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Hardly anyone reported to the Shah the extent of the opposition. He kept some of the forms of representative government, such as a toothless parliament, but in fact he ruled as an absolute monarch. His picture appeared on all currency and postage stamps (almost a year after the revolution, in fact, many of the old bills are still in use), and on the front page of every Tehran newspaper virtually every day. In 1971 he staged a $100 million festival at Persepolis to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the monarchy; 165 chefs were flown in from Maxim's in Paris, and 50 members of the court were decked out in Lanvin-designed uniforms that required one mile of gold thread—each. The Shah personally approved all army promotions above the rank of major and forbade all criticism of his policies. In 1957, with the help of the CIA, he set up SAVAK, the notorious secret police, to crack down on dissidents.
Documentation of its activities is still difficult to come by, partly because SAVAK spread an atmosphere of terror so intense that victims—those who survived —were long afraid to talk. International investigators tell of families beseeching them to try to find out what had happened to relatives who had disappeared months before, but simultaneously begging them not to let the Shah's government know they were asking.
The number of SAVAK's victims is also difficult to establish. In 1976 Amnesty International, a London-based organization that keeps track of "prisoners of conscience" around the world, estimated that 25,000 to 100,000 political prisoners were being held in Iran. The Shah's own figure was 3,000 to 3,500—but then, he regarded most dissidents as potential or actual Marxist terrorists and thus common criminals rather than political prisoners. Some of the dissidents really were Marxists; the Tudeh (Communist) Party has long been outlawed but is still active. And some were indeed terrorists; the Shah survived at least two attempts on his life during his long reign. But according to Amnesty International, many Iranians were arrested for acts like reading banned books and possessing pictures of Khomeini or Mossadegh. They were then tried in secret before courts that accepted anything in a SAVAK file as established fact, needing no corroboration. The accused were represented by military counsel, but defense lawyers who put up a vigorous argument were occasionally prosecuted and imprisoned themselves.