SAVAK: The Shah’s Security Service

SAVAK was the intelligence and internal security service of Mohammad Reza Shah, founded in 1957 and dissolved after the revolution of February 1979. It watched, censored, arrested and interrogated the shah’s opponents, and its prisons and use of torture became, for many Iranians and for human rights groups abroad, the defining image of the regime. How many people it held and killed is still disputed, and the figures given range very widely.

Origins after the 1953 coup

After the coup of 1953, military governors in Tehran broke up the Tudeh party network, including a secret organisation of several hundred army officers. In 1957 the shah turned this work into a permanent body. American advisers, and according to later accounts also French and Israeli services, helped set it up and train its first officers; Encyclopaedia Iranica notes that CIA officers trained much of the first generation of staff.

Its first head, General Teymur Bakhtiar, became powerful enough to worry the shah. He was dismissed in 1961, went into exile and was shot dead in Iraq in 1970 in what is generally attributed to a SAVAK operation. His successor Hassan Pakravan had a reputation as a relatively mild officer. General Nematollah Nasiri, who had carried the shah’s decree to Mosaddegh in 1953, ran SAVAK from 1965 until June 1978, the years of its widest reach.

What it did

SAVAK combined jobs that in other countries are split between several agencies. It ran foreign intelligence and counter-espionage, watched Iranian students abroad, screened candidates for many state jobs and university posts, and kept files on clerics, writers, trade unionists and politicians. It worked with the censorship office on books, newspapers and films. Its internal security department, long associated with Parviz Sabeti, handled political cases and was the side most Iranians feared.

After the guerrilla attack on the gendarmerie post at Siahkal in February 1971, the campaign against armed groups such as the Fada’iyan-e Khalq and the Mojahedin-e Khalq intensified. A Joint Committee of SAVAK and the police was created to run it, with its own prison in central Tehran. Former prisoners described beatings, whipping on the soles of the feet, electric shocks, burns and long solitary confinement. Amnesty International’s 1976 briefing on Iran reported such methods and concluded that torture regularly happened between arrest and trial; trials were held before military courts with limited defence.

Cases that became symbols

Several deaths became rallying points: the cleric Ayatollah Mohammad-Reza Sa’idi, who died in custody in 1970; the killing in April 1975 of nine prisoners, among them the Marxist writer Bizhan Jazani, who were officially reported shot while trying to escape; and the deaths of guerrillas in shoot-outs and under interrogation. Writers and artists were also jailed for their work, including the poet and critic Reza Baraheni, whose accounts of prison reached Western readers in 1976.

The disputed numbers

Because SAVAK’s files were seized and selectively published after 1979, and both the old regime and its opponents had reasons to shape the figures, the numbers need care. The main estimates are these.

• Size of SAVAK. Ervand Abrahamian gives over 5,300 full-time officers after 1963, plus an unknown number of informers. Other estimates run from about 4,000 to 6,000 staff, up to claims of 30,000 or 60,000. In 1974 the shah said he thought the number was under 2,000. After the revolution, claims of millions of informers circulated; there is no evidence for figures of that order.
• Political prisoners. In 1975 Amnesty International reported figures “from 25,000 to 100,000” given by exiles and journalists, while saying a reliable count was impossible. Its 1976 briefing set these against the shah’s own statement in October 1976 of “perhaps three thousand” and a figure of 3,200 given by Sabeti in September 1976. Amnesty’s secretary-general Martin Ennals said in 1975 that no country had a worse human rights record than Iran.
• Deaths. Abrahamian, working from guerrilla and official sources, counts 368 guerrillas killed by SAVAK, police and army between 1971 and 1977, and fewer than 100 political prisoners executed between 1971 and 1979. Amnesty later spoke of at least 300 political executions under the shah. Revolutionary publications in 1979 claimed that SAVAK had killed many thousands; historians generally treat these claims as greatly exaggerated.

Historians who stress the regime’s achievements, such as Gholam Reza Afkhami and Andrew Scott Cooper, argue that SAVAK’s scale and cruelty were inflated by opposition propaganda. Abrahamian, in Tortured Confessions, argues that the true weight of SAVAK lay less in the number of dead than in the systematic use of torture and televised recantations to break opponents, a practice later continued and enlarged under the Islamic Republic.

Pressure and collapse

From 1977, under pressure from the Carter administration and international groups, the shah let the International Committee of the Red Cross visit prisons, released prisoners and allowed some civilian trials. In June 1978 he replaced Nasiri with General Nasser Moghaddam. When the monarchy fell in February 1979, crowds took SAVAK buildings, and Nasiri was among the first generals executed by revolutionary courts that month. Pakravan was executed in April 1979. The new regime soon built its own intelligence service, which absorbed some SAVAK staff and files.

For the wider politics of these years, see intellectuals and opposition in the 1960s and 1970s and the causes of the 1979 revolution.