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Tuesday, May 6, 2008

The Opposition Actually Won In Zimbzbwe/Comparisons With Iran In 1979

I finally saw the data from the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission. The MDC and a splinter party got over 55% of the vote. They won.

Please go back to 1979 and Iran. The Shah had oil wealth and an incredible military machine. He had the dreaded SAVAK intelligence agency. He launch a campaign of terror and intimidation on opponents. It failed and he had to flee the country. Mugabe's terror and intimidation campaign will not work.

Please note the text below:
Ministry of Security SAVAK

Shah-an-Shah [King of Kings] Mohammad Reza Pahlevi was restored to the Peacock Throne of Iran with the assistance of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1953. CIA mounted a coup against the left-leaning government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, which had planned to nationalize Iran's oil industry. CIA subsequently provided organizational and and training assistance for the establishment of an intelligence organization for the Shah. With training focused on domestic security and interrogation, the primary purpose of the intelligence unit, headed by General Teymur Bakhtiar, was to eliminate threats to Shah.
Formed under the guidance of United States and Israeli intelligence officers in 1957, SAVAK developed into an effective secret agency. 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.
SAVAK increasingly to symbolized the Shah's rule from 1963-79, a period of corruption in the royal family, one-party rule, the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners, suppression of dissent, and alienation of the religious masses. The United States reinforced its position as the Shah's protector and supporter, sowing the seeds of the anti-Americanism that later manifested itself in the revolution against the monarchy.
Accurate information concerning SAVAK remains 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.
SAVAK paid Rockwell International to implement a large communications monitoring system called IBEX. The Stanford Technology Corp. [STC, owned by Hakim] had a $5.5 million contract to supply the CIA-promoted IBEX project. STC had another $7.5 million contract with Iran's air force for a telephone monitoring system, operated by SAVAK, to enable the Shah to track his top commanders' communications.
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. SAVAK's torture methods included electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting brokon glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails. Many of these activities were carried out without any institutional checks.
At the peak its influence under the Shah SAVAK had at least 13 full-time case officers running a network of informers and infiltration covering 30,000 Iranian students on United States college campuses. The head of the SAVAK agents in the United States operated under the cover of an attache at the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, with the FBI, CIA, and State Department fully aware of these activities.
In 1978 the deepening opposition to the Shah errupted in widespread demonstrations and rioting. SAVAK and the military responded with widespread repression that killed thousands of people. Recognizing that even this level of violence had failed to crush the rebellion, the Shah abdicated the Peacock Throne and departed Iran on 16 January 1979. Despite decades of pervasive surveillance by SAVAK, working closely with CIA, the extent of public opposition to the Shah, and his sudden departure, came as a considerable suprise to the US intelligence community and national leadership. As late as September 28, 1978 the US Defense Intelligence Agency reported that the shah "is expected to remain actively in power over the next ten years."
However, it was no surprise that 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.
Sources and Resources
SAVAK in IRAN - A Country Study Library of Congress Federal Research Division
A 'great venture': overthrowing the government of Iran by Mark Curtis Lobster #30, December 1995
HISTORY OF MOJAHEDIN [Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran ]
Khomeini's Incorporation of the Iranian Military Mark Roberts NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY McNair Paper 48 January 1996
"Judgment; An Analysis of Savak", by General Hashemai, the former head of counterespionage of Savak who in Savak for 22 years. Unfortunately this book is only available in Farsi.



SAVAK (Persian: ?????, short for ?????? ??????? ? ????? ???? Sazeman-e Ettela'at va Amniyat-e Keshvar, National Intelligence and Security Organization) was the domestic security and intelligence service of Iran from 1957 to 1979. Its headquarters were in Tehran. At its peak, the organization had as many as 60,000 agents serving in its ranks. It has been estimated that by the time the agency was finally dismantled in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution, as many as one third of all Iranian men had some sort of connection to SAVAK by way of being informants or actual agents.[1]
Contents[hide]
1 History
2 Operations
3 Post-Revolution and Fardost
4 SAVAK Directors
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
//

