SAVAK was the intelligence service of the Iranian monarchy under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. John Kiriakou characterises it by the direction it faced: a “bloodthirsty intelligence service called SAVAK that spent way more time investigating and murdering Iranian citizens than it ever did doing anything, you know, in any other country.”[1]
Scale
In a separate account Kiriakou puts numbers and a terminal date on it. Writing off the claim that the monarchy was a democracy, he addresses the Shah’s record directly: a ruler “who was more bloodthirsty than anybody in power in Iran today, who with his intelligence service, the SAVAK, tortured and executed untold thousands, tens of thousands of people, who raped and pillaged the country and stole billions of dollars as they were running away to save themselves in February of 1979.”[2]
Method
The detail he reaches for when explaining what the service meant to ordinary Iranians is deliberately physical. SAVAK was “the dreaded, feared Iranian intelligence service that would scoop you off the street and they’d find your head on one side of town and the rest of your body on the other.”[3][4]
Why it still matters
Kiriakou uses SAVAK as the load-bearing element in his argument that the Pahlavi restoration proposed by Western commentators has no domestic constituency. Asked why Reza Pahlavi would not survive a return, he answers with the service rather than the son: “Because they hate him. Why do they hate him? Because his father created SAVAK.”[3] Outside the royalists and an expatriate community in Southern California, he says, “there is no love of this family.”[4]