Word: savak
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Muslim terrorist in 1896, crowds attacked the Baha'i community in Yazd, killing several people. Believers were repeatedly tortured and mutilated by local vigilantes in subsequent years. The worst outburst prior to Khomeini's takeover occurred in 1955-56 under the late Shah. Former agents of SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, say that government agents provoked anti-Baha'i hysteria to divert reactionary Muslims from turning their fury against the Shah. Recalls a former SAVAK officer: "A lot of Muslim clergy, including many with high positions in the Khomeini regime, grew rich on SAVAK money...
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...
...Soviets 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...
While Khomeini's Islamic Guards are executing enemies of the regime in the streets, they are also torturing suspected opponents behind prison walls with a ferocity unequaled even by the deposed Shah's notorious SAVAK agents. Many of the prisoners who are being tortured are merely relatives of dissidents sought by the political police. One victim, who is now in hiding in Iran, described his ordeal to TIME
Then they threw me into a cell full of other battered political prisoners and threatened to "play football" with me again unless my memory improved. [The same technique was used by SAVAK and called by the same name. The aim is to shatter the prisoner's self-confidence and ability to think clearly so that he cannot consistently relate a "cover" story he may have prepared...