The Iranian secret police under the Shah, established with CIA and Mossad assistance in 1957 and responsible for intelligence, political surveillance, and the torture and execution of the Shah’s opponents. Its methods became a primary cause of the broad coalition that made the 1979 revolution.
SAVAK — Sazman-e Ettelaat va Amniyat-e Keshvar, the National Intelligence and Security Organisation — was created in 1957 with training and organisational assistance from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad, as part of the American commitment to maintaining the Shah’s regime following the 1953 coup. It developed into a comprehensive domestic intelligence apparatus that monitored the press, universities, political organisations, and religious institutions, infiltrated opposition groups, and operated a network of prisons in which torture was systematic. Its most notorious facility was Evin Prison in Tehran, which became a synonym for state terror. The exact number of people killed or tortured by SAVAK is disputed; Amnesty International reported that Iran had the world’s highest rate of execution in the 1970s and that political prisoners numbered in the tens of thousands. SAVAK’s activities were not merely domestic: it monitored Iranian students overseas, assassinated opposition figures in exile, and maintained surveillance of diaspora communities. The Iranian opposition — across the ideological spectrum from Marxist to Islamist to nationalist — shared the experience of SAVAK surveillance, imprisonment, and torture, which was a powerful unifying force in the coalition that overthrew the Shah. Khomeini’s Islamic Republic retained Evin Prison and created its own political police; the experience of SAVAK did not produce a commitment to human rights but a new system of political violence with different ideological foundations.
SAVAK illustrates the self-defeating logic of security-state repression at a certain level of intensity. By making virtually every form of political organisation, publication, or public expression dangerous, SAVAK eliminated the moderate political centre — the politicians, trade unionists, and civil society actors who might have channelled discontent into reform — while driving the most committed opponents underground into radical networks where the possibilities of compromise were eliminated and the commitment to total overthrow was reinforced. A repression that destroys moderate opposition strengthens the extremes; the Shah’s security state created the conditions in which Khomeini’s uncompromising Islamism became the most credible alternative to the monarchy.
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