Episode Details

Four years after the CIA helped overthrow Iran's democracy, American intelligence officers sat down with their Iranian counterparts and built something new. Not a military alliance. Not a trade agreement. A secret police force.

SAVAK — the Organisation of Intelligence and National Security — would go on to become one of the most feared internal security services in the world. Thirteen thousand officers. Hundreds of thousands of informants. Detention facilities where Amnesty International documented practices so severe that in 1975 it declared no country on earth had a worse human rights record. And behind all of it, an American intelligence agency that trained the organisation, transferred the technology, shared the intelligence, and looked the other way.

This episode tells the full story of SAVAK and the CIA's Iran project — from the organisation's founding in 1957 through two decades of political repression, the systematic destruction of Iran's secular intellectual left, the surveillance of Iranian students on American soil, and the catastrophic intelligence failure that left the CIA blind as millions of Iranians took to the streets in 1978.

It also asks the question that the history demands: did the apparatus built to protect the Shah's regime help make the Islamic Revolution inevitable? And what happened to SAVAK's methods after the revolution swept it away?