Prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the shah sought to keep control over Iranian society through the National Intelligence and Security Organization, better known by its Persian acronym SAVAK. The SAVAK was brutal. It ruled with an iron fist; torture was common. Nor was exile always enough to escape it: The SAVAK’s espionage against students and dissidents, if not repression, was transnational.
While the Islamic Republic’s ability to preserve itself through violence now appears evident, it was not always so.
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the new authorities arrested any SAVAK leaders they could grab. On February 15, 1979, just two weeks after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran, revolutionary authorities arrested longtime SAVAK chief Nematollah Nasseri. After a ten-hour trial alongside two dozen others on charges of “corruption on earth,” a revolutionary tribunal declared his guilt. Less than two hours later, a firing squad executed his sentence. His successor, Nasser Moghaddam, lasted only a few months later before a Revolutionary Tribunal ordered his execution, carried out almost immediately by firing squad. Several other high-ranking SAVAK officials met similar fates, especially at the top levels of the organization.
But the purge was never completed. While the Islamic Republic’s ability to preserve itself through violence now appears evident, it was not always so. Steven Erlanger, who would rise to become the New York Times’s chief diplomatic correspondent, filed a report from Tehran the day before revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy. “The religious phase is drawing to a close even as it is becoming formalized,” he declared. After Khomeini purged his former Mojahedin-e Khalq allies, they unleashed a wave of terror targeting regime officials, killing dozens. Decades of exile did not make the new regime competent, which led government structures to crumble.
It was then that the Islamic Republic’s new leaders turned to the SAVAK, whose basic infrastructure they retained. They rebranded the SAVAK as the Organization for Information and Security of the Nation of Iran (SAVAMA) before, in 1983, elevating it to become the Ministry of Information and Security, known by its Persian acronym VEVAK. As the regime recognized how fragile its grip on power was, it decided to hire back as many of the SAVAK employees as possible.
There were not an insignificant number. True, the regime had executed nearly all of the SAVAK’s top-ranking officials, and those who could escape, did so. But at a lower level, many employees had faded into the background and remained. Many were technocrats or functioned as procedural cogs for the machine.
While the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was still in its infancy, the recast VEVAK provided enough glue to hold the regime together and secure it from both external and internal threats.
With so many top-level Iranian security officials dead and lacking the means to pay others, the prognosis for regime survival is poor.
Today, while the Islamic Republic claims victory in its war with the United States and Israel, its longevity is far from secure. There remains no proof of life for Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević survived President Bill Clinton’s multiweek bombing campaign in 1999, only to succumb to popular protests the following year. With so many top-level Iranian security officials dead and lacking the means to pay others, the prognosis for regime survival is poor.
Exiled Iranian activists continue to organize, but the backbone of any post-Islamic Republic will be internal. Some may be civil society activists, though if President Donald Trump replays the Venezuela model, Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps may take over, at least in the interim.
Either way, Iranians and their future international partners must decide: To what extent will they build a new Iranian intelligence service upon the structure of the Islamic Republic’s VEVAK? Whom within the current structure will they allow to remain? Whom will they pension? Who should expect no amnesty?
If the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad plan proactively, they might hasten the regime’s fall by linking future positions with the willingness to prove loyalty now with provision of information, if not defection.
If Iranians take a harder line against VEVAK veterans, that is their choice, but in such a case, the exile community, Iranian civil society, and external actors cannot afford to waste any time constructing a new service to take over on day one. Failure to do so will condemn Iranians to instability and terror at a time they can least afford it.
