Godfathers of SAVAK Torture Regime Gaslight World to Further Regime Change War in Iran
Under the Shah of Iran, the CIA & Mossad shaped SAVAK into a torture & killing machine. One of its torture victims was current Iran Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.
A joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran would be the culmination of a history of attacks on Iran going back to the U.S.-UK 1953 overthrow of Iran's elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in a coup engineered by the CIA and England’s MI6 intelligence agencies. The CIA refused to admit its involvement in the operation for sixty years! The U.S. and the West have zero moral authority to tell Iran what to do or how to conduct itself.
At this moment, Donald Trump, the 79-year-old fatuous president of the United States and would-be comic book villain, has said that he will put off for two weeks a decision about overtly joining Israel’s war against Iran. This is after Trump demanded that Iran evacuate its capital city, Tehran, and unconditionally surrender to Israel.
Few in Iran could miss the bitter irony that the U.S. and Israel — whose military and intelligence services, including the CIA, NSA, FBI, and Mossad, helped construct a mass surveillance and torture regime in Iran from 1953-1979 — now pretend to act as Iran’s saviors.
While the Western press-cum-propaganda machine spins out stories about how the average Iranian man or woman in the street is opposed to Iran’s Islamic regime — and no doubt there are some, even many, in opposition — they practically never ask (especially in recent years) if any Iranians remember the previous regime’s reliance on the Shah’s society-wide political repression, courtesy of Western and Israeli intelligence services.
There were two primary beneficiaries of Western and Israeli support for the Shah: the military and the security forces. The latter was primarily centered in Iran’s sinister Sâzemân-e Ettelâ’ât va Amniat-e Kešvar, or Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State (سازمان اطلاعات و امنیت کشور), known by its acronym, SAVAK.
The press rarely ask about Iran’s history of U.S.-backed oppression and torture because it is their job to bury consciousness of the historical past, all the better to prosecute the current agenda of Western conquest and universal control. It is certain that many Iranians remember, or experienced first hand, the long history of U.S. and Israeli support for torture in their country. (Both Israel and the U.S. have their own documented histories of the use of torture.)
Every great once in a while, couched between condemnations of Iran’s clerical regime, the press will bring up the legacy of the U.S.-Israeli backed torture regime of the Peacock Throne in Iran, a regime toppled by the 1978-79 revolution against Shah Reza Pahlevi. Alternative press has done somewhat better. Just last month, Max Blumenthal released a remarkable video story, “Inside Iran's Savak torture museum,” at The Greyzone website.
The Torture of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Occasionally, a mainstream news story will mention how Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was tortured in the Shah’s prisons. One can only imagine how formative such an experience was. When you consider that the torture was at the hands of police and jailers trained and/or supported by the United States, Great Britain, and Israel, it puts a different color on Western propaganda about Khamenei.
To be sure, Supreme Leader Khamenei was not the first leader to be tortured by U.S.-backed security forces. There have been numerous such cases in Latin America over the years, including the former presidents of Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile. In addition, it’s important to recall that the late former president of Greece, Christos Sartzetakis, was as a jurist arrested and tortured by the U.S.-backed Greek junta in the 1960s. The totality of this record exposes the barbarity of the U.S. imperium.
Khamenei’s own story in this regard is usually not related in any depth. There is no mention of it at his English-language Wikipedia page. But the accounts I’ve seen show that under the Shah’s repressive regime he was subjected to at a minimum solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, flogging and foot whipping, as well as subjection to hearing the sounds of others being tortured.
According to Ayatollah Khamenei’s own website, he was arrested twice in 1963. He was arrested again at approximately age 25 in January 1964 and “taken to Tehran by an airplane to spend two months in solitary confinement during which time he was tortured.”
A 2021 article at Iranwire, which details charges about the alleged current use of torture by Iran’s regime, examines the history of Ali Khamenei’s torture at the hands of SAVAK. The story relates the time SAVAK arrested the Ayatollah in September 1971:
“I had never seen a room so small until that day,” [Khamenei] has said of that period in jail. “It was square in shape, one and a half meters long on each side. It had no openings. Absolute darkness enveloped it….”
“At the same time, he was flogged and tortured — in part to humiliate him, in part to make him confess.
