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There is no longer any dispute that SAVAK practiced systematic torture. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a member of Khomeini's Revolutionary Council, described to TIME'S Raji Samghabadi how SAVAK agents in 1964 lashed the soles of his feet with electric cable: "The flesh was torn apart, and the bones jutted out. There were multiple fractures." The agents, he says, also held a knife to his throat for hours, making small nicks and telling him to guess "when the blade might go all the way down and sever my head." Amnesty International in the 1970s described other methods of torture: electric shock, burning on a heated metal grill, and the insertion of bottles and hot eggs into the anus. Last spring Anne Burley, an Amnesty International researcher, was shown by the government a SAVAK file that she deems authentic, containing pictures of victims who had been tortured to death. Several were women, she says, and "in each case the breasts were mutilated."
William J. Butler, a New York lawyer who investigated SAVAK for the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, spoke to Reza Baraheni, an Iranian poet who was held for 102 days by the secret police in 1973. Baraheni told of seeing in SAVAK torture rooms "all sizes of whips" and instruments designed to pluck out the fingernails of victims. He described the sufferings of some fellow prisoners: "They hang you upside down, and then someone beats you with a mace on your legs or on your genitals, or they lower you down, pull your pants up and then one of them tries to rape you while you are still hanging upside down." Baraheni himself was beaten and whipped, and released only after agreeing to make a statement on television condemning Communism. Many other SAVAK victims were tortured briefly and then released, after the secret police satisfied themselves that they would no longer oppose the Shah.
Did the Shah know? He told TIME in 1976 that "we don't need to torture people any more," implying that torture had in fact been practiced earlier. In any case, as an absolute monarch he obviously was responsible for the actions of his own security forces.
There is some more direct evidence of the Shah's complicity in executions too. Early this year, SAVAK agents testified before" Khomeini's Islamic revolutionary courts that the Shah, under international pressure to liberalize his regime and therefore eager to hide evidence of repression, gave the secret police a terse oral order in 1975: "Don't take any prisoners. Kill them." In a confession interspersed with sobs, Bahman Naderipour described how he and other agents, in response to this order, took nine political prisoners out of Evin jail in northwest Tehran, handcuffed and blindfolded them and then machine-gunned them. He and another agent, Fereydoun Tavangari, said that SAVAK murdered other prisoners in their cells, then turned their bodies over to police medical examiners with an explanation that they had been killed in gun fights while resisting arrest.
The new revolutionary courts are hardly more objective than the Shah's tribunals. Naderipour and Tavangari had no hope of winning leniency from the revolutionary courts by fabricating stories. Both were executed, as they knew they would be, and as some 600 of the Shah's officials have also been.