SAVAK (Persian: ?????, short for ?????? ??????? ? ????? ???? Sazeman-e Ettela'at va Amniyat-e Keshvar,
National Intelligence and Security Organization) was the domestic security and intelligence service of Iran from 1957 to 1979. It has been described as Iran's "most hated and feared institution" prior to the revolution of 1979, for its association with the foreign intelligence organizations such as the CIA and its torture and execution of regime opponents.] At its peak, the organization had as many as 60,000 agents serving in its ranks. It has been estimated that by the time the agency was finally dismantled in 1979 by the Iranian Revolution, as many as one third of all Iranian men had some sort of connection to SAVAK by way of being informants or actual agents
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Operations
During the height of its power, SAVAK had virtually unlimited powers of arrest and detention. It operated its own detention centers, like Evin Prison. In addition to domestic security the service's tasks extended to the surveillance of Iranians abroad, notably in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, and especially students on government stipends. The agency also closely collaborated with the American CIA by sending their agents to an air force base in New York to share and discuss interrogation tactics.
SAVAK agents often carried out operations against each other.[citation needed] Teymur Bakhtiar was assassinated by SAVAK agents in 1970, and Mansur Rafizadeh, SAVAK's United States director during the 1970s, reported that General Nassiri's phone was tapped. Mansur Rafizadeh later published his life as a SAVAK man and detailed the human rights violations of the Shah in his book Witness: From the Shah to the Secret Arms Deal : An Insider's Account of U.S. Involvement in Iran.
According to Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski, SAVAK was responsible for
- Censorship of press, books and films.
- Interrogation and often torture of prisoners
- Surveillance of political opponents.
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Victims
Sources disagree over how many victims SAVAK had and how inhumane its techniques were. Writing at the time of the Shah's overthrow, TIME magazine described SAVAK as having "long been Iran's most hated and feared institution" which had "tortured and murdered thousands of the Shah's opponents." Federation of American Scientists (FAS) also found it guilty of "the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners" and symbolizing "the Shah's rule from 1963-79." The FAS list of SAVAK torture methods included "electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails." According to a former CIA analyst on Iran, Jesse J. Leaf, SAVAK was trained in torture techniques by the CIA.
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