[Writer Hedayatollah] Behboudi’s account of the flogging is as follows: "He lost his balance, but soon shifted back to the earlier position, when a second blow came and threw him on the bed beside him. He wanted to get up, but one of them shouted: ‘Stay, you’re in the right place!’ They tied his legs to the bed. Opposite him, the whips hung from the wall ... One of them picked up the whips and aimed at the soles of his feet. He started beating... someone else came and took the whip from him. He beat him so hard that he had to give in. The third person took the whip. He also got tired of hitting, and the fourth person came. Everyone in that room had the opportunity to rest and catch their breath, except for Mr. Khamenei. Some of them wet the whip to strike the body of the prisoner." [Ellipses in last paragraph above are in the original]
The beating of the soles of the feet is a form of torture often practiced by police and prison officials. It is known as falanga, falaka, or bastinado. It can often result in “persistent pain and pain-related disability” for years after the torture.
Khamenei was arrested a number of times by SAVAK and/or other Iranian police. It’s unclear how many times he was tortured, or how extensive the torture was. According to the biography at his website, Khamenei was arrested in June 1963, spending “ten days in prison under severe conditions.” The conditions themselves are not specified. But according to the Iranwire article quoted above, the Ayatollah described aspects of his imprisonment for a documentary.
Prisoners “were taken for interrogation regularly. There were loud shouts, without exception,” Khamenei recalled. The article continues: “According to Khamenei, once a week the prisoners were lined up blindfolded and allowed 10 minutes to bathe. The sound of beatings, shouts and lashes feature prominently in the background throughout the film.”
Other Accounts of SAVAK Torture
One mainstream press story from the not too distant past was the February 2019 Associated Press article, “Torture still scars Iranians 40 years after revolution.” The article reminds us how “current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the late President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani” were prisoners and tortured in SAVAK’S prisons.
“Ahmad Sheikhi, a 63-year-old former revolutionary once tortured” by SAVAK described to AP reporters his torture by SAVAK agents when he was 19 years old. By my calculations, this would have been in 1975.
Imprisoned, Sheikhi had “spent about three months in the prison and 11 months in another after being detained for distributing anti-shah statements from Khomeini, then in exile.”
“Four times I was tortured in two consecutive days, every time about 10 minutes,” he recounted. “They used electric cables and wires for flogging my (feet) while I was blindfolded. The first hit was very effective; you felt your heart and brain were exploding.”
Even more frightening was the torture device interrogators and prisoners referred to as the Apollo, named after the U.S. lunar program. Those tortured sat in a chair and had a metal bucket strapped over their head, like a space helmet, that intensified their screams.
“They put my fingers and toes between the jaws of the vises firmly, whipped the soles of my feet with cables and put a metal bucket over head,” Sheikhi said. “My own cries would twirl around inside the bucket and made me delirious and gave me headaches. They would hit the bucket with those cables as well.”
There are older articles, too. Time Magazine (Dec. 10, 1979) reported how Iranian poet Reza Baraheni described his 102 day captivity by SAVAK to “William J. Butler, a New York lawyer who investigated SAVAK for the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva” (pg. 6):
Baraheni told of seeing in SAVAK torture rooms "all sizes of whips" and instruments designed to pluck out the fingernails of victims. He described the sufferings of some fellow prisoners: "They hang you upside down, and then someone beats you with a mace on your legs or on your genitals, or they lower you down, pull your pants up and then one of them tries to rape you while you are still hanging upside down." Baraheni himself was beaten and whipped, and released only after agreeing to make a statement on television condemning Communism.
CIA Training of SAVAK
According to a 1978 investigation by New York magazine, “Since SAVAK’s inception in 1956, the CIA has trained, equipped, and advised SAVAK officers. A State Department spokesman confirmed that 175 SAVAKs are currently undergoing training at the CIA’s McLean, Virginia, facilities. This is down from the last five years’ average of 400 per year” (pg. 5).
The New York article described “An extensive campaign of surveillance and harassment of Iranian dissidents and American opponents of the shah in this country” (pg. 2). Bribes were paid via SAVAK to political parties, while years before the Epstein scandal, "the use of prostitutes and drugs at parties attended by members of Congress" were used to keep U.S. politicians under SAVAK control.
The U.S. government worked with the press to keep most revelations under control. A year before the New York magazine revelations, Herbert E. Hetu, Assistant to the Director of CIA Public Affairs, wrote to CIA Director Stansfield Turner, about how to handle sensitive press inquiries about SAVAK and other CIA-associated foreign intelligence services (e.g. KCIA).
Faced with a June 1977 request for an interview with a U.S. News and World Report reporter on whether the U.S. had any “agreements or tacit understanding [that] exists with foreign intelligence agencies that permit them to operate in this country,” Hetu advised lying, telling Turner:
I am not convinced that an interview would serve any useful purpose because he would want answers to very detailed questions. I think we could satisfy the situation by giving him one general statement similar to that which you gave [Washington Post Executive Editor] Ben Bradlee at breakfast yesterday morning, e.g., “there are no existing agreements between the CIA and the foreign intelligence organizations of other countries concerning their operations in this country or our operations in their countries. Should the CIA somehow become aware of illegal activities undertaken by foreign intelligence agencies in this country, we would immediately notify the Justice Department, the FBI and other appropriate individuals or, agencies of the U.S. Government.”
British Collaboration with SAVAK
British journalist Mark Curtis has posted a collection of quotes from documents he obtained from Britain’s National Archive about UK partnership with SAVAK. The NA collection documents the collaboration of the UK’s various governmental offices, especially the notorious Information Research Department, or IRD, a propaganda-dirty tricks branch of the British Foreign Office.
SAVAK was integrated into UK multi-national “defense” organizations, such as CENTO (Central Treaty Organization), which involved Turkey, Great Britain, Pakistan and Iran in a UK-dominated NATO-like alliance in the Middle East. The U.S., by the way, according to the State Department, participated in CENTO “as an observer and took part in committee meetings.”
One selection from Curtis, from a December 7, 1964 “minute” written by IRD official Ann Elwell, describes how SAVAK was integrated into high-level military alliance and even domestic operations:
“For some years IRD has collaborated with SAVAK... both in the CENTO context and bilaterally... SAVAK has a long history of successful work against the Tudeh (Iranian Communist) Party, using sophisticated counter-espionage and counter-propaganda techniques... The Counter-Subversion Committee [of CENTO] directs the activities of a permanent body in Ankara, the Counter-Subversion Office, of which the Deputy Secretary-general is the Iranian representative, Colonel Negahbani, a member of SAVAK…. In our embassy in Tehran the Assistant Information Officer is responsible for doing IRD work in consultation with one of [SAVAK Director] General Pakravan's deputies, Dr Zehtab, who spent ten days in the UK at IRD's expense in October this year and was shown a great deal of IRD's activities...”1
There have been some NGO reports about SAVAK as well. A November 1976 Amnesty International report, “Human Rights Abuses in Shahist Iran,” described SAVAK’s operations. “[T]here are in every provincial capital and large city Joint Committee of SAVAK and Police prisons which are used for interrogations,” Amnesty wrote. “Discipline is severe and in cases of indiscipline prisoners may be put into solitary confinement for anything up to three or four months. Maltreatment and torture do not always cease after trial and in some cases prisoners who are regarded as being difficult are sent back to the Committee or Evin prisons for further torture.”
“The Shah’s Eyes”
Finding primary documents describing the history of U.S.-SAVAK collaboration is not easy, as these are generally suppressed. But there are some. This undated (likely 1976), memo from U.S. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft to ex-CIA chief, and then Ambassador to Iran, Richard Helms, describes funneling both cash and “900,000 pounds of nonattributable small arms and ammunition” to SAVAK for distribution to U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Iraq, led by Mustafa Barzani (see pg. 4).
An archived article published originally in July 2017, “How CIA, Mossad helped form Savak,” provides a brief overview of how the CIA and Mossad helped create SAVAK.2
A 2023 article by educator Braedon McGhee, on “the Contradictory Nature of SAVAK and The U.S.-Iran Cliency Relationship,” noted how despite all the articles and books written on the Shah’s regime and the U.S. sponsorship of the same, “little research has been done on the Shah’s intelligence agency’s role in enhancing the Shah’s autonomy from his people through the U.S.-Iran cliency relationship” (pg. 35).
McGhee noted, “information on SAVAK’s actions during the Shah’s rule is limited because of the clandestine nature of the organization itself; much of the information gathered on SAVAK’s covert actions rely on former members’ admissions, victim testimonials, and cross-analysis of declassified CIA documents. The Iranian revolutionaries who overtook the U.S. embassy in 1979 uncovered shredded CIA documents, later published in The True Nature of The Great Satan, which exposed SAVAK’s expansive liaison network within Iran and its collaboration with foreign intelligence agencies such as the CIA and MOSSAD” (pgs. 35-36).
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McGhee’s work is essential in understanding the true outlines of the current U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran. The use of scare tactics about Iranian nuclear weapons acts to cover-up the actual program of the West vis-a-vis Iran.
According to McGhee’s scholarly essay, after the coup against Mossadegh, “The United States assisted its client with military aid, infrastructure development, and, most importantly, intelligence, which led to the creation of the Shah’s infamous Sâzemân-e Ettelâ’ât va Amniat-e Kešvar (SAVAK) in 1957. Nicknamed the Shah’s eyes, SAVAK’s depravity became a center of attention for human rights organizations such as Amnesty International. The United States developed SAVAK as a mirror of its own intelligence agencies, the CIA and FBI, which had direct contact with the Shah and trained SAVAK personnel” (pgs. 38-39).
A Brief History of SAVAK
A brief outline of the relevant history from McGhee’s article3:
SAVAK’s first goal after its consolidation was to take control of the Shah’s most formidable opposition, the [communist - JK] Tudeh party…. SAVAK did not hesitate and quickly implemented repressive tactics against the working class of Iran, Tudeh members lost their jobs, and many were imprisoned. Imprisoned Tudeh members were kept for unspecified amounts of time and typically tortured to gather information (pg. 41) ….
At its peak, [SAVAK] employed around 7,000 full-time staff and about 20,000-40,000 part-time informants. The agency was organized into eight different departments…. Department seven, the covert operations department, according to Alimardan Azimpour, a former SAVAK member, “dealt with Middle Eastern affairs which were controlled by Israel’s MOSSAD” (pg. 42) ….
Illegitimate imprisonment became one of the many tools SAVAK used to install fear into Iranian society; it is estimated that in 1976 alone, there were between 25,000-100,000 political prisoners within Iran (pg. 44) ….
Besides its patron country, the United States, SAVAK’s most crucial partner was Israel’s MOSSAD agency…. In 1965 when the Shah exiled [first head of SAVAK, General Teymur] Bakhtiar for conspiring against him, many CIA agents were also sent back to the United States. Soon after, MOSSAD agents took their place in Tehran to train SAVAK members in domestic surveillance and interrogation techniques (pg. 46)….
In January 1978, new information was brought to light through correspondence between Aryeh Neir (b. 1937), executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (1917-2002), that the FBI identified Iranian students suspected of rioting and reported them to SAVAK (pg. 48)….
Following the arrest of Iranian students in the United States in 1978, Senator Birch Bayh (1928-2019) wrote to the FBI Director, William Webster (b. 1924), suspicious of the relationship between the FBI and SAVAK. Bayh was given information by Webster that the Chicago Police Department had, in fact, collaborated with SAVAK and that the FBI’s close relationship was worthy of his suspicion and constituted, in Bayh’s words, “improper conduct” (pg. 49).
I could go on and on, but I think readers are getting the salient points.
Lack of Accountability on Torture Paved Way for War
On June 13, 2025, Israel launched what it must have hoped would be a decapitation strike, involving assassinations of top Iranian military staff and nuclear scientists. In addition, according to The New York Times, “Four Iranian officials said Israel had attacked at least a dozen military bases, missile depots, nuclear and missile bases, in multiple cities in Iran including Tehran, Tabriz, Isfahan, Kermanshah and Arak.”
Since the initial attack, Iran has responded with a drone and missile offensive of its own against Israel, which has been somewhat effective, though government censorship and propaganda mills on both sides obscure the military realities.
