Word: savak
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...Muslim world. The progress achieved in a deeply backward country was stunning. Petroleum revenues built steel mills, nuclear power plants, telecommunication systems and a formidable military machine, complete with U.S. supersonic fighters and missiles. Dissent was ruthlessly suppressed, in part by the use of torture in the dungeons of SAVAK, the secret police. It is still not clear how widespread the tortures and political executions were; but the Shah did not heed U.S. advice to liberalize his regime, and repression inflamed rather than quieted dissent...
...included at least seven prostitutes, 15 men accused of homosexual rape, and a Jewish businessman alleged to be spying for Israel. Defenders of Khomeini's regime argue with some justification that far fewer people were condemned by the revolutionary courts than were tortured to death by the Shah's SAVAK, and that the swift trials were necessary to defuse public anger against the minions of the deposed monarch...
...Fedayan and Mujahedin are the more dynamic groups with a degree of support among the masses and in the armed services. The most persistent and ferocious of the Shah's opponents, they were brutally suppressed and suffered heavy losses. But they continued to provoke bloody clashes with SAVAK and played a major role in the battle for Tehran, which led to the Shah's downfall. Says a Mujahedin leader: "We have waded through blood and fire to our present status...
...mistake of ignoring the mullahs (priests). The U.S., in turn, embraced him, and even had the CIA engineer a coup to restore him to power in 1953. Corruption, dislocations of life and profoundly disorienting social change all accompanied his rule; so did political suppression and the tortures of SAVAK, his secret police. The U.S. was inextricably implicated in the career of this potentate-Ozymandias and Faust-and shared the people's judgment of him when it came...
There is some more direct evidence of the Shah's complicity in executions too. Early this year, SAVAK agents testified before" Khomeini's Islamic revolutionary courts that the Shah, under international pressure to liberalize his regime and therefore eager to hide evidence of repression, gave the secret police a terse oral order in 1975: "Don't take any prisoners. Kill them." In a confession interspersed with sobs, Bahman Naderipour described how he and other agents, in response to this order, took nine political prisoners out of Evin jail in northwest Tehran, handcuffed and blindfolded them and then...