→ This article from the archives is part of a series celebrating the Platinum Anniversary — 70 years! — of the Voice. The first issue hit the stands on October 26, 1955. ←
Editor’s note January 30, 2026: After Jack Newfield reported in the January 19, 1976, Voice on how Marion Javits was hired as a public relations consultant by the Iranian government, columnist Nat Hentoff used his space two weeks later to further examine the horrors being visited upon everyday Iranians by one of the most repressive regimes of the post-war era. Some of the roots of Iran’s current turmoil become apparent in this story: Just as the Iranian people were resisting the Shah’s murderous bullies half a century ago, citizens across that country are rising up again — at considerable risk to life and limb — to topple the repressive theocrats who replaced the Shah a few years after the Voice published these articles. Some things have changed (such as the preferred spelling of “Tehran”), but, as is too often the case, when it comes to the powers that be, to “Meet the new boss” is to realize that they deploy the same breed of bullies wielding cattle prods, whips, fingernail pullers, and other instruments of torture, as did their predecessors. —R.C. Baker
‘We Who Have Been in the Shah’s Prisons Are Grateful to Marion Javits’
By Nat Hentoff
February 2, 1976
Near an imposing building in the center of Teheran, there stands an extraordinarily graceful arch, created for a Persian king nearly 150 years ago. Tourists come to marvel at this arch, quite unaware that in the large adjacent building the present Shah of Iran maintains a series of enthusiastically staffed torture chambers.
It was in this building, for instance, that an Iranian writer, whom torture could not entirely break, finally did tell his interrogators everything they wanted to hear when they brought his wife to the prison and raped her in front of him. It was also there that a woman prisoner abandoned her protestations that she would die rather than “confess” when others of the Shah’s men brought in her four-year-old daughter whom they proceeded to whip and to carve about the neck. Then there was an intellectual in his middle years who also decided to cooperate after his young son was given electric shocks as he looked on.
The source for these three stories is Yves Baudelot, a Paris lawyer who has journeyed to Iran on behalf of the International Association of Catholic Lawyers and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. In what follows, I shall give sources whenever I can without putting someone still in Iran in one of the Shah’s torture centers (of which he is not in short supply).
Although knowledge of the Shah’s chronic barbarism is fairly widespread in parts of Europe because of investigative reporting in Le Monde, London’s Financial Times, the Observer, and the Sunday Times of London, among other publications, the prevailing view of the Shah in America is that of a sophisticated, shrewd statesman and patron of the arts who is greatly concerned with obliterating illiteracy and otherwise brightening the lives of his faithful sub-jects.
If his regime is authoritarian, the intent and effect are seen as benign. There have been a few American accounts of Iran as the Kingdom of Torture (notably Frances Fitzgerald’s report in the November 1974 Harper’s and Roslyn Lacks’s in the March 3, 1975 Voice); but they have been largely overwhelmed by the generally bland, when not fawning, American coverage of the Shah and the rest of the dashing Royal Family.
In terms of public relations, then, the Shah was doing splendidly here. Until the advent of Marion Javits. An Iranian exile whose fingers were broken and whose hair was pulled out by the Shah’s torturers as a prologue to the more inventive interrogation that followed — is delighted at the furor which has attended Jack Newfield’s disclosure of Marion Javits’s registration as a foreign agent for Air Iran. “We who know the Shah so well,” the ex-prisoner told me, “have been trying for years to get Americans to understand what is happening in Iran. But it has been hard to stir interest. Now nearly everyone I speak to is curious about Iran. Believe me, we who have been in the Shah’s prisons are grateful to Marion Javits, and we are delighted to help Ruder & Finn in its public relations work.”
First, the number of political prisoners in the land of this sovereign whom William Randolph Hearst, Jr., has characterized in the San Francisco Examiner as “one of the world’s most interesting and impressive leaders.”
From all available sources — including Amnesty International, the International Federation of Human Rights, various international bodies of lawyers, and a number of affidavits I have examined — the number of Iranians shut away without a trace of due process for disagreeing with the Shah is close to 100,000. The majority, by far, of these political prisoners are, at one time or another, tortured; and not a few die in the process. Since 1972, moreover, there have been at least 300 “formal” political executions in Iran.
The Shah is much obsessed with creating a “pure” Aryan culture, and that means suppressing the other cultures within his kingdom.
And the political arrests continue to increase. As Nuri Albala, a French lawyer who has done investigative work in the luminous land of the Shah reported in Le Monde, “The regime has accomplished a tour de force in achieving a more rapid rate of construction for prisons than for schools.” Albala goes on to emphasize that “all the observers who have gone to Iran on behalf of international organizations have been able to affirm that the regime only survives by instilling terror…. I have attended parodies of trials in Teheran where I saw men whose bodies have been mutilated by torture. And I have heard the Shah of Iran call this ‘a bagatelle’ on French television.”
