The Plot to Attack Iran Quotes

“One might pause here to wonder how it is that the United States claims to support democracy and freedom in the world when it so often backs dictators like the Shah and Somoza. As I tell my human rights class every year, the United States always supports democracy and freedom, except when it doesn’t, which is all the time…. As political analyst Stephen Gowans explains, the United States is simply not what it claims to be, and most likely never has been: The United States—which began as 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America pursuing a “manifest destiny” of continental expansion, (the inspiration for Nazi Germany’s lebensraum policy); which fought a war with Spain for colonies; which promulgated the Monroe Doctrine asserting a sphere of influence in the Americas; which stole Panama to create a canal; whose special operations forces project US power in 81 countries; whose generals control the militaries of the combined NATO members in Europe and the military forces of South Korea; whose military command stations one hundred thousand troops on the territories of former imperialist rivals, manifestly has an empire. And yet this reality is denied, as assuredly as is the reality that the United States, built on the genocide of Native Americans and the slave labor of Africans, overtly white supremacist until the mid-1960s, and covertly white supremacist since, is unequivocally not a beacon of Enlightenment values, unless liberalism is defined as equality and liberty assigned exclusively to white men who own productive property. Indeed, so antithetical is the United States to the liberal values of the equality of all peoples and nations, freedom from exploitation and oppression, and the absence of discrimination on the bases of class, race, and sex, that it’s difficult to apprehend in what sense the United States has ever been liberal or has in any way had a legitimate claim to being the repository of the values of the Enlightenment.2”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“advance US global interests. This memo, from policy aide Brian Hook to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, explicitly reminds Tillerson to make sure to treat allies and adversaries differently when it comes to expressing human rights concerns.1 As Hook explains to Tillerson: In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights. It is not as though human rights practices will be improved if anti-American radicals take power in those countries. Moreover, this would be a severe blow to our vital interests. We saw what a disaster Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood turned out to be in power. After eight years of Obama, the US is right to bolster US allies rather than badger or abandon them. One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently—and better—than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies. The classic dilemma of balancing ideals and interests is with regard to America’s allies. In relation to our competitors, there is far less of a dilemma. We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically. Meanwhile, Hook criticizes the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter which he sees as an outlier amongst US presidents in the postwar era: President Carter upended Cold War policies by criticizing and even undermining governments, especially in cases such as Nicaragua and Iran. The results were unfortunate for American interests, as for the citizens of those countries. Carter’s badgering of American allies unintentionally strengthened anti-American radicals in both Iran and Nicaragua. As Jeanne Kirkpatrick wrote in 1979 criticizing Carter’s foreign policy, “Hurried efforts to force complex and unfamiliar political practices on societies lacking the requisite political culture, tradition, and social structures not only fail to produce the desired outcomes; if they are undertaken at a time when the traditional regime is under attack, they actually facilitate the job of the insurgents.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“The implication of Bush’s New World Order was that the planet would be divided between nations destined to be dominated and one nation, the United States, which would dominate. Only the United States would have the right to independence, and the Pentagon, CIA, and US state and treasury departments would exercise leadership over the affairs of other countries. The expression of Bush’s declaration of US world leadership can be seen in the words of a Pentagon spokesman, Rear Admiral John Kirby, who, in 2015, declared that the United States retains the “right,” the “responsibility,” and “the resources” to intervene in any country unilaterally to achieve US foreign policy goals.5”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“As Davidson and others have noted, the United States is continuing this cruel policy of playing both sides against each other today by supporting, but also trying to contain, ISIS forces in order to molest and undermine both Syria and Iran; by intentionally stirring up religious sectarianism in the Middle East, and in