Israel claimed it attacked to stop Iran’s supposedly imminent construction of a nuclear bomb. But commentators have noted that, one, Israel has been bleating this bogus call to action for decades. Two, Israel is the one that is not abiding by international treaties by having its own unacknowledged nuclear arsenal, developed with the witting or unwitting assistance of France and components of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Israel has asked the U.S. to join its war, though actually, the U.S. has, despite denials, been involved already. Trump is considering major escalation into Israel’s war, while Iran has refused U.S. calls to surrender. Israel is reportedly threatening the assassination of Iran Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Meanwhile, the two countries trade missile attacks, and the entire affair unfolds in the undeniable shadow of Israel’s escalating genocide in Gaza, and stepped up attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.
Thanks to years of exposure, many Americans and other Westerners are aware of the joint U.S.-UK 1953 effort to overthrow Iran’s elected leadership and install a phony “Shah” of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. What isn’t talked about very much — especially right now — is how the U.S. and Israel helped construct Iran’s internal security agency, SAVAK.
The U.S. press and government have generally underplayed the horror that was the Shah’s SAVAK-backed regime. If one goes to the FOIA “reading rooms” of the FBI, the NSA, and the U.S. State Department,4 you will find almost nothing about SAVAK. Even an academic repository like the National Security Archive at George Washington University shows “0 results” if one runs a search on “SAVAK.”
In general, the U.S. underplays anything having to do with torture, and the press goes along with most of it. There never has been any accountability for the CIA and Pentagon post-9/11 torture programs, so it’s no surprise that there is little accountability for U.S. and Mossad complicity for promoting torture under the Shah.
In the U.S., torture is covered up. A 2014 Senate report on the CIA torture program was largely withheld from publication. Material evidence — videotapes of U.S. torture — was destroyed by the CIA with no legal consequences. In addition, a UN watchdog agency has been hounding the U.S. about ongoing use of sensory and sleep deprivation torture as part of its official “Army Field Manual.” Not one U.S. press outlet or reporter has picked up on that story since the Associated Press ran one article on it in March 2016, since which time nothing has changed in the U.S. position.
Interestingly, the CIA has quite a bit available on SAVAK at its electronic reading room, including reproductions of articles written about SAVAK at the time. For instance, one March 1966 press clipping from The Sun described SAVAK surveillance and terrorization of “Iranian students and technicians” in West Germany.
The Sun article stated, for instance, “Last summer an Iranian student disappeared from Cologne under mysterious circumstances. Not long afterward his half-charred body was found near Brussels. He had been done in by SAVAK, his associates alleged.”
Another document posted by the CIA is a May 25, 1961 issue of CIA’s Current Weekly Review, which contained a top secret discussion of a potential coup attempt by SAVAK’s then chief, Teymur Bakhtiar. During this period, SAVAK’s Deputy Chief, Brigadier General Alavi-Kia, aka Hassan Alavikia, was temporarily relieved of his command and sent on “vacation” to Israel. Alavikia was subsequently posted to Cologne the following year as head of SAVAK’s European operations. (Could Alavikia have ordered or organized the death of the Iranian student described in the previous paragraph, who was “disappeared” from Cologne in 1966 while Alavikia was in charge there?)
It would take a long time to scan all of the CIA’s hundreds of documents, though I suspect paperwork and CIA files describing first hand orders for CIA to train SAVAK torturers will not be in there. The CIA covers its bases when it needs to.
The main point here is that the lack of information and attention to the U.S.-UK-Israeli intervention in post-coup Iran, has helped politically rehabilitate the West as some kind of good actor in relation to Iran. But in fact, Western efforts in Iran for decades led to the construction of a massive repressive secret police apparatus in that country, one which imprisoned, tortured and killed hundreds of thousands. That apparatus was given political cover by Western propaganda and associated governmental agencies.
As an October 1976 article in the New York Review of Books put it, “The CIA re-created the monarchy, built up the SAVAK and trained all its prominent members, and stood by the Shah and his secret police as their powerful ally. Iran became the police state it is now [in 1976 - JK].”