The methodology of torture in Iran is fairly standard, with most of the same basic hardware that can be found in the prisons of Chile, Iraq, South Korea, Brazil, et al. — power batons used with special zeal in the genital area, machinery to create violent electric shocks, whips of a weight and composition to the torturer’s taste, exceedingly heavy scales attached to the shoulders and guaranteed to break them after two hours of excruciating pain; nail-pluckers unknown to manicurists; and what appears to be an Iranian innovation — the Hot Table. The latter has several variations, but in using the basic model, the prisoner is tied to an iron bed-frame covered with wire-mesh which is then heated electrically or by a torch. The prisoner is gradually toasted and ultimately burned. If particular heat-focus is given to the spine, the prisoner has an excellent chance of being paralyzed.
Also among the torments awaiting those who displease the Shah or his secret police, the SAVAK, are the pulling out of teeth by decidedly nonlicensed practitioners; the hanging of a heavy weight from the testicles which, in a few minutes, become irredeemably damaged; and the pumping of boiling water into the rectum. Bottles, preferably broken, are also inserted into the rectum. Some prisoners, in the course of their stay in the Shah’s jails, spend a fair amount of time hanging upside down, and they — male and female alike — are often raped by the personnel.
There was a poet, for another example, who was forced to watch not only the rape of his wife but also the rape of his children.
Why are these poor souls imprisoned and tortured? One man was found with a book that the Shah’s regime had suppressed. He was tortured because he would not reveal who had given him the poisoned book, and so efficient was the torture that for eight days he could only get to the torture chamber and then back to his cell by crawling on his hands and knees. Eventually the man was sentenced to eight years for possession of the accursed book. It was never determined whether he had actually had time to read the volume before it put him in jail. At the same time this seditious book recipient was getting his deserts, a woman in the same prison was being beaten and tortured with unusual gusto. The charge against her was that she was the sister of an activist. No more, no less.
Other prisoners include playwrights, poets, actors, directors, critics, novelists, journalists, university students, professors, and many Muslims who are in religious disagreement with the Shah. During the past few years, according to poet-novelist-critic Reza Baraheni (one of Iran’s more influential intellectuals), there has been a rise in the number of imprisoned men and women from the working class. “Since wages are low, inflation is high, and social dissatisfaction is the only legitimate consequence of repression,” Baraheni says, “the laborer, almost by instinct, becomes a member of the opposition. But the leadership isn’t there yet. There isn’t a party with a labor ideology, and under the circumstances, it is very difficult to start one. Those who have attempted it have failed or have been shot.”
Reza Baraheni has empirical knowledge of the Shah’s torturers, having been imprisoned in Teheran and having been released only because of persistent pressure from Amnesty International, PEN, and the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (for which group he writes and lectures). Since coming to America in exile in October 1974, Baraheni has taught at several universities.
SAVAK gives no accounting of its activities. People simply disappear in Iran.” And the United States is still nurturing SAVAK, with Iranian police as well as military officers receiving training in the United States.
This spring, his book, “God’s Shadow/Prison Poems,” will be published by the University of Indiana Press. (In Iran, God’s Shadow is a metaphor for the Shah, the Shah himself having expressed his belief that God has specifically charged him to do what he is doing in Iran. And certainly there is a shadow over Iran.)
In talking with Baraheni, I checked some of the reports by French lawyers on the torturers’ use of members of the prisoners’ families to get them to speak to the prepared text. “Yes,” Baraheni said, “it happens. There was a poet, for another example, who was forced to watch not only the rape of his wife but also the rape of his children. And they use the families in another way. I know of a 13-year-old girl who was raped to make her betray her parents. And once, in the prison where I was kept, looking down from the interrogators’ room, I saw a five-or six-year-old girl being placed in front of several prisoners in handcuffs. The torturers were not sure of the prisoners’ identity and they wanted this child to tell them. Any time she resisted, she was slapped, kicked, and poked in the rear until she screamed.
Baraheni’s principal offense to the Shah has been his advocacy, in his teaching and writings, of the cultural and linguistic rights of the Azerbaijani Turks — of whom he is one. The Shah is much obsessed with creating a “pure” Aryan culture, and that means suppressing the other cultures within his kingdom. This is a somewhat difficult task because although Iran contains 14 to 16 million Persians, it also includes some 10 million Turks, four million Kurds, and three million Arabs, Baluchis, and Lurs. (Add, too, about 300,000 each of Christians and Jews.) Yet the Shah is insistent, jailing such dissidents as Baraheni and even trying to cast out all Arabic and Turkish words from the Persian language. (And that means changing about 37 per cent of the language).
