this is bbc news. the headlines... emmanuel macron and marine le pen cast their votes — as france heads to the polls in the final round of the country's presidential election. japan says ten people have died off the northern island of hokkaido after a sightseeing boat went missing on saturday. as russia's war on ukraine

enters its third month — us secretary of state antony blinken is expected in kyiv — the first top us offical to visit since the invasion. the row over lockdown party breaches in downing street continues. a conservative minster says removing boris johnson from office would lead to "instability". now on bbc news, hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. iran's rocky relations with the west have cost a host of individuals their freedom. the islamic republic has imprisoned citizens from the us, britain and a number of other countries for spying. now, the charges may be trumped up, but tehran�*s determination to use western prisoners for political purposes is very real. my guest is the australian academic, kylie moore—gilbert,

who was released from an iranian jail in 2020 after 804 days behind bars. is it possible to heal after such a shattering ordeal? kylie moore—gilbert in melbourne, welcome to hardtalk. thanks so much for having me. it's a real pleasure to have you on the show. it is pretty much a year and a half now since you were released from imprisonment in iran. how much distance do you now feel from that whole experience? it feels sometimes

like it never happened. it feels like it was a very lengthy, especially vivid nightmare that ijust dreamt one night when i was asleep and have woken up the next day, and i still have those memories of that nightmare lingering with me. but because i'm in the same familiar spaces, back at my home that i was in before i went to iran, sometimes i have to pinch myself and remind myself that i've actually gone through that terrible ordeal and that experience in real life. you did say a little while ago, you said when you're first released, you think that you're going to be shattered, you're going to be broken but actually, that's not really true. "from my experience, at least," you say, "the real problems come further down the track and i haven't processed through it all yet." so this... i mean, it's a funny word, "processing," but you're still processing, are you? that's absolutely true, at least in my case —

that when i first came back from iran, i wasjust on cloud nine, i was ecstatic. i was so happy to be free. i was on this incredible high for probably six months. i was completely unfazed and unflappable by anything or anyone, and i wasjust glorying in my freedom and luxuriating in the feeling that almost as though i'd been reborn, and that was just an incredible feeling. i didn't have any negative mental health implications because of that. and actually, it was covid, it was a huge lockdown that we went into in melbourne midway through last year that put paid to those feelings of euphoria and sort of brought me back down to earth again. and, you know, ifaced being locked in my own home alone. so there were definitely echoes reminiscent of my time in prison, although, obviously, being in your own home is infinitely preferable

to being locked in a prison cell. and that was a wake—up call to me and just sort of brought me back down to earth and made me grapple a bit more with some of what i had been through in my ordeal and come to terms with the gritty, bitter reality of some of the things i'd seen when i was in prison. ijust want to begin by, you know, getting back to that period when you were making your decision as a research academic who specialised in mideast affairs, but particularly you were focused on the shia community in bahrain, and its links to, you know, political associates inside iran. you took a decision that you wanted to go to iran. there was a conference you wanted to attend, there were people you wanted to meet. but do you think you were naive to think that it would be ok to go to iran with your background, given that you had spent time studying in israel and in the arab world? you were a fluent hebrew speaker, a fluent arabic speaker, you were married — newly married to a man who was an israeli russian.

to the iranians, did it not seem to you that these could all be red flags? certainly from the perspective of the iranian security services or interrogators, i do think that would have been a red flag. but the thing is, i was invited to iran by an iranian university who, given my research output, decided that i was suitable to attend their university seminar. ithen.... and i was concerned about this, but i had nothing to hide. all they needed to do was google me to see what my area of research interest is, for example, and what countries i visited. i mean, i had written about it. so i went to the iranian embassy in canberra and deliberately applied in advance for my visa, being upfront that i was going to attend a university seminar, i had been invited by an iranian university, and gave them every opportunity to google my name and check my background.

i didn't declare that my ex—husband had an israeli passport, but i didn't believe that they would find that out. but also, i didn't believe it was relevant. i'm not an israeli citizen. he was born in russia, migrated to australia, lives in australia, so it's not as though i was coming straight from israel, and that's where he was living. and, you know... no, kylie, icompletely take all of that. but the context. i mean, the context is a country you intended to visit, which clearly, you know, has a government and an overall sort of governing philosophy, which is extremely suspicious of the west, indeed hostile to the west. and you knew the context, of, for example, nazanin zaghari—ratcliffe, a british, dual national british citizen as well as iranian, who'd been to visit her family and was arrested in 2016 and was in prison when you, you know, in 2018, made your journey. i just... again, i'mjust wondering...

i actually didn't know. i actually didn't know much about nazanin at all. i'd never actually heard of hostage diplomacy. i'd never heard that the iranian regime takes innocent foreign nationals or dual nationals hostage. it's never... you know, now it's a big deal in the british media, but even in the australian media today, i think nazanin and anoosheh ashoori's homecoming was, you know, a minor news story for 2h hours. certainly, in 2018 when i travelled to iran, i don't recall her situation being in the news over here. i know there's a lot of coverage of it today in britain, but back at that time, in early 2018, i don't really recall seeing it in the news at all. obviously, there are far more than, you know, just a couple of british nationals in iranian prisons, and now i'm aware of the extent to which iran weaponises the arbitrary detention of innocent

foreigners for its own nefarious purposes. and i would caution anybody from travelling to iran, whether they visited israel or not, you know. it's not important, even the story, because they can concoct anything, they can spin anything. you know, that my trial, nazanin�*s trial, the trials of numerous others were a complete farce, they were a sham. so they're not interested in innocent or guilty, they're not innocent, they're not interested in where you've been or what passport your husband might have or whatever, you know. mr ashoori was also charged with being a mossad spy, and you know, he's a british citizen too, like i am, and he'd never visited israel, so i don't think it's necessarily relevant. they will take you and they will do what they want with you, and they will use you as a bargaining chip to extract concessions from your government regardless of, you know, what country you may have visited ten years earlier or not. in my case... yeah. ..i just, i guess i was naive,

but i didn't think that my profile coming to iranjust for a couple of weeks, invited by an iranian university, i didn't think that that would be of great concern to the iranian authorities. let's get to the reality of what it was like being imprisoned in iran, because you were picked up at the airport, as you were hoping to get out of the country, and things spiralled very quickly and you were taken ultimately to the evin prison, to the special wing run by the iranian revolutionary guard corps. i think it was the 2a wing of the prison, you were in solitary confinement. at what point did you realise this wasn't just some terrible sort of mix up, but you were in real deep trouble? yeah, ifeel like in my gut, i knew i was in deep trouble from the first day of my arrest, but my mind, my brainjust could not compute what was going on. i was in a state of denial and i was in a state of shock

and panic, and i wasn't able to make logical and rational decisions in those first few days. and it was only when they threw me in solitary confinement one week after my arrest — after several days of solitary did i digest the fact that i am going to be here for some time. not even the first day i was there, in the prison, because ijust thought this can't be, "i've done nothing wrong. "i don't understand why i'm here". and i didn't speak farsi, so i had no context. i didn't know who had arrested me. the group that arrested me, the islamic revolutionary guard corps, they were wearing plain clothes, they didn't show me any badge, any license, any official paperwork, nothing in english anyway. i had no idea who they were. i didn't know i was in evin prison, you know. i was so confused and discombobulated by everything that was going on and in such

a state of panic and shock that i think it was several weeks before i was actually able to process the fact that i'm in deep trouble here. kylie, how close over months and months did they come to breaking you? because it's clear the techniques they use, the constant interrogations, the threats, the insinuation that you could be locked up pretty much forever, the sleeplessness, the lights on all night, you know, there were, and the horrible hygiene conditions, the unsanitary conditions. they wanted to break you. how close did they get? everything in that place is designed to break you, and you're deliberately dehumanised because they want you to make a false confession in interrogations and they want you to tell them everything you know. i can't say that i was never broken. at least, ifelt broken many, many times. i felt complete and utter despair.

there was one moment, actually, maybe almost two years, or a bit less, 18 months after my arrest, when i heard that a diplomatic deal that i was pinning all of my hopes on had fallen through, three days before it was supposed to be enacted. i remember lying on the floor of my cell and falling into such a deep well of despair that i couldn't physically move my limbs. my brain was sending signals to my arms and legs, and i could not move and enact those signals. that's how despairing i was. you know, my despair was so deep it had a physical... . . response. so i can't say that they never broke me or they never sent me to such places, but what i can say is that it never lasted. i always found some sort of wellspring of inner strength to pick myself up again, whether that be a day later or hours later or whenever it may be,

and continue to struggle to survive and find some sort of tiny fleck of hope i could cling to. it took the iranian authorities pretty much ten months to actually put you before a court, convict you and sentence you. and then they sentenced you to ten years for espionage. i'm not even going to bother asking you whether you were indeed a spy, because i think that's sort of ridiculous given who you are and your background and the way you've told your story, but nonetheless i do have to ask you, have you figured out why they targeted you and why they did this to you? yes, i knew from the first few days of my arrest why they targeted me. in fact, they told me. that was initially because of my connections with bahrainis, actually, my research about bahrain. and i got really, really unlucky.

in the book, i elaborate in further detail, but basically a bahraini guy who i met in qom, which was the location of the university seminar i was attending, i interviewed him informally, i had a few informal chats with him — about bahrain, not about iran, but about my research into the shia community in bahrain. and this individual, who did not at all seem to me to be sympathetic to a hardline islamist worldview, he was linked to the irgc, to the revolutionary guards, in some way. and he flagged me as suspicious with them or alerted them to my presence. so i popped up on their radar because of this individual, and i think... my guess would be he had a pre—existing relationship with them. perhaps he was an informer on the bahraini community within iran, acting for the security

services to inform on his own people in qom, because there are a lot of bahrainis in iran for various reasons. he was a seminary student, so he wasn't a refugee from bahrain or anything like that. he was doing clerical studies in qom, because of course qom is a centre of religious... it's sort of the vatican city of iran, in a way. so this individual is responsible for my arrest. right. and they told me that even on my first night. 804 days you eventually spent in prison, much of it in evin but some of it also in a public prison, a very difficult place a long way away from tehran. during the course of that imprisonment, you did some pretty amazing things. you did a rooftop protest. you time and again confronted guards — you screamed in their faces. you staged protests of different sorts. what did you learn about yourself in those 804 days? i learnt that i am stronger

than i thought i was. i learnt that i keep my head under pressure, that i can still... ..make difficult moral decisions under pressure that i saw others not be capable of making. i learned that... ..i will back myself, and that i have integrity. and this was really important to me, maintaining my integrity throughout. i didn't always... i'm not always proud of everything i did in prison. but one reason why i decided to start resisting my captors was because i understood that the whole thing was a stitch—up and i didn't want tojust be a passive victim sitting in my cell waiting for bad people to do bad things to me. i wanted to at least stand up to those people and claw back a shred of my own integrity in doing so. so i think i have a firmer grasp

of my own strength of character, and i guess that's made me a little bit more fearless. i want to get back to that in just a moment, butjust a quick word, if you would, on the diplomacy around your situation. the australian government told you, and indeed yourfamily back in australia, to try to keep this quiet for a long time. they talked about quiet diplomacy being the best way out of this. you disagreed with them. but the truth is that australia knew very little about your case for many, many months, and this is mirrored with — we've already talked about nazanin zaghari—ratcliffe — the advice that was given to her by the british government, and to anoosheh ashoori and his family, too. the advice always seems to be, in these situations with the iranians, "keep it quiet, keep a lid on it. "we'll do the diplomacy behind the scenes. "trust in us. "that's the best way out of this." that didn't work, did it? and are you angry that for so long you were given that advice?

i'm not angry at the australian government because i am grateful to them for pulling off what was quite a remarkable trilateral deal, a trilateral prisoner exchange, for my release. yeah, and just to be clear about that, because we need to let our audience know, kylie, in the end you got out because there was a de facto deal done over prisoners. a couple of iranians held by the thai government, who were suspected of involvement in terror activity in thailand, they were released, and at the same time you were released. there was clearly some sort of deal done, brokered, by australian intelligence officials, and that got you back to australia. but i just want to come back to this notion of "quiet diplomacy works". what's your view on whether it does or not? well, where's the evidence that it works? in the case of iran... and i'm not disputing that it ever works — i think we need to always approach these cases of arbitrary detention on a case—by—case basis.

but in the case of iran, which i know well — i know the stories of many others, i'm in touch with them, with theirfamilies, and i knew others inside — i am yet to see an example where somebody whose case has been kept quiet has actually benefited from that. the iranians, you know... i don't see an evidence base to suggest that, a, you are punished more in prison because your situation is in the media or because people publish in a foreign country on the other side of the world to iran something about your prison conditions or situation. in fact, my experience shows that actually the prisoner has benefited from that, from that transparency, from that spotlight which is shone on their prison conditions — access to medical care, potential psychological or physical torture, these kinds of issues — when foreign media as well as foreign governments focus on it. actually, the prisoner's situation improves.

that was my experience. so this is the message that's being given to families by the british government, by the australian government and others. "if you speak out, your loved one in prison will be harmed." but my experience shows the opposite. if there is a media spotlight and a public campaign on that individual in an iranian prison, their prison conditions improve... right. ..their access to medical treatment is enhanced. so i actually think that the opposite is true. honestly, i'm not... i am cynical of governments. i do think they have an interest in keeping things quiet, especially because no... and we're talking about bureaucrats here as well as foreign ministers and the like. nobody likes media breathing down their neck and asking, "what are you doing, what are you not doing, to get this person out? are you doing enough? could you have done more?" nobody wants that kind of scrutiny, but i don't think... i think it's up to the governments themselves to make the argument that this is in the person's interest.

