Word: savak
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...thrown into a cell with 20 Iranian prisoners. From there he was led to a small office and given a "trial" that lasted eight minutes. His three judges accused him of killing three Iranian soldiers, all the while shouting at him, "You're CIA! You're SAVAK! You're mercenary!" Sent back to his cell, he was threatened with execution every day until last Wednesday. Then, suddenly, he was allowed to phone the embassy, and shortly thereafter was freed...
...next day, Khomeini forces attacked the Lavizan barracks in northeastern Tehran, home of the crack Javidan guards, killing the commander and many of his troops. Using acetylene torches, the attackers cut their way through electrically locked doors to free prisoners at Evin, a jail run by the hated SAVAK secret police. There the liberators found electric whips, torture beds and other interrogation devices that justified many of the atrocity charges long leveled at SAVAK. Also attacked was the Shah's principal residence in north Tehran, Niavaran Palace. Dispirited Imperial Guards on duty there capitulated without a fight...
Meanwhile, the new revolutionary government was acting in an arbitrary manner that seemed at variance with the Ayatullah's previously expressed democratic ideals. After hasty−and private−trials, four officials of the former regime, including the head of the Shah's hated SAVAK secret police and three generals, were executed by firing squad on charges of "torture, massacre of people, treason and earthly corruption...
...presented interviews with some of the more notorious leaders of the Shah's regime. Three nights before he was executed, General Nematollah Nassiri, looking like a frightened rabbit, was interrogated by two local reporters. When he failed to respond fast enough to a question about who had ordered SAVAK to torture its prisoners, a masked militiaman prodded him and whispered, "Say the Shah, say the Shah." Nassiri wore a bandage on his head and talked as if his throat had been beaten. The station was flooded with calls protesting the appearance of an obviously injured man. "We overthrew...
What angered the Carter Administration as much as anything else about the embassy affair was the way in which the Soviet Union tried to exploit the incident for its own ends. The official news agency Tass charged that the embassy attack had been inspired by remnants of SAVAK, under orders of the CIA, to create a pretext for U.S. intervention. The Soviet press further declared that Washington was trying to provoke a split in Iran between the new regime's "religious section" and the "left forces...