particular, animosities between the Shia and”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“Davidson explains that, similarly, “in the Middle East itself, the desire for such similarly balanced conflicts is of course nothing new, with the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s having helped cancel out the two major powers of the day….” Davidson cites William Blum for the proposition that the West’s support of both sides of the Iran-Iraq war “had the effect of ‘enhancing the ability of the two countries to inflict maximum devastation upon each other and stunt their growth as strong Middle East nations’.” In the words of the New York Times, the goal was “to prolong the slaughter and so weaken both countries, along with their ability to oppose US domination of the region.”18”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“the process.10 To add insult to injury, some in the US government and media attempted to blame Iran somehow for this attack when it had nothing to do with it. To the contrary, it must be emphasized that Iran, while having some chemical weapons capability of its own at the time, never retaliated against Iraq in kind for its chemical weapons attacks even though international law, and specifically the reservations to the 1925 Geneva Protocol,11 would have allowed for such retaliation. Indeed, during the height of the war and of the suffering being inflicted upon Iran by Saddam’s chemical weapons attacks, Ayatollah Khomeini made clear his view that Islamic law, which forbids the willful destruction of the environment, necessarily prohibits the development and use of chemical weapons.12 He made it clear, therefore, that Iran would not use such weapons against Iraq even though Saddam was using such weapons, and the available evidence supports the conclusion that Khomeini lived by his word.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“Nothing but total capitulation by the Sandinistas would suffice for Reagan. Thus, as the ICJ related, revolutionary leader and then Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega made it clear that he would give in to all of Reagan’s stated demands (i.e., that he would send home the Cuban and Russians advisers and not support the FMLN guerillas in El Salvador) in return for only “one thing: that they don’t attack us, that the United States stop arming and financing … the gangs that kill our people, burn our crops and force us to divert enormous human and economic resources into war when we desperately need them for development.”10 But Reagan would not relent until the Sandinistas and Ortega were out of power altogether. Ultimately, Reagan’s terror campaign would work, with the Nicaraguan people finally crying uncle in 1990, and voting the Sandinistas out of power. The Sandinistas would be voted back in, however, in 2007, and they remain the governing party to this day, with Daniel Ortega as president. Meanwhile, the United States continues to punish Nicaragua, the most stable and prosperous country in Central America after successfully breaking off from US domination, for its impertinence in overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship, having the audacity to survive the Contra War which claimed fifty thousand lives, voting back in the Sandinistas, and for now working with the Chinese to build the canal that the United States has coveted for so long. Thus, as I write these lines, the US Senate is considering passage of the “Nica Act,” already passed by the House, which would cut Nicaragua off from multilateral loans (e.g., from the World Bank, IMF). This, apparently, will show Nicaragua and other countries what they get for deciding to go their own way.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“As Noam Chomsky so well explains in his book, What Uncle Sam Really Wants: When his rule was challenged by the Sandinistas [the insurgent group named after Augusto Cesar Sandino] in the late 1970s, the US first tried to institute what was called “Somocismo [Somoza-ism] without Somoza”- that is, the whole corrupt system intact, but with somebody else at the top. That didn’t work, so President Carter tried to maintain Somoza’s National Guard as a base for US power. The National Guard had always been remarkably brutal and sadistic. By June 1979, it was carrying out massive atrocities in the war against the Sandinistas, bombing residential neighborhoods in Managua, killing tens of thousands of people. At that point, the US ambassador sent a cable to the White House saying it would be “ill advised” to tell the Guard to call off the bombing, because that might interfere with the policy of keeping them in power and the Sandinistas out. Our ambassador to the Organization of American States also spoke in favor of “Somocismo without Somoza,” but the OAS rejected the suggestion flat out. A few days later, Somoza flew off to Miami with what was left of the Nicaraguan national treasury, and the Guard collapsed. The Carter administration flew Guard commanders out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings (a war crime), and began to reconstitute the Guard on Nicaragua’s borders. They also used Argentina as a proxy. (At that time, Argentina was under the rule of neo-Nazi generals, but they took a little time off from torturing and murdering their own population to help reestablish the Guard -- soon to be renamed the contras, or “freedom fighters.”)3 Again, we see Jimmy Carter not really living up to all of his lofty human rights rhetoric.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“In addition, as we learned from the infamous “twenty-eight pages” (really, twenty-nine) of the Congressional report on 9/11, Saudi Arabia provided substantial backing for the 9/11 attacks themselves.18 This backing included financial support to some of the 9/11 hijackers from members of the Saudi royal family and intelligence services. FBI documents even show that the Saudi Embassy in Washington provided financial support for a “dry run” of the 9/11 operation.19 Indeed, “Six years after the [9/11] attack, at the height of the military conflict in Iraq in 2007, Stuart Levey, the undersecretary of the US Treasury in charge of monitoring and impeding terror financing, told ABC News that, when it came to al-Qaeda, ‘if I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding of one country, it would be Saudi Arabia.’ ”20 And so, it stands to reason, the United States is a fierce ally of Saudi Arabia in its feud against Iran?!”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“As Christopher Davidson sets forth in his recent book, Shadow Wars, the United States and Britain continued to aid and abet Iran, even more intensely after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, in the physical extermination of Iran’s left-wing. As Davidson explains, in 1983 “the CIA and MI6 jointly began to pass on information to the Tehran regime about Iranian communists and other leftists. Going far further than the Shah ever had, Khomeini made over a thousand arrests and executed several leaders of the Tudeh Party. As James Bill describes, this was regarded in the West as successfully ‘completing the dismantling of the Iranian left,’ even though the CIA and MI6 had long been aware of the Islamic Republic’s propensity for executing political prisoners without trial.”13”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“As just one example, Great Britain had supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as far back as 1928, as it identified it as “an anti-nationalist and anti-liberal vehicle” to be used against the prodemocracy forces in that country. It continued to back the Brotherhood against the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a secularist who had the audacity “to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic.”3 And indeed, just around the same time it was trying to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran, Britain was trying to assassinate Nasser, who represented the distinct danger of spreading secular democracy throughout the Arab world.4 As for Iran, when its revolution came in 1979, it was led by the Islamic leaders of that country more than the Left, which the United States had made sure was suppressed and crushed throughout the reign of the Shah, and even later as we will see. In other words, it was the United States’ own policies that made a revolution, and specifically an Islamic revolution, both possible and probable.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“John F. Kennedy famously said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” This is, of course, true. Quite tragically, Kennedy, who initiated the National Security Doctrine to violently prevent social change in Latin America and who led the United States’ deeper involvement into the effort to destroy Vietnam’s bid for independence, never heeded his own words. It is equally true, especially when talking about the Middle East, that those who make a secular, progressive revolution impossible will make a radical religious revolution inevitable. The United States and its partner Great Britain have made secular revolutions in the Middle East, and Iran in particular, impossible for many decades.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“By the way, at the present time, the United States has bilateral immunity agreements with over one hundred countries, preventing its military personnel from being tried under the laws of these foreign countries for any crimes, including rape and murder.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“Of course, to the Iranians, with a history spanning thousands of years, the events of 1953 were like yesterday, and the support the United States gave to the Shah and the SAVAK up until the bitter end in 1979 were even fresher wounds. This calls to mind the story about Chinese premier Zhou Enlai being asked by Richard Nixon in 1972 about the significance of the 1789 French Revolution, whereupon Enlai, also from a country with an ancient history, quipped, “too early to say.” In truth, the well-documented amnesia that Americans have about historic events is selective, with Americans usually able to remember the tragedies they have suffered and the crimes committed against them, like the attacks of September 11, 2001, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Of course, in all fairness, Americans are kept in the dark about the less savory episodes in our collective history by both our schools and our press. At the same time, it seems to me that in addition to a lack of knowledge is a lack of empathy for others’ suffering, as well as the complete refusal to accept the truth about the suffering our nation has inflicted on others even when we are told about it.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“Representing the apogee of human rights and humanitarian sentiments among post-war U.S. presidents, Carter also rebuffed Iranian demands for an apology from the U.S. for installing the Shah in power since 1953 and the subsequent decades of the S.A.V.A.K. torture that continued well into this ‘soft’ Democrat’s administration: ‘I don’t think we have anything to apologize for,’ assured Henry Kissinger. Ruminating about the United States of Amnesia, Carter’s principal White House aide for Iran throughout the crisis, Mr. Gary Sick, admitted that from the standpoint of U.S. policy-makers ‘anything that happened more than a quarter century before—even an event of singular importance—assumes the pale and distant appearance of ancient history. In Washington, by 1978, the events of 1953 had all the relevance of a pressed flower.’ Barely over a year before the Iranian people toppled this modernizing despot, Carter toasted the Shah’s Iran as ‘an island of stability,’ which he called a ‘great tribute to the respect, admiration and love of your people for you’. A defiant George H.W. Bush announced, after the U.S. shot down a large Iranian airliner filled with 290 civilians, ‘I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.’25”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“Thousands of children killed for reading banned literature? Naturally one does a double take at this. But it was true. As the US diplomats in Iran were quite aware, children were killed in Iran for “crimes against the state.” In his book, Shah of Shahs, Kapuscinski talks about a three-year-old prisoner of the SAVAK who was, as was very common, locked up with his whole family.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“At this point, it may be of value to revisit the United States involvement in the rise of the “Colonels in Greece” and the Juntas in Latin America. Just after WWII, Britain and the United States intervened in the Greek civil war on behalf of the fascists against the Greek left which had successfully ousted the Nazis from Greece—a formidable feat given that Britain had intervened during WWII against the left-wing guerillas. With the help of Britain and the United States, the fascists prevailed in the post-WWII civil war in Greece and “instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek),”8 just as it had helped create the repressive SAVAK in Iran. The fascist government erected a statue of Harry S. Truman in Athens as thanks for the United States’ role in the coup under his leadership. This statue has been blown up, rebuilt, and blown up again several times. And then, much to the chagrin of both Britain and America, democracy broke out again in Greece—the country which, as we all know, invented democracy—when liberal George Papandreou was elected in 1964. Just before the 1967 elections which Papandreou was sure to win again, a joint effort of Britain, the CIA, Greek Military, KYP and US military stationed in Greece brought about a military coup which brought the fascists back to power. And, as with the Shah in Iran, the new rightist government immediately instituted “martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killing, the victims totaling 8,000 in the first month. … Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.”9 Sound familiar?”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“The Guardian further notes, in an unintentional rebuke to Cyrus Vance who claimed to Archbishop Romero that the Carter Administration was seeking “peaceful and progressive solutions” in El Salvador, that “the arming of one side of the conflict by the US [which began under Carter] hastened the country’s descent into a civil war in which 75,000 people died and 1 million out of a population of 6 million became refugees.” And, while Vance in his letter decried the violence on both sides of the political spectrum in El Salvador, it was in truth the forces which the United States funded which carried out the lion’s share of the violence. Thus, as El Salvador’s Truth Commission would later conclude, “85% of ‘serious acts of violence’ were attributed to the state” which the United States backed throughout the conflict. In truth, the United States’ “Salvador option,” or option of creating, training, and arming indigenous paramilitary death squad units to destroy local insurgencies, really began in Colombia in the early 1960s, was then carried out in Vietnam, and continues to this day in countries such as Afghanistan and Syria. And so, Romero’s words to Carter shortly before his death ring as powerful and true as they did then, and they continue to be ignored by successive US presidents.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. —George Kennan, 1948”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“And certainly, the Iranian people must be forgiven if they do not believe that the United States has their best interests at heart. Indeed, knowing about the SAVAK, and the United States’ critical role in creating and supporting it, leads me to feel no offense, and certainly no surprise, to hear that some Iranians to this day continue to chant “Death to America,” or continue to label the United States “the Great Satan.” Iranians have every reason and right to feel anger and even hatred toward the United States, not just for what has been done to them, but also because the United States continues to do so while holding itself out as a bright beacon of democracy and freedom in the world. The US pretense of being a uniquely righteous country must be hard to bear for many in the world, not just the Iranians. And in truth, it has become unbearable for me, and I live here!”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“It is impossible for me to think of Iran, or of the United States’ long-time relationship with it, without thinking of the Shah’s violent reign and the SAVAK, which carried out torture on a massive scale to keep the Shah in power. To me, the very existence of the SAVAK belies any claims that the United States somehow cares about human rights, democracy, or freedom, or that it wants such things for the Iranian people.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“One former prisoner, Reza Baraheni, reported to AI the following: Not every prisoner goes through the same process, but generally, this is what happens to a prisoner of the first importance. First, he is beaten by several torturers at once, with sticks and clubs. If he doesn’t confess, he is hanged upside down and beaten; if this doesn’t work, he is raped; and if he still shows signs of resistance, he is given electric shock which turns him into a howling dog; and if he is still obstinate, his nails and sometimes all his teeth are pulled out; and in certain cases, a hot iron rod is put into one side of the face to force its way to the other side, burning his entire mouth and tongue. A young man was killed this way….24 And the United States, while trying to claim at times that it was unaware of the depths of depravity of the SAVAK, was quite aware in real time what it was up to. As one example, a State Department cable from December 5, 1978, matter-of-factly details the complaints of the bazaaris about the SAVAK: BAZAARIS EXPRESSED GENERAL COMPLAINTS AGAINST THE SHAH SIMILAR TO THOSE HEARD ELSEWHERE, I.E., CORRUPTION OF HIGH-LEVEL OFFICIALS, MURDER AND TORTURE OF OPPOSITIONISTS, OVER-CONCENTRATION OF POWER AND POOR ECONOMIC DECISIONMAKING. HOWEVER, BAZAARIS CONCENTRATED THEIR IRE ON SAVAK AND ITS FORMER CHIEF NEMATOLLAH NASSIRI. SAVAK UNDER NASSIRI, THEY SAID, HAS KILLED AND TORUTURED (sic.) THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE. DURING THE IMPRISONMENT OF THE AYATOLLAH TALEGHANI, SAVAK JAILORS HAD RAPED THE WOMEN IN HIM [His] HOME AND FORCED TALEGHANI TO DRINK HIS JAILORS’ URINE.25”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“Kapuscinski does explain that some of the SAVAK’s torture techniques were ancient and home-grown. As he relates, “technological progress could not displace medieval methods in this nightmare world. In Isfahan, people were thrown into huge bags full of cats crazed and hungry, or among poisonous snakes. Accounts of such horrors, sometimes, of course, propagated by Savak itself, circulated among the population for years. They were so threatening, and the definition of an enemy of the state was so loose and arbitrary, that everyone could imagine ending up in such a torture chamber.”14”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“The techniques used by the SAVAK, many borrowed from the Nazis and then passed along to the SAVAK by the CIA,10 were uniquely grisly and terrible. The SAVAK operated much like the Gestapo, entering a person’s home at night, hauling the person away and many times disappearing that person forever. A quite ominous State Department cable (from Wikileaks), dated March 7, 1975, describes such an event: NYMAN INFORMS THAT WHEN ARRESTED MAJID WAS AT HIS FAMILY HOME IN TEHRAN (118 AVENUE GHAANI—FORMERLY TIR). HIS FATHER HADI GHAVAM INFORMED DAUGHTER (MRS. NYMAN) THAT FIVE SAVAK MEN ENTERED HOME AT 10 P.M. AND TOOK AWAY MAJID AND FOUR OF HIS BOOKS. HE HAS NOT BEEN HEARD FROM SINCE. FATHER ALSO SAID FAIRLY LARGE NUMBER OF KARAJ STUDENTS ARRESTED AROUND SAME TIME.11 This is all the cable says. Most likely, Majid was taken to a prison and tortured, and very well could have died under torture as so many Iranians did at the hands of the SAVAK.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“For its part, the Washington Post, in an article written shortly after the Islamic Revolution, acknowledges that “the CIA ‘definitely’ trained SAVAK agents in ‘both physical and psychological’ torture techniques….”4 The article explained that there were “joint activities ” between the SAVAK and the CIA and Israel’s Mossad, and that “the Israelis even wrote SAVAK’s manuals … and prepared an ill-fated effort … to undermine the growing religious impact of the revolution.” Well-trained by the CIA, the “Savak—Sazman-i Etelaat va Amniyat-I Keshvar, the “National Information and Security Organization”—was to become the most notorious and murderous [of the Shah’s security services], its torture chambers among the Middle East’s most terrible institutions.”5”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“Wherever the Four Horsemen (Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco & Royal Dutch/Shell) gallop the CIA is close behind. Iran was no exception. By 1957 the Company, as intelligence insiders know the CIA, created one of its first Frankensteins—the Shah of Iran’s brutal secret police known as SAVAK. Kermit Roosevelt, the Mossadegh coup-master turned Northrop salesman, admitted in his memoirs that SAVAK was 100% created by the CIA and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency that acts as appendage of the CIA. For the next 20 years the CIA and SAVAK were joined at the hip when it came to matters of Persian Gulf security. Three hundred fifty SAVAK agents were shuttled each year to CIA training facilities in McLean, Virginia, where they learned the finer arts of interrogation and torture. Top SAVAK brass were trained through the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Public Safety Program, until it was shut down in 1973 due to its reputation for turning out some of the world’s finest terrorists…. Popular anger towards Big Oil, the Shah and his new police state resulted in mass protests. The Shah dealt with the peaceful demonstrations with sheer brutality and got a wink and nod from Langley. From 1957-79 Iran housed 125,000 political prisoners. SAVAK “disappeared” dissenters, a strategy replicated by CIA surrogate dictators in Argentina and Chile. … In 1974 the director of Amnesty International declared that no country had a worse human rights record than Iran. The CIA responded by increasing its support for SAVAK.3”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“In 2017, the United States spent over $1 million in financing anti-government protests in Iran and in trying to convert spontaneous protests into a push for regime change, and another $20 million on Voice of America’s Persian Service which is also aimed at turning Iranian public opinion against the government.1 And since 2006, successive US administrations have sought “to exploit these crises [e.g., economic, water, and energy crises] to undermine the legitimacy of the regime, by funding opposition groups as well as anti-regime broadcasting to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“As for President Eisenhower, he seemed to be less than proud of what the United States had done in Iran. Thus, an October 8, 1953, entry in his diary which is quoted in the newly-released documents about the coup reads: “Another recent development that we helped bring about was the restoration of the Shah to power in Iran and the elimination of Mossadegh. The things we did were ‘covert.’ If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed in the region, but our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would totally disappear.”58 Of course, Eisenhower would not let much time go by before he was involved in another coup of “like nature” in Guatemala, with possibly even more disastrous results.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“The Iranians were also novices in modern torture techniques, and so, as we shall soon see, after the coup against Mossadegh, the CIA helped train the Iranian security services in torture techniques—techniques borrowed, as in the case of Pinochet’s Chile, from the experts on such subjects -- the Nazis. And again, this type of alliance is not a thing of the past. The best example of this today is in Ukraine where, as Max Blumenthal writes, “Massive torchlit rallies pour out into the streets of Kiev on regular occasions, showcasing columns of Azov members rallying beneath the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel banner that serves as the militia’s symbol.”53 As Blumenthal explains, Azov is a militia now incorporated into the Ukranian National Guard, and, despite its openly pro-Nazi ideology, including violent anti-Semitism, this militia has obtained heavy US weaponry transfers “right under the nose of the US State Department,” while “U.S. trainers and U.S. volunteers have been working closely with this battalion.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran

“Black shirts with “swastika-bedecked banners” marching in Tehran. Mission accomplished! Again, if this seems surprising, one needs to look not only to history, but also to current events to see other examples of the United States happily working with the worst groups, including Nazis, to obtain its goals. Again, throughout the Cold War, the United States invariably sided with fascist and even neo-Nazi regimes as a bulwark against Communism, socialism, and even just liberalism, and the United States continues to side with such elements when it suits its sometime-hard-to-discern interests.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran