Word: savak
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...forced to flee to Rome. A few days later, however, a countercoup sponsored by the CIA restored him to the throne. The Shah launched a ruthless purge, particularly of remnants of the Communist Tudeh Party, which had been outlawed in 1948. He also organized a secret-police network, SAVAK, that was to become one of the most notorious in the world...
Rouhani's uncle was imprisoned by SAVAK, the shah's secret police force for many years because of his activities in the National Front, and agents of the shah harassed other members of his family. Because of Iranian experience with abuse at the hands of American-backed forces, Rouhani says, they see the action against the students as just another in a long line of injustices. Far from causing them to consider releasing the hostages, Carter's hard line will simply strengthen their resolve to persevere until the U.S. apologizes...
...foreign country. This inhibition had much less to do with American congressional investigations into CIA abuses than it did with the Shah of Iran's insistence that the CIA not involve itself with opposition political groups, and that all "intelligence operations" be conducted through Iran's own SAVAK--an obvious attempt by the Shah to safeguard against any shift in CIA support to the opposition were it to appear at any point that the Shah himself had become "expendable...
...ways to the emergence of a new patriotic impulse in America. It seems to many that the villains have moved overseas again; fewer Americans are transfixed by any evil within. They have the patriotism of outraged innocence (contaminated somewhat by association with the Shah and by the tales of SAVAK tortures). Americans, for so long vaguely depressed by endless quarrels among themselves, now find they are in an unexpected kinship of common interest and travail...
Unfortunately, if predictably, this line of thinking survives by the tenuous argument that the billions of dollars of arms we sold to the government of the Shah, Israel's and our training of Savak and other military personnel, 40,000 American technicians and "consultants" working for our military or private corporations on contract to the Shah, and no doubt substantial covert CIA activities as well--all of these were somehow "insufficient," and we erred in Iran only by not supporting the Shah more fully...