SAVAK

• 1. Introduction

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  SAVAK, the secret police of Imperial Iran, was described by Time magazine in February 1979 as "long been Iran's most hated and feared institution." It had tortured and murdered thousands of the Shah's opponents, according to that same report. How does a state apparatus dedicated to surveillance and fear get built from scratch? And what happens to the people it swallows whole?

  The questions the rest of this documentary will answer are these: who built SAVAK, who ran it, and how did it grow from a fledgling intelligence service into a machinery of repression that ultimately helped destroy the very government it was created to protect?

• 2. Built by Outsiders

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  In September 1953, a U.S. Army colonel working for the CIA arrived in Persia to work alongside General Teymur Bakhtiar, freshly appointed as military governor of Tehran. Together they assembled what one source describes as "the nucleus of a new intelligence organization." The colonel trained recruits in surveillance, interrogation, and the use of intelligence networks. By September 1954, this embryonic agency had already claimed its first notable success: exposing and dismantling a large communist Tudeh Party network embedded inside the Persian armed forces.

  In March 1955, that colonel was replaced by a five-person team of career CIA officers. Among them was Major General Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, who reportedly trained nearly all of SAVAK's first generation of personnel. The French intelligence service, the SDECE, also contributed. Its instructors delivered courses in surveillance, counter-subversion, and political intelligence gathering, techniques they had sharpened during the Algerian War. The formal legal basis arrived in 1957, when the organization was established in Tehran by national security law.

  By 1965, the agency was reorganized and officially named Sazeman-e Ettela'at va Amniyat-e Keshvar, contracted to SAVAK. That same year, SAVAK's own instructors took over from the foreign trainers, marking a transition from a borrowed apparatus to an independent one.

• 3. Structure and Reach

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  SAVAK divided its work across nine general directorates, each with a distinct mandate. Internal Security fell to the Third Directorate; foreign intelligence to the Second; counterintelligence to the Eighth. A separate Fourth Directorate handled security within SAVAK itself, suggesting the organization watched its own members nearly as closely as it watched the outside world.

  At its peak, the agency reportedly employed approximately 5,000 agents under the Pahlavi dynasty. Iranian-American scholar Gholam Reza Afkhami placed the figure at between 4,000 and 6,000 members. Historians have offered wildly conflicting estimates, ranging from 6,000 to as high as 60,000. The Shah himself, in an interview on the 4th of February 1974, said he did not know the exact number and guessed fewer than 2,000.

  Whatever its true size, SAVAK's reach was broad. It censored the press, screened applicants for government employment, operated its own detention centers including Evin Prison, and tracked Iranian students abroad in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. Agents collaborated with CIA officers at an air force base in New York to share interrogation tactics. After 1963, the Shah expanded SAVAK to over 5,300 full-time agents, supplemented by an unknown but large number of part-time informers.

• 4. The Men Who Led It

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  General Teymur Bakhtiar, who had helped build the original intelligence nucleus after the 1953 coup, served as SAVAK's first director. Iranian authorities dismissed him in 1961, and he went on to become a political dissident. In 1970, SAVAK agents assassinated him, staging his death to look like an accident.

  His successor, General Hassan Pakravan, who directed SAVAK from 1961 to 1966, carried an almost unusual reputation for restraint. Pakravan dined on a weekly basis with Ayatollah Khomeini while Khomeini was under house arrest, and he intervened to block Khomeini's execution, arguing that it would anger ordinary Iranians. After the revolution, that same Khomeini regime made Pakravan one of its first targets: he was among the first of the Shah's officials to be executed.

  General Nematollah Nassiri replaced Pakravan in 1966. A close associate of the Shah, Nassiri oversaw the organization as it grew more aggressive in the face of rising communist, socialist, and Islamist unrest. Nassiri's own phone was reportedly tapped at some point, a detail documented by Mansur Rafizadeh, SAVAK's director in the United States during the 1970s, who later described his years inside the agency in the book Witness: From the Shah to the Secret Arms Deal. Rafizadeh himself was suspected of working simultaneously as a CIA asset.

