Word: savak
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...member Iranian secret police force SAVAK (a contraction of the Farsi words for security and information organization) has long been Iran's most hated and feared institution. With virtually unlimited powers to arrest and interrogate, SAVAK has tortured and murdered thousands of the Shah's opponents. Last week, in fulfillment of a promise made by Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, the assembly approved a bill abolishing SAVAK and establishing a new National Intelligence Center, without police powers. The No. 2 man in SAVAK agreed to an unprecedented interview with TIME Correspondent David S. Jackson at the organization...
...Commando Organization of the Warriors of the Constitution." They threatened "guerrilla warfare" and "unprecedented slaughter" if the 1906 royalist constitution were overturned. These self-styled warriors also threatened to assassinate anyone who joined the Ayatullah's revolutionary council. Khomeini loyalists charged that provocateurs?suspected of being either agents of SAVAK or underground Communists, who have the most to gain from chaos?were inciting violence. Gangs of street toughs burned down a beer factory, a nightclub, and numerous slum dwellings in the city's red-light district. The apparent motive was to make the revolutionary movement seem fanatical and violent...
America also failed to encourage reforms in Iran for a different reason. The CIA did not provide the U.S. government with sufficient, accurate intelligence about both the growth of opposition and its causes--among them repressive domestic policies. This was because the CIA saw SAVAK, the Iranian secret police, as a friendly intelligence service on the lines of the British or French models with whom it exchanges information, rather than an instrument of political oppression akin...
...historic bloodshed" that would result from a confrontation between supporters of the Ayatullah and Iran's 340,000-man armed forces. In a televised appeal for support last week, Bakhtiar outlined the reforms that his government was carrying out: releasing political prisoners, ending censorship, abolishing SAVAK, the secret police, and speeding up the corruption trials of former public officials...
...ignored the grievances that festered throughout the country. The House report stressed that "intelligence and policy failings were intertwined: intelligence collection and analysis were weak, and policymakers' confidence in the Shah in turn skewed intelligence." In fact, TIME learned that the CIA had left intelligence reporting to SAVAK in such areas as nuclear power operations, the Soviet Union and the oil situation. From his exile in Morocco, the Shah was also criticizing U.S. policy-for not giving him more support (see following story...