The Shah also authorized the creation of the
secret police force,
SAVAK (
National Organization for Information and Security, which was organized with the help of the
CIA and
Mossad.).This infamous agency operated its own secret prison, used
torture extensively,
assassinated dissidents, and kept the
CIA informed. The Shah became a despot whose secret police did use torture, as he once admitted to Time magazine, and who eventually earned the passionate hatred of his nation. Amnesty International in the 1970s described his regime’s methods of torture: electric shock, burning on a heated metal grill, and t he insertion of bottles and hot eggs into the ****. According to 1976 Amnesty International estimates 25,000 to 100,000 political prisoners were being held in Iran. The Shah's own figure was 3,000 to 3,500. Anne Burley, an Amnesty International researcher, was shown by the government a SAVAK file that she deems authentic, containing pictures of victims who had been tortured to death. Several were women, she testified, and "in each case the breasts were mutilated." William J. Butler, a New York lawyer who investigated SAVAK for the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, spoke to Reza Baraheni, an Iranian poet who was held for 102 days by the secret police in 1973. 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. Many other SAVAK victims were tortured briefly and then released, after the secret police satisfied themselves that they would no longer oppose the Shah. Did the Shah know? He told TIME in 1976 that "we don't need to torture people any more," implying that torture had in fact been practiced earlier. In any case, as an absolute monarch he obviously was responsible for the actions of his own security forces.
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There is some more direct evidence of the Shah's complicity in executions too. According to TIME, SAVAK agents had testified that the Shah, under international pressure to liberalize his regime and therefore eager to hide evidence of repression, gave the secret police a terse oral order in 1975: "Don't take any prisoners. Kill them." In a confession interspersed with sobs, Bahman Naderipour described how he and other agents, in response to this order, took nine political prisoners out of Evin jail in northwest Tehran, handcuffed and blindfolded them and then machine-gunned them. He and another agent, Fereydoun Tavangari, said that SAVAK murdered other prisoners in their cells, then turned their bodies over to police medical examiners with an explanation that they had been killed in gun fights while resisting arrest. For all the torture tales, U.S. experts estimated the number of political executions under the Shah at about 150 per year. By far the greatest bloodshed under the Shah occurred in the demonstrations that convulsed the country in 1978 and early 1979. The Shah's troops several times opened fire on crowds. One prominent member of the International Commission of Jurists classifies the Shah as in a "second league" of tyrants, below Uganda's Idi Amin, Cambodia's Pol Pot and Central African Emperor Jean Bokassa I. .
[14]