“Those of us who want our own culture to live are called ‘secessionists’ by the Shah,” Baraheni says. “And there is a new law which calls for not just jail but death for those who speak for any form of what he regards as ‘secession.’ Yet I tell you this: until the education of the Iranian nationalities is conducted in the languages to which these nationalities are born, the problem of literacy will never be solved in Iran, for all the talk by the Shah and his public relations people about all he is doing to educate the masses.” Opposition to the Shah, meanwhile, increases inside Iran, not only among the various nationalities, and continues in other countries through the work of exiles and Iranian students. But it is remarkable that any opposition at all can survive inside the country. The political police, the SAVAK — created, trained and equipped by the CIA in 1953 — is ubiquitous. Frances Fitzgerald estimates that there are at least 70,000 SAVAK agents in Iran, adding that “SAVAK officials themselves acknowledge this is only the nucleus, for they have more unpaid informers than paid agents … SAVAK gives no accounting of its activities. People simply disappear in Iran.” And the United States is still nurturing SAVAK, with Iranian police as well as military officers receiving training in the United States under the Military Assistance Program while at least 1000 American military personnel are in Iran “advising” the army and no doubt “advising” SAVAK as well.
Every Iranian exile in America with whom I’ve spoken is convinced, moreover, that SAVAK agents function in the United States as well, monitoring Iranian students at the 2000 or so different colleges and universities the latter attend. Having active foreign secret police agents in this country is, to say the least, illegal. We have more than enough of our own secret police. But there has yet to be any protest to the Shah by the State Department because Iran is a country with which, for oil and other reasons, Dr. Kissinger wants to remain on good or better terms.
Back in Iran, SAVAK is pervasively involved in that country’s total censorship — books, films, plays, radio, television, newspapers. For instance, as Ahmad Faroughy has reported in the invaluable British journal, Index on Censorship ($12 a year, Room 221, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010): “A special SAVAK press section recruits political journalists who are imposed upon the press. Not only are these journalists mandated as censors, but all major articles dealing with important political events inside or outside Iran are written by them.”
With SAVAK everywhere, with the torture chambers perpetually overpopulated, the only hope for those Iranians who want to be free of the terror of the Shah is to expose him. And that’s why Iranian dissidents here are grateful to Marion Javits for having given them an audience. But once one knows of the Shah’s appetites, what then?
“Those Americans who agree with us that Iran should be free, Baraheni says, “can bring pressure on their government not to sell arms to Iran. And they themselves can boycott Iran — as businessmen, as lawyers and other professionals, and as tourists. They can say we will not come to your country until we see that all your political prisoners have been released.”
I asked Baraheni about artists — performers, directors, filmmakers? Did he advocate their boycotting Iran?
“Yes, I hope they do,” Baraheni answered. “It was dismaying to us when, in June 1974, Peter Brook, the Open Theatre, Jerzy Grotowski, and the Bread & Puppet Theatre accepted invitations to perform at the Shiraz Arts Festival in Iran. In fairness, the Bread & Puppet Theatre, when they came and discovered what was going on, held a demonstration protesting the Shah’s repression. But the others took their money, their considerable amounts of money, and remained silent. So, yes, I would urge all artists who believe in freedom for others as well as for themselves to boycott Iran.” One theatrical organization, by the way, which did boycott that 1974 arts festival in Iran was the Performance Group. They needed the money, and were delighted to get the invitation, but on learning the bestial nature of the host, they declined. Although the Performance Group notified New York newspapers of what it had done, and why, no news of its protest was printed. The internal politics of Iran were apparently considered to be of slight interest at the time. Marion Javits should have been hired earlier.
Baraheni is more sanguine about the chances for freedom in Iran than the seemingly impregnable position of the Shah would appear to warrant. “The momentum is with us,” he maintains. “There is an armed struggle against the regime within Iran; there is the continuing struggle, without arms, among students and writers and teachers and now the working class. There have been strikes in Iran, and people killed for striking, but there will be more strikes. And the dissent among the Muslims is also rising. With what has happened in Portugal and Greece and other countries, I feel optimistic. After all, it is impossible for Iran to regress beyond this point. With this Shah, you can’t go any farther back. So we can only go forward.”
The Shah does not seem worried. “I am not afraid of my people,” he has told CBS’s Mike Wallace. “They trust in me. I trust in them.” Yet a few seconds before, the Shah had told Wallace of a nightmare he’d had as a boy. In the dream there had been a pit full of snakes, his enemies. It had bothered him all these years, a dream that might come true.
“But now,” Mike Wallace said, “you sleep more soundly.”
“Yes, with my sleeping pills,” said God’s Shadow on Iran.
“What sustained you,” I asked Reza Baraheni, the enemy of God’s Shadow, “during the days and nights of torture?”
“It was a strange thing in my case,” Baraheni said. “On the third day, when I was shouting for the guard to come and take me to the toilet — in solitary confinement, there is no toilet in your cell — I heard, after about half an hour of my shouting, someone, in a cell, reciting a poem. Something about that poem strengthened me. Then I realized it was my own poem, and the voice was the voice of a student of mine. When force is against you, the word, sometimes, can keep you alive.”
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