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http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+ir0187)
Library of Congress
Iran
SAVAK
Formed under the guidance of United States and Israeli intelligence officers in 1957, SAVAK developed into an effective secret agency. General Teymur Bakhtiar was appointed its first director, only to be dismissed in 1961, allegedly for organizing a coup; he was assassinated in 1970 under mysterious circumstances, probably on the shah’s direct order. His successor, General Hosain Pakravan, was dismissed in 1966, allegedly for having failed to crush the clerical opposition in the early 1960s. The shah turned to his childhood friend and classmate, General Nematollah Nassiri, to rebuild SAVAK and properly “serve” the monarch. Mansur Rafizadeh, the SAVAK director in the United States throughout the 1970s, claimed that General Nassiri’s telephone was tapped by SAVAK agents reporting directly to the shah, an example of the level of mistrust pervading the government on the eve of the Revolution.

In 1987 accurate information concerning SAVAK remained publicly unavailable. A flurry of pamphlets issued by the revolutionary regime after 1979 indicated that SAVAK had been a full-scale intelligence agency with more than 15,000 full-time personnel and thousands of part-time informants. SAVAK was attached to the Office of the Prime Minister, and its director assumed the title of deputy to the prime minister for national security affairs. Although officially a civilian agency, SAVAK had close ties to the military; many of its officers served simultaneously in branches of the armed forces. Another childhood friend and close confidant of the shah, Major General Hosain Fardust, was deputy director of SAVAK until the early 1970s, when the shah promoted him to the directorship of the Special Intelligence Bureau, which operated inside Niavaran Palace, independently of SAVAK.

Founded to round up members of the outlawed Tudeh, SAVAK expanded its activities to include gathering intelligence and neutralizing the regime’s opponents. An elaborate system was created to monitor all facets of political life. For example, a censorship office was established to monitor journalists, literary figures, and academics throughout the country; it took appropriate measures against those who fell out of line. Universities, labor unions, and peasant organizations, among others, were all subjected to intense surveillance by SAVAK agents and paid informants. The agency was also active abroad, especially in monitoring Iranian students who publicly opposed Pahlavi rule.

Over the years, SAVAK became a law unto itself, having legal authority to arrest and detain suspected persons indefinitely. SAVAK operated its own prisons in Tehran (the Komiteh and Evin facilities) and, many suspected, throughout the country as well. Many of these activities were carried out without any institutional checks. Thus, it came as no surprise when, in 1979, SAVAK was singled out as a primary target for reprisals, its headquarters overrun, and prominent leaders tried and executed by komiteh representatives. High-ranking SAVAK agents were purged between 1979 and 1981; there were 61 SAVAK officials among 248 military personnel executed between February and September 1979. The organization was officially dissolved by Khomeini shortly after he came to power in 1979.

Data as of December 1987

http://www.hirhome.com/iraniraq/savak.htm.

If the Ayatollah Khomeini was an enemy of the United States ruling elite, why did he adopt the CIA’s security service?

Historical and Investigative Research - 23 Feb 2006
by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/iraniraq/savak.htm
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In June of 1980, the New York Times reported that the new leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, was complaining loudly that many people who had served under the Shah had not been purged from the government bureaucracies. “He singled out the Foreign Ministry for criticism, saying that in this department and in other ministries there were ‘the same emblems and the same corruption’ as before.”[0] It is curious that he should not have singled out SAVAK — especially SAVAK.

SAVAK had been the Iranian Shah (King) Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s feared security service, which routinely tortured and assassinated dissidents, and spied on everybody. It had been created by the CIA after the CIA installed the shah in power in a 1953 coup d’état.[1] As a dissident leader prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had been denouncing SAVAK. So why so much noise now about other ministries being full of Shah agents and nothing in particular about SAVAK?

Earlier the same month, the Washington Post had published an interesting article with the title: “Khomeini Is Reported to Have a SAVAK of His Own.”[1a] And what was Khomeini’s own SAVAK like? It was none other than SAVAK itself. Here is what the Washington Post writes (emphases are mine):

“Though it came to power denouncing the shah’s dreaded SAVAK secret service, the government of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has created a new internal security and intelligence operation, apparently with a similar organizational structure and some of the same faces as its predecessor.

The new organization is called SAVAMA. It is run, according to U.S. sources and Iranian exile sources here and in Paris, by Gen. Hossein Fardoust, who was deputy chief of SAVAK under the former shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and a friend from boyhood of the deposed monarch.

...‘SAVAK is alive and kicking’ in the form of SAVAMA, claims Ali Tabatabai, former press counselor at the Iranian Embassy in Washington under the shah... now president of the Iran Freedom Foundation in Bethesda [Maryland, near Washington D.C.]… ‘There are large numbers of former SAVAK people’ in the new organization, he says. ‘In fact, with the exception of the bureau chiefs [who ran the individual sections of SAVAK] the whole organization seems to be intact.’

(Ali Akbar Tabatabaei was an Iranian exile and former press attache to the Iranian embassy in the United States under the Shah who became president of the Iran Freedom Foundation in Bethesda, Maryland after the Islamic Revolution.

A critic of Ayatollah Khomeini, Tabatabaei was shot in his Bethesda, Maryland home by Dawud Salahuddin, an American Muslim convert.

Salahuddin has stated he was paid $5000 by Iranians to kill Tabatabaei and is currently on the FBI fugitives list. He escaped to Iran via Paris and Geneva, reaching Teheran, Iran, on July 31, 1980. In a 1996 interview with ABC’s 20/20, Salahuddin confessed to killing Tabatabaei. He has also stated he thought the killing was an “an act of war