Australian academic Kylie-Moore Gilbert was imprisoned for 7 months after an informant in Tehran reported Dr. Moore-Gilbert as suspicious, partly because her husband Ruslan Hodorov was a Russian-Israeli and for spying charges when she tried to fly out of the city in 2018.
She asserted that Iranian captors had repeatedly tried to turn her into a double agent and do their bidding across the western territory. Dr. Moore-Gilbert was held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison for 804 days
During seven months of her detention, she was put in solitary confinement. She has revealed disturbing details since she was released last November in her first TV interview.
But before being allowed to return to Australia as part of a prisoner swap, the academic said the Iranian Revolutionary Guard tried to convince her “many times to do espionage work for them.”
“I knew the reason why they didn’t engage in any meaningful negotiations with the Australians. It was because they wanted to recruit me, they wanted me to work for them as a spy,” she declared in an interview with Sky News.
“They said if I co-operated with them and agreed to become a spy for them, they would free me – I could win my freedom,” she added.
Dr. Moore-Gilbert was eventually released in exchange for three Iranian prisoners being held abroad. The regime wanted even more value by turning her into a double agent who could use her position as an academic to collect information on Iran’s political enemies.
“They were more interested in me using my academic status as a cover story and traveling to other Middle Eastern countries and perhaps European countries and America to collect information for them.”
“The first room I was put in is designed to break you. It’s psychological torture. You go completely insane,” “It’s a two-by-two-meter box. There is no toilet, there is no television. There is nothing whatsoever other than a phone on the wall for calling the guards.”
Dr. Moore-Gilbert used on an ‘old, dirty, stained carpet and was given three thin blankets which other prisoners had used to sleep.
Besides, she said that it wasn’t really possible to tell the time because the light was maintained 24/7.
Dr. Moore-Gilbert said that during her captivity she experienced extended anxiety and panic and was “flipping out” after two weeks.
She said that, until she was imprisoned every day, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard stopped interrogating her, and she had to entertain herself with nothing for days at last.
However, the academic said she began to draw strength from the anger she felt at her mistreatment and said the rage woke up her emotional side again.
“I drew strength from my anger and indignation at what had happened to me and became stubborn and started to fight back and started to break the rules because I felt I don’t deserve this. Who are these people to do this to me?”
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