[edit] History
SAVAK was founded in 1957 to strengthen the Shah's regime by placing political opponents under surveillance and repress dissident movements. SAVAK had the power to censor the media, screen applicants for government jobs, "and according to reliable Western source [2], use all means necessary, including torture, to hunt down dissidents." [3]
According to a book published in Iran after the revolution, reputedly written by Hussein Fardust, a high level SAVAK official, SAVAK was created with the help of American and Israeli advisers who devised the agency to closely model after the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).[4]
After 1963, the shah expanded the security organizations, including SAVAK which grew to a total of over 5300 full-time agents and a large but unknown number of part-time informers.[5]
The agency's first director, General Teymur Bakhtiar, was dismissed in 1961 and later became a political dissident. In 1970 he was a victim of assassination by SAVAK agents disguised to look like an accident.
Hassan Pakravan, director of Savak from 1961-1965, had an almost benevolent reputation, for example, dining with the Ayatollah Khomeini while Khomeini was under house arrest on a weekly basis, and later intervened to prevent Khomeini's execution, on the grounds it would "anger the common people of Iran".[6] After the Iranian Revolution, however, Pakravan was among the first of the Shah's officials to be executed.
Pakravan was replaced in 1965 by General Nematollah Nassiri, a close associate of the Shah, and the service was reorganized and became increasingly active in the face of rising Shia and Communist militancy and political unrest.
A turning point in SAVAK's reputation for ruthless brutality was an attack on a gendarmerie post in the Caspian village of Siahkal by a small band of armed Marxists in February 1971. According to Iranian political historian Ervand Abrahamian, after this attack SAVAK interrogators were sent abroad for `scientific training to prevent unwanted deaths from `brute force.` .... Despite the new `scientific` methods, the torture of choice remained the traditional bastinado used to beat soles of the feet. Its "primary goal was to locate arms caches, safe houses and accomplices ..." [7]
Abrahamian estimates that SAVAK (and other police and military) killed 368 guerillas between 1971-1977 and executed something less than 100 political prisoners between 1971 and 1979 - the most violent era of the SAVAK's existence. [8]
One well known writer was arrested, tortured for months, and finally placed before television cameras to `confess` that his works paid too much attention to social problems and not enough to the great achievements of the White Revolution. .... By the end of 1975, twenty-two prominent poets, novelist, professors, theater directors, and film makers were in jail for criticizing the regime. And many others had been physically attacked for refusing to cooperate with the authorities. [9]
By 1976, this repression was softened considerably thanks to publicity and scrutiny by "numerous international organizations and foreign newspapers." In 1976, Jimmy Carter Was elected president of the United States and he "raised the issue of human rights in Iran as well as in the Soviet Union. Overnight prison conditions changed. Inmates dubbed this the dawn of `jimmykrasy.` .... " [10]
After the Islamic Revolution former directors Pakravan and Nassiri were tried by inadequate Revolutionary 'Courts' and executed by the Revolutionary Guard.

[edit] Operations
During the height of its power, SAVAK had virtually unlimited powers of arrest and detention. It operated its own detention centers, like Evin Prison. In addition to domestic security the service's tasks extended to the surveillance of Iranians abroad, notably in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, and especially students on government stipends. The agency also closely collaborated with the American CIA by sending their agents to an air force base in New York to share and discuss interrogation tactics.[11]
SAVAK agents often carried out operations against each other.[citation needed] Teymur Bakhtiar was assassinated by SAVAK agents in 1970, and Mansur Rafizadeh, SAVAK's United States director during the 1970s, reported that General Nassiri's phone was tapped. Mansur Rafizadeh later published his life as a SAVAK man and detailed the human rights violations of the Shah in his book Witness: From the Shah to the Secret Arms Deal : An Insider's Account of U.S. Involvement in Iran.
According to Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski, SAVAK was responsible for
Censorship of press, books and films.[12]
Interrogation and often torture of prisoners
Surveillance of political opponents.

[edit] Post-Revolution and Fardost
Further information: Human rights in Islamic Republic of Iran
Hossein Fardoust, a former classmate of the Shah, was a deputy director of SAVAK until he was appointed head of the Imperial Inspectorate, also known as the Special Intelligence Bureau, to watch over high-level government officials, including SAVAK directors. Fardust later is rumoured to have become director of SAVAMA, the post-revolution incarnation of the original SAVAK organization.
SAVAK was closed down shortly before the end of themonarchy and the gain of power by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in February 1979. Following the departure of the Shah in January 1979, SAVAK's 3,000+ central staff and its agents were targeted for reprisals; almost all of them that were in Iran at the time of the Iranian Revolution were hunted down and executed, only a few who were on missions outside of Iran managed to survive.[citation needed]
SAVAK has been replaced by the SAVAMA, Sazman-e Ettela'at va Amniat-e Melli-e Iran, later renamed the Ministry of Intelligence. The latter is also referred to as VEVAK, Vezarat-e Ettela'at va Amniat-e Keshvar, though Iranians and the Iranian press never employ this term, using instead the official Ministry title.[citation needed]
According to some sources, the new organization is structurally identical to the old one and retains many of the same people, but there is no reliable proof of these allegations.[citation needed]
Many books have since been published about the pre-revolution status of Iran politicians, based on the documents found in SAVAK's offices.

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