Back on Australian soil, and safe in the enforced quiet of Covid quarantine, Kylie Moore-Gilbert faces a long road to recovery, according to another victim of Iran’s practice of seizing foreign nationals as hostages.
Ana Diamond was just 19 when she was seized by the country’s Revolutionary Guards in 2016, held for 200 days in solitary confinement and forced to endure a mock execution over baseless allegations she was a foreign spy.
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Diamond said while Moore-Gilbert looked well in video footage, and is reportedly in “good spirits”, she will find regaining her freedom challenging after her two-year ordeal in Iranian prisons ended this week.
“The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps have been practising and perfecting their state hostage-taking for many decades now, and … have become rather sophisticated in their tactics,” said Diamond, previously a dual Iranian and Finnish citizen who is now based in Britain. “You no longer see grotesque visual and physical traces of violence on the detainee’s body … a lot of the damage is internal.
“During my detention, my feelings ranged from hope to self-loathing … it is very hard to convince yourself that you are not to blame.”
Diamond also said she believed Moore-Gilbert, an expert in Bahraini politics at the University of Melbourne, will find it challenging to communicate her feelings without hesitation or self-censorship.
“I struggled a lot with a feeling of self-guilt – for what I had made my loved ones go through, for the inconvenience I had caused … but also a guilt of survival: after my release, I realised that I was not an isolated case and that there were more than 30 known cases of dual- and foreign-nationals still held hostage in that very same prison that I was allowed to walk out from.”
Last year, alongside other former captives and family members, Diamond helped launch the Alliance Against State Hostage-Taking at the UN general assembly, designed to “create a legal path to hold Iran accountable for their atrocious violations of human rights and the deliberate and planned acts of kidnapping and torture of foreign nationals”.
Domestic academics have been arrested, international journalists have been kicked out, and we’re next basically.
Australian academic, Jessie Moritz
Foreign academics targeted
Dozens of dual and foreign nationals are currently held in Iranian prisons, including Iranian-Swedish scholar Ahmadreza Djalali who was handed down the death penalty three months ago and is due to be executed shortly. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian arrested in 2016, is under a form of house arrest in her parents’ home in Tehran.
Several of Moore-Gilbert’s colleagues have said her capture sent a chill through the Australian and global academic communities. It was a “there but for the grace of God” moment, they said, and could have befallen any of them.
Moore-Gilbert had travelled to Iran from Australia to attend a conference in the city of Qom to which she had been invited, said her friend and colleague, Dr Jessie Moritz.
“It was not an exceptional thing to do,” she said. “Our whole job is to go over to these countries – we’re not ivory-tower academics, we go to the field, we meet people, in order to understand these countries.”
Iran observers have seen a surge in foreign academics being targeted.
“Journalists and human rights activists have already been arrested, domestic academics have already been arrested, international journalists have been kicked out, and we’re next basically,” Moritz said.
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‘Quiet diplomacy’
Moore-Gilbert is a dual UK-Australian citizen but she was travelling on her Australian passport so became Australia’s consular responsibility.
Australia, unlike other western democracies such as the US and UK, has maintained an embassy in Iran since 1967, giving it a deeper connection to Iran’s opaque administration.
From the moment Moore-Gilbert was seized in September 2018 on the way to Tehran airport to catch her flight home, the Australian government pursued a policy of “quiet diplomacy”. Her family, friends and colleagues were entreated to secrecy and her case remained out of the public eye for almost a full year until two other Australians were also taken (Mark Firkin and Jolie King were released within four months).
But as media and public interest intensified and political pressure built around Moore-Gilbert’s case, the Australian government said little.
Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, – parsimonious in her public comments on the case – was said to be central to the strategy, as was Canberra’s ambassador in Tehran, Lyndall Sachs.
Also closely involved in knitting together the deal to free Moore-Gilbert was Australia’s director-general of national intelligence, Nick Warner. A former ambassador to Iran in the 1990s, he was pivotal in the release of another Australian hostage, Douglas Wood, who was captured in Iraq in 2005.
Diplomatic sources say Moore-Gilbert’s release was not a case of a straight swap, or even of finding a third country with a bargaining chip of interest to Iran.
Rather it was a case of, piece by piece, pulling together a deal that “every party could live with, and would get the result”. There was progress, but there were setbacks too.
A complication was Moore-Gilbert’s husband holding Israeli citizenship, sparking baseless rumours of her connection to “Israeli military intelligence”. No evidence has ever been presented of this.
Complex deal
Outside the inner circle, there was increasing concern, and increasing frustration.
“Diplomats have time,” one person with knowledge of Moore-Gilbert’s case told The Guardian during her detention. “Kylie does not: there is a person at the centre of this, and every day she is held there is doing her damage, is harming the person who eventually walks free.”
But wheels were turning within the opaque world of the Iranian government’s various axes of control and influence – the often antagonistic relationships between the elected government, with its urbane public face, foreign minister, Javad Zarif; the hardline Revolutionary Guards who physically held Moore-Gilbert; and the judiciary, a power centre of its own, which had sentenced her.
The deal that was settled upon was complex, ultimately affecting the interests of four countries. Australia wanted its citizen back. Iran needed to be convinced to give up an asset it understood to be valuable. Thailand needed to agree to release from prison three men who’d allegedly been involved in a botched bombing attack in Bangkok eight years ago. And Israel had a stake too: its diplomats were the target of the Iranians’ abortive attack in Bangkok.
Iranian state media this week showed footage of the three men – Saeid Moradi, Mohammad Kharzei, Massoud Sedaghatzadeh – receiving garlands of flowers on return to Iran, draped in the national flag. Accompanying reports said Iran had engineered an “exchange” for Moore-Gilbert, whom they painted as a spy with links to Israel and MI6.
No evidence of Moore-Gilbert’s alleged crimes has ever been publicly presented. She has denied the allegations against her, and the Australian government rejects them as baseless.
State TV IRIB broadcast a short video, compiled with dramatic music and lighting effects, showing Moore-Gilbert leaving Tehran on Wednesday. Wearing a facemask and headscarf, she is seen speaking with officials and travels in a bus, before boarding a plane marked with an Australian flag on its tail. She made a short statement – speaking Farsi – detailing her travels in the region, including to “the Zionist regime”, as Iran refers to Israel.
Moore-Gilbert flew home to begin two weeks of mandatory quarantine in Australia. It was understood she will be allowed a limited number of visitors in that quarantine, which will take place in an undisclosed location. She will have medical and psychological support.
Ana Diamond has urged Moore-Gilbert to progress slowly with her re-entry.
“I just hope she will never feel lonely, or think that she was ever alone in this. We are only a call away, as we have been with her family and colleagues, and we will do what we can to help her. But it’s only up from here, the calm after the storm, and she is safe now.”
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