The NYRB article, written by Iranian poet Reza Baraheni, whose torture was described some paragraphs above, continued:
More than 300,000 people have been in and out of prison during the last nineteen years of the existence of SAVAK; an average of 1,500 people are arrested every month. In one instance alone, American-trained counterinsurgency troops of the Iranian Army and SAVAK killed more than 6,000 people on June 5, 1963. According to Amnesty International’s Annual Report for 1974-1975 “the total number of political prisoners has been reported at times throughout the year [1975] to be anything from 25,000 to 100,000.”
The hellish nightmare the West and Israel helped make in Iran led directly to the 1978-79 revolution that overthrew the Shah and kicked the West out of the country. Now the West and Israel want that control back.
There are many reasons to oppose Israel’s attacks on Iran. Iran’s responses are legitimate actions of self-defense. Even those who oppose the clericalism of Iran’s rulers should recognize there is no benefit from supporting Israel’s Western-backed aggressive strikes on Iran. Those materially supporting Israel at this time are guilty of war crimes themselves, as Israel, in a seeming attempt to divert attention from its stepped-up genocide in Gaza, has metastasized its military expansion through much of the Middle East, and brought the world to the edge of a nuclear World War Three.
For more on the UK and SAVAK, see Chickara Hashimoto’s 2013 thesis paper, “British Intelligence, Counter-Subversion, and ‘Informal Empire’ in the Middle East, 1949-63.”
Also see Mark Curtis’s November 8, 2022 article at Declassified UK, “When Britain Backed Iran’s Dictator.” Curtis wrote, “The IRD provided material for ‘unattributable use by the press and radio’ directly to SAVAK. This included spending on ‘book translation, articles for the press and counter-subversive propaganda work of various kinds’, IRD official Ann Elwell wrote in December 1964.”
The article states that after the 1953 coup, “Americans launched [a] campaign to create the anti-intelligence [i.e., counterintelligence - JK] unit in the Army which was of high importance to them. They worked hard to create antis for the central intelligence and the intelligences of the three branches and their units. They chose Tajbakhs, whom we looked to specially, as the head of the anti-intelligence. They worked and helped a lot to preserve this organization, due to the high significance it held to them….
“As America’s base in the region, Iran needed a powerful intelligence organization. Also, the USSR and neighbors used to pose a serious threat to the interests of the US. Not only did CIA help with the foundation of Savak, but the FBI helped a lot to create and develop it. Nonetheless, the National Security Agency which used to specialize in electronic espionage also conducted relations with Savak.
“The US also send groups to Tehran to educate Savak. Right after the coup, a US Army general visited Iran and started training commandership of intelligence units at the military governorate.
“Two years later a high-ranking delegation, five CIA officers, replaced him and remained in Iran for six years.
“During these years, the American consultants used to make full interference with the daily handling of information. These men educated the Savak in anti-intelligence.
“Around 1961, Americans left their place for Israel and Mossad. As Mossad started to engage Savak, the infiltration of the US subsided to some extent, to return to strong intervention after about one decade, when the CIA moved its Middle East command to Iran. Around the same time former CIA chief Richard Holmes [Helms - JK] was appointed as US ambassador to Iran.”
See also this 50 minute video of a CBS 60 Minutes 1976 interview with Reza Pahlavi, “SAVAK: Fathered by the CIA.” The Shah tells Mike Wallace that the SAVAK used to engage in physical torture in the past, but that at some point that ended. He said they used more “psychological” methods of interrogation at the time of the interview.
McGhee repeatedly references for his essay a 1991 book by Mark Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah : Building a Client State in Iran (Cornell University Press). The book can be read at Internet Archive.
The FBI and NSA had no results for any search for documents mentioning SAVAK, and this despite the fact both had been involved in assisting SAVAK training and operations over the years. FBI also supposedly investigated SAVAK operations in the United States. Searching for “SAVAK” at the U.S. State Department’s “Virtual Reading Room” returned one result, a set of November 1978 telegrams from the U.S. Embassy in Iran to the U.S. Secretary of State, Jimmy Carter appointee, Cyrus Vance. Iran was then in considerable political turmoil. SAVAK was mentioned at two points, including a controversy over whether SAVAK held at this point 600 or 900 political prisoners in its jails. SAVAK was also noted to be involved in organizing “progovt [pro-government] street brawlers” inside Iran.
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Excellent and important report. This is what real journalism looks like. Thank you!