http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/iranpoliticsmediauspahlavineda;_ylt=Ah7WCaK3bZYzoraxY8lpjNYFO7gF

The son of the late shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, was Monday carrying in his breastpocket a photograph of the slain protester known as Neda said to have been killed in the Tehran protests.

“I have added her (Neda) to the list of my daughters. She is now forever in my pocket,” Pahlavi told AFP fighting back tears, after calling at a press conference for Western media and governments to stand strongly alongside the protest movement in Iran.

The former crown prince of Iran took from his left breastpocket photographs of his wife, Yasmine, and three daughters, Noor, Iman and Farah, and, in the same clutch of images, one of a veiled Neda.

He held them up silently, and stammered an apology for having tears in his eyes.

A video of a blood-drenched young woman, purportedly killed in protests in Tehran, has been flashed around the world via the Internet since it was posted Saturday.

The woman, known only as Neda, has become a symbol of Iranian defiance of the country’s Islamic rulers and their insistence that hardline incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won this month’s presidential election.

In a speech at the packed National Press Club in Washington, Pahlavi slammed the “brutal violence of the regime’s plain-clothes thugs against unarmed people” and urged global media to continue to be “the international artery” of the Iranian protest movement.

“No one will benefit from closing his or her eyes to knives and cables cutting into faces and mouths of our young and old, or from bullets piercing our beloved ‘Neda’ whose only sin was the quest for freedom — no one but tyrants and their thugs,” Pahlavi said, breaking off his speech as he was overcome by emotion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAVAK

After removing the left-leaning government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, (which had planned to nationalize Iran’s oil industry), from power on 19 August 1953, in a coup, supported and funded by the British and U.S. governments, the Shah decided he wanted an effective internal security service and set up the large organization known by the acronym SAVAK in 1957 to strengthen his regime by placing political opponents under surveillance and repress dissident movements.

According to Iranian political historian Ervand Abrahamian, after this attack SAVAK interrogators were sent abroad for “scientific training to prevent unwanted deaths from ‘brute force.’ Brute force was supplemented with the bastinado; sleep deprivation; extensive solitary confinement; glaring searchlights; standing in one place for hours on end; nail extractions; snakes (favored for use with women); electrical shocks with cattle prods, often into the rectum; cigarette burns; sitting on hot grills; acid dripped into nostrils; near-drownings; mock executions; and an electric chair with a large metal mask to muffle screams while amplifying them for the victim. This latter contraption was dubbed the Apollo—an allusion to the American space capsules. Prisoners were also humiliated by being raped, urinated on, and forced to stand naked.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1543798/US-funds-terror-groups-to-sow-chaos-in-Iran.html

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/04/abc_news_exclus.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-thomson/the-cias-role-in-iranian_b_220217.html

Regardless, Rustmann and Lenczowski say, the CIA may now help set Tehran’s smoldering tinder ablaze by supplying the opposition factions with money, intel, press placement, and weapons–perhaps the most potent of which may be BlackBerrys.

“What we could do immediately is essentially manipulate Iranian media, especially the media that serves the Iranian diaspora,” says the former CIA operations officer who goes by–and wrote an espionage memoir under–the pseudonym Ