Word: pahlavis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi tolerated little political opposition at home, but allegations were increasingly heard in the U.S. that his secret police, SAVAK, were brutalizing Iranian citizens. The Shah was a likable man-erect without being pompous, seemingly calm and self-assured in spite of the tear gas incident, surprisingly modest in demeanor. The air of reticence in his first conversations with me could not have been caused by his unfamiliarity with American Presidents. I was the eighth he had known...
...late-night summons, the slow walk along bleak prison corridors, and finally the waiting firing squad. Last week the executioners' guns took aim, on the specific orders of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, at one of the founding figures of the Islamic revolution that swept away Shah Reza Pahlavi in February 1979: Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, 46, the man who sprang to international prominence as Iran's Foreign Minister during the U.S. hostage crisis. Ghotbzadeh was shot after a 26-day trial in which he was accused by the Islamic military prosecutor of plotting to overthrow the Islamic government and assassinate...
...regards Iraq as its most implacable enemy among the Muslim states, has sold Iran Israeli-made weapons such as sea-to-sea and air-to-air missiles, as well as some parts for the U.S.-made matériel the Ayatullah's regime inherited when Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was deposed in 1979. Still, most of the $1 billion in weaponry that Iran has bought has come from an international network of arms dealers or directly from Western European sources...
...well-organized underground movement founded in 1965, the Mujahedin was active in the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. But it later split with the clergy-dominated regime of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Over the past eight months it has launched a bloody campaign of insurrection that culminated in the assassination of President Mohammed Ali Raja'i and many other top government figures. In the wake of severe government reprisals, Mujahedin activities have tapered off. The Mujahedin say they have merely switched tactics from assassinating political leaders to attacking government security forces. Government sources claim that, in fact, the rebels...
...have purged the central committee of the Tudeh of what they call "bourgeois-minded reformists" and put in their own people. The security agents have set up shop in Saltanatabad, a northern suburb of Tehran, in the former headquarters of SAVAK, the notorious secret police of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Recruits for the new revolutionary secret service include some Islamic Guards, the better members of an inefficient secret service created after the fall of the Shah, and former SAVAK agents who have lost none of their taste for brutality and their skill at torture. Their Soviet teachers, who are evidently...