right. and unfortunately, what we've seen in the british case, in the australian case, is that there's so much secrecy around what's going on behind the scenes that the family and the individual themselves don't actually know why the government is making and giving this advice. and no reasoning is provided. and i... you know, i'm critical of that. i don't think it's the right approach. i want to bring it back at the end, kylie, to the personal. you said to me, very powerfully, that, you know, "i learned a lot about myself, and actually in some ways it made me a more confident person, confident of my own strength." you had to be strong when you came back to australia because life was difficult. i mean, you discovered very soon after landing back in australia that your husband had had an affair with a work colleague. and of course, you know, you have since divorced, and you've talked about the difficulties of rebuilding relationships with family. how tough has that been? it's been really hard to grapple with.

i think, in a way, coming home after such an experience, you don't prepare yourself for it because when you're in prison all you're doing is thinking about that moment of freedom, and that day that you get on that flight and you leave iran and you land back on home soil. you don't spend much time thinking about what happens next, and that goes for my family, the government officials involved, everybody. everybody�*s focused on that really important moment of getting you out, and obviously it's the most important thing, yourfreedom. but then what comes next? it's... it is often confusion, it is often a sense of dislocation, a sense... i had the sense that, "i'm coming out of one world and entering another," or "i've time—travelled in some sort of way," because in my mind time had stood still. i imagined the world to be as it was in 2018, when i essentially left it, when i was thrown into prison, and everything froze for me.

but the world moved on in that two and a half years. and other than losing, you know, two and a half years of pop culture and history and world events and developments in music and film and whatever — i had this chunk missing from my brain from that — you know, there's also two plus years of family events and experiences and developments and people's relationships. and you've really been disconnected from all of that, and it's like you're frozen in time — you're coming back and your heads in the place that it was in in 2018 or whenever that arrest occurred, but the world has sped forward in time and you've remained in that place. and that's just profoundly... profoundly disorienting. is your life going to go in a very different direction now? is it going to be, you know, a transformed life, nothing like the life you would've had had this experience in iran never happened? i hope not. maybe on a superficial level, yes.

you know, i've left academia, so i will change my career and do something else that way. but overall, i think i'm still the same person. i'm determined not to be a victim, i'm determined to be positive, to be optimistic and to find a way to locate the silver lining in all of this and push forward, onwards and upwards. and i don't want my life to be so radically changed that i change as a person. i would like to go back to a normal life, and i would like to carry on as though this horrible ordeal was just a footnote in the history of my life and not the defining moment of it. kylie moore—gilbert, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. thank you.

hello, there. temperatures average 19 degrees in bournemouth, dorset. that is the warmest place i've seen so far today. there is still another hour or so when temperatures could rise higher than that. there is brisk north—east movements. low cloud in scotland, temperaturesjust 7 degrees underneath that gloom. and there is more of that upstream as well. and in the north of the uk, thatis well. and in the north of the uk, that is where the current is going to be feeding in from. the tendency is for the weather to turn cooler and cloudier, so make the best of any sunshine when it comes along. 0vernight, clear spells. the exception across the north and east of scotland, where the cloud probably begins to give a patch of drizzle. 4—7 . tomorrow, we are

looking at some changes. just several changes. a sunny start the day for most of you once again. cloud bubble up, the afternoon sees showers develop. most of these across central and eastern england. some heavier ones in the south east with hail moved in. when is coming from a north—easterly direction, flowing in over those cool waters of the north sea. that is why these eastern areas of both scotland and england will have lower afternoon temperatures. well away from the north sea, in the sunshine not too bad. for most of us, those temperatures two or three degrees down on what we've had this weekend. for tuesday, that cloud is pushing southwards and then moving across much of the uk. a lot of cloud on tuesday. a patch of drizzle first thing in the morning. the best of any sunshine across southern and western areas. 16 or 17 degrees across the south—west. 9—11 around

round or north across the south—west. 9—11 around roc coast. wednesday, very similar looking weather picture. extensive cloud around, perhaps the odd patch of morning drizzle. sunny spots along the west and temperature is not as high as we have seen over the last few days. beyond the middle part of the week, no great change in the weather pattern. through thursday and friday, that there is cloudy conditions. 13—16 , something like that. into next weekend, low pressure moving in. that will bring some rain or some showers. and then the week that follows will bring north—westerly winds, and it might even be cold enough to see a little bit of snow on the top of the scottish mountains.

this is bbc news ? welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. our top stories... voters in france cast their ballot in the final round of the country's presidential election. emmanuel macron looks to extend his premiership. the challenger marine le pen seeks to replace the incumbent — but voter turnout so far has been lower in comparison to the last election. as russia's war on ukraine enters its third month — us secretary of state antony blinken is expected in kyiv — the first top us offical to visit since the invasion. japan says 10 people have died off the northern island of hokkaido after a sightseeing boat went missing on saturday.