How do you mean buffalo,
usually regimes like to purge the armed forces and security apparatus, because they are so paranoid about the threat to their power. Dictators only like yes men!! Shit who does that remind me of???!
Anyway in the grand scheme of things the Savak or whatever are still just a bunch MUTHAFUCKAS
Do you think that the Ayatollahs just threw out all the People who ran Savak?
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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SAVAK was the accronym for 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]
In 1979, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini -- who as a dissident leader had been denouncing SAVAK -- came to power after the revolutionary forces deposed the shah. The next year, the Washington Post wrote 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.’
In Paris, a French lawyer who specializes in representing Iranian exiles told Washington Post correspondent Ronald Koven that ‘SAVAMA is SAVAK without any change in structure. They just replaced some of the chiefs...
...Tabatabai, who claims he has good sources on the situation in Tehran, says that SAVAMA’s organization ‘is almost a carbon copy’ of SAVAK’s, with nine bureaus. These, he said, cover personnel, collection of foreign intelligence, collection of domestic intelligence, surveillance of its own agents and security of its own agents and security of government buildings, communications, finances, analysis of collected intelligence, counterintelligence, and recruitment and training.”
What Tabatabai is describing above is the security apparatus of a totalitarian police state: the nine bureaus of SAVAK/SAVAMA were spying on ordinary Iranians and even on SAVAK/SAVAMA itself. They were also torturing and murdering ordinary Iranians, as they judged it necessary: “SAVAK used torture systematically as a tool of internal repression.” The Ayatollah Khomeini, of course, installed a totalitarian police state, so from this point of view swallowing SAVAK -- which had a great deal of experience running the shah’s totalitarian police state -- was convenient. But it was still a perfectly absurd thing for Khomeini to do if he was really an enemy of the US ruling elite, because it was this ruling elite’s CIA that had installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in power and created SAVAK for him, and therefore only an ally of the US ruling elite would welcome the “very close ties that SAVAK, under the shah, [had] maintained with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.”
Of course, US officials were very busy telling everybody that the Ayatollah Khomeini (whom they would soon start arming to the teeth, in secret, for the entire duration of the Iran-Iraq war[1b]) was supposedly their enemy, so they rushed to deny that there was really that much SAVAK in SAVAMA. As reported in the same article:
“In Washington, however, U.S. government analysts offer a more subdued assessment.
‘It may be tempting to look at SAVAMA as SAVAK reborn,’ one source said, ‘but that is too fanciful for the facts.’ …U.S. sources say that some vestiges of the previous system could be useful [to new regime]. So, some former SAVAK functionaries -- described as ‘lower level’ -- who were able to function for the shah without being tainted now work for Khomeini.”
Uh-huh. But as you can see from one of the quotes above, the one thing that both US and Iranian exile sources were definitely agreeing on was that “SAVAMA…is run…by Gen. Hossein Fardoust, who was deputy chief of SAVAK under the former shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi...”
Not only that:
“Fardoust...[was] a longtime friend, classmate and confidant of the shah. Fardoust, Tabatabai says, was also head of a special SAVAK bureau that summarized all intelligence information. Fardoust delivered it personally to the shah daily.”
This Fardoust was not exactly “lower level,” was he? Nor was he merely “tainted”: Fardoust had been running Iran for the shah. It also turns out that “Fardoust’s deputy at SAVAMA is said to be Gen. Ali Mohammed Kaveh, formerly the head of the SAVAK bureau dealing with analysis of collected intelligence.” This Kaveh was not exactly “lower level” either. Finally, “In three former bureaus dealing with personnel organization and summation of intelligence, Tabatabai claims, every member who worked for Fardoust when he was deputy chief of SAVAK still works for him as chief of SAVAMA.”
The US ruling elite did not support Ali Tabatabai’s Iran Freedom Foundation, which wanted to topple Khomeini,[2] and it was awkward for the US ruling elite that Ali Tabatabai was explaining out loud how the Ayatollah was running Iran with the CIA’s SAVAK, just like the shah had before him. It is possible that Tabatabai's assassination in his Bethesda, Maryland home, shortly after he made the above statements to the press, was unrelated to the CIA.[3] However, it does seem significant that,
“Only Tabatabai was willing to let his name be attached publicly to the foundation. Only Tabatabai was eager to go before television cameras and radio microphones to discuss the positions of the foundation. In the end, said one of the original 10 [founders] who asked that his name not be used, their fears for the safety of their families and themselves were borne out by what happened to Tabatabai. ...‘Our object was primarily to expose the true nature of Khomeini,’ he said.
...Tabatabai was president of the foundation as well as its spokesman. Because of his prominent public profile, the Iran Freedom FOUNDATION (IFF) became in turn the most widely known of nine anti-Khomeini groups in the United States.
...In all cases, it was Tabatabai who took the public stage. ... He appeared on talk shows, both radio and television, locally, nationally and in Canada. He helped organize a major anti-Khomeini demonstration in Los Angeles earlier this month, designed to bring together the different anti-Khomeini groups.”[4]
In other words, Tabatai had a big mouth, and he was the only person that needed shutting up -- everybody else had already gotten the message. With Tabatabai out of the picture, problem solved. And indeed, I was unable to find mention of the SAVAK/SAVAMA identity in newspaper articles since. On the contrary: the next year, The New York Times 'informed' the public in a headline that “[SAVAMA] Isn’t Like Savak Under Sha,” stating in the body of the text that “Savak [was] disbanded after the 1979 revolution.”[5] An article in The Christian Science Monitor, the same year, did say that “Savama [was] the name given [to] the reconstituted Savak secret police organization, so long a weapon of terror and torture in the late Shah’s hands,” but it rushed to assure its readers that the reason “many Savak members gladly serve in Savama” was “to save their own skins.”[6]