  A figure of quieter but profound importance was Hossein Fardoust, a former classmate of the Shah. Fardoust served as a deputy director of SAVAK before being appointed to lead the Imperial Inspectorate, a separate bureau tasked with watching high-level officials including SAVAK directors. When the revolution came, Fardoust switched sides and, according to author Charles Kurzman, effectively preserved the bulk of the SAVAK organization under new leadership and a new name.

• 5. Methods of Terror

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  A turning point in how SAVAK's brutality was understood arrived in February 1971, when a small group of armed Marxists attacked a gendarmerie post in the Caspian village of Siahkal. After that attack, according to Iranian political historian Ervand Abrahamian, SAVAK interrogators were sent abroad for what was described as "scientific training" to prevent deaths that arose from what they called "brute force."

  The new methods were clinical in their cruelty. Abrahamian documented the range: bastinado, sleep deprivation, extended solitary confinement, nail extractions, electrical shocks applied via cattle prods often into the rectum, cigarette burns, acid dripped into nostrils, near-drowning, and mock executions. An electric chair fitted with a large metal mask to muffle screams while amplifying them for the prisoner earned its own nickname: the Apollo, a reference to the American spacecraft. Prisoners were also subjected to rape, urination, and forced nudity. The Federation of American Scientists documented additional methods including inserting broken glass into the rectum, pouring boiling water into the rectum, and the use of weights attached to the testicles.

  Despite the new "scientific" approach, the bastinado remained the preferred instrument. Its primary stated purpose, according to Abrahamian, was to locate arms caches, safe houses, and accomplices. The year 1970 also saw SAVAK torture a Shia cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Reza Sa'idi, to death, before the Siahkal attack that supposedly prompted the methodological shift.

  Abrahamian estimates that between 1971 and 1977, SAVAK and allied security forces killed 368 guerrillas, including leaders of the Organization of Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas and the People's Mujahedin of Iran. Hamid Ashraf, one of the major urban guerrilla leaders, was among those killed. Between 1971 and 1979, as many as 100 political prisoners were executed.

• 6. Artists, Dissidents, and Scrutiny

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  Writers and intellectuals were not spared. One well-known writer was arrested, tortured for months, and then placed before television cameras to confess that his work had focused too much on social problems and too little on the achievements of the White Revolution. By the end of 1975, twenty-two prominent poets, novelists, professors, theater directors, and filmmakers were held in jail for criticizing the regime. Others who refused to cooperate with the authorities were physically attacked.

  The repression began to ease under international pressure. Numerous international organizations and foreign newspapers drew sustained attention to conditions inside Iran's prisons. When Jimmy Carter became U.S. president and raised the issue of human rights in Pahlavi Iran, prison conditions changed almost overnight. Inmates coined a term for this shift: "jimmykrasy."

  Even inside SAVAK, unease was not unknown. During the 1960s, some agents began to treat financial surveillance as a matter of institutional self-interest, monitoring the fiscal behavior of Iran's political and economic elite and even the royal family. The Shah was reportedly angered by these reports, believing the agents had exceeded their mandate and pried into private affairs.

• 7. After the Revolution

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  Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar dissolved SAVAK in February 1979, just before the fall of the monarchy. Following the Shah's departure in January 1979, more than 3,000 central staff members and field agents faced reprisals. General Pakravan was executed. General Nassiri was put on trial and executed. Yet the organization itself did not simply cease to exist.

  Kurzman's account is stark: SAVAK was never truly dismantled. It changed its name and its leadership but continued operating under essentially the same codes. The replacement body was SAVAMA, formally the Sazman-e Ettela'at va Amniat-e Melli-e Iran, described as "much larger" than its predecessor. This is also known today as the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security of Iran.

  In the years after the revolution, the former Towhid Prison in central Tehran was converted into a museum called Ebrat. It displays documented evidence of SAVAK's methods, preserved in the building where some of those methods were applied. The institution that Khomeini's movement used as a rallying point to build popular support against the Shah now stands partly as a monument to what that movement said it was fighting against.