moore-Gilbert received at home. “I am usually very measured about the way I speak about this topic, but Kylie’s case very much put it very squarely within the current spectrum of what’s happening in Australia: that even someone of her position and standing, she was held for 804 days in prison, she calls the hotline and is given a generic answer.”
For those worried they are being watched, the alarm of being spied on by one country, on one hand, has been compounded by the frustration of not being properly heard by another. “I’ve seen many compassionate responses from the Australian community here. They come to our protests and come forward and talk to us, but I don’t think that they can understand how much stress and fear there is around our community,” says Melbourne activist Masoud Modabber.
Or as Sara Zahedi, on the other side of the country, puts it: “We are so physically removed from the rest of the world, and up till now we have been a really safe place to be… but the reality is there are these long tentacles that are unseen and they are only known to people who are a threat to the republic. It’s freaking us out, but the average Joe wouldn’t know anything about it, and I think the Australian government has only just started to wake up to it.”
Those fears and misunderstandings were spotlighted when the senate inquiry’s report was released in February. “Iranian-Australians live in a near constant state of worry, unable to contact family and friends in Iran to know that they are safe,” the report states. “There can scarcely be a more concerning form of foreign interference than a hostile foreign government making direct threats to Australian citizens.” The committee urged that high priority be given to investigating reports of intimidation and surveillance, and said that any Iranian officials involved should be expelled.
Less than a fortnight later, Home Affairs minister Clare O’Neil suddenly announced plans to name and shame those suspected of foreign interference, in a process to be led by the National Counter Foreign Interference Co-ordinator Andrew Kefford and the Department of Home Affairs. “Since becoming Minister for Home Affairs, my understanding of the extent of the problem of foreign interference in Australia has significantly grown. But for some people in our community, the threat is ever present,” she told an audience at Canberra’s National Security College. She also revealed that, just months earlier, ASIO had shut down a group that had been surveilling the home of an Iranian-Australian and extensively researching that person and their family.
“If you were told today you were the target of a foreign intelligence operation, I suspect even the hardened professionals in this room might have their hearts skip a beat or two,” O’Neil said, surprising many local community members who had been awaiting a proactive government response for years. “We have here someone living in our country who is being followed, watched, photographed, their home invaded by people at the direction of a foreign power.”
In a statement, the Iranian Embassy in Canberra described the allegations as baseless, “while the events of the past few months clearly indicate that it is Iran which is the victim of the interventionist policies of some western countries. The Islamic Republic of Iran, contrary to the Western approach, is committed to the fundamental principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. Making such claims without the least consultation is not a sign of honesty and goodwill.”
But it was another part of O’Neil’s speech that carried an even deeper resonance. In her address, she referred to an additional target of foreign interference – the university sector, an area in which Australia, it turns out, has some concerning ties to the heart of the Iranian government. “It is well known in the Iranian community that a number of senior ranking IRI [Islamic Republic of Iran] officials and their family members are already on our shores, with access to Australian universities and rumoured to have very large sums of investment and commercial interests,” businesswoman Setareh Vaziri, who has lived in Australia for 30 years, told the senate inquiry. “However, verifying this via publicly available information is a near impossible challenge for the community.”
-
“The sense of safety I used to live with has been ripped away”
-
The most notable connection to the university sector is Iran’s communications minister Eisa Zarepour, who in October was sanctioned by the US and the EU for restricting internet access within Iran as part of a crackdown on anti-government protests.
Less than a decade ago, Zarepour was living in Sydney. Between 2012 and 2015 he was a student at the University of NSW, where he completed a PhD on nanotechnology. In 2014, he was jointly awarded the UNSW Innovator of the Year People’s Choice Award for his work on “nano sensor networks for improving the performance of chemical reactors”. The prize, which included $1000, was presented by then NSW resources and energy minister Anthony Roberts.
That same year Zarepour was one of three finalists for UNSW’s Student Innovator of the Year, and, among other prizes, he earned a student innovation award for “improving gas-to-liquid fuel catalysis via nano-scale sensor networks”. The following year, his thesis – on “efficient communication protocols for wireless nanoscale sensor networks” – was a finalist for the Malcolm Chaikin Prize at UNSW.
According to United Action for Iran, a cooperative representing 19 Iranian Australian community organisations, Zarepour had held a number of senior positions in the Iranian government before coming to Australia. The London-based Persian language news channel Iran International meanwhile reported in September that two of Zarepour’s children hold Australian citizenship. (Within weeks of that report being published, Scotland Yard warned of an “imminent” and “credible threat to life” to staff at Iran International, who are now broadcasting from Washington DC.)
While Zarepour has denied his family holds dual citizenship, the allegations deeply concern Kylie Moore-Gilbert. “We have not sanctioned him,” she says.
The Department of Foreign Affairs would not comment on any potential future sanctions, but the senate committee is concerned. Its report in February states that “the government does not know whether senior IRI officials and their families are living in Australia or have visas allowing them to do so. The committee holds similar concerns with answers provided to the committee regarding alleged investments held in Australia by persons connected to the IRI regime. The answers provided by the government indicate that it either does not have the information to answer these questions, or, if it does have this information, did not wish to provide it to this inquiry.”
For those who believe they are being spied on in Australia, or whose relatives have been coerced elsewhere, options to protect themselves remain limited. Moore-Gilbert has remained mostly close to home since her release from prison in Tehran. “I’ve only left the country once and I am a bit nervous to travel abroad now. Australia is a sanctuary for me,” she says.
“I do get worried because I have two little children,” says Melbourne lawyer Nos Hosseini, who now ventures to events without them, worried aboutsurveillance. Since her Instagram account was recently and mysteriously replicated, and she received threatening voice messages online (“the gist of it is, don’t spread lies about the regime – we know where your family lives”) she has also scrubbed her children from social media. “[But] the harassment doesn’t stop.”
Other changes, however, have been forced upon her. After her overseas family was questioned repeatedly about their Australian relatives, a cousin whose father was recently imprisoned in Iran, severed contact with Hosseini and her Melbourne clan. “He said, ‘Don’t contact my father ever again. It’s because of my father’s relationship with you that he was arrested.’”
Having to choose between exercising democratic rights to demonstrate in one country over the safety of loved ones in another country is one of the most emotional costs for expatriates. “You do live with that fear,” says Hosseini. “It brings you so much discomfort knowing that being outspoken, the repercussions are being experienced by your family. It’s not an easy choice.” Still, she has not stopped protesting. “I can’t say that the lives of the people that you are connected to are more important than the people that are on the streets.”
In Perth, meanwhile, Sara Zahedi has started working more from home, and has told her remaining distant relatives in Iran to no longer contact her. But her sense of being menaced has been compounded by a lengthy and unexpected silence.
In the days after she was mysteriously photographed on her way to work in early November, Zahedi contacted the national security hotline and the Australian Federal Police. Later, she shared emails and phone calls with an AFP member, one of two officers who then flew to Perth to interview her. “They got me to take them through exactly where the incident happened and show them where the man was standing and what he was wearing.”
Believing that they would chase up CCTV footage in an effort to identify the man, she keenly awaited their follow-up conversations. An excruciating four months would lapse, however, before she heard from either officer again. With her concerns still under investigation, and despite having finally been assigned a case officer, the experience has left her even more unsettled. “The sense of safety I used to live with has been ripped away,” she says. “Because it did take four months, it’s made me lose a bit of trust in the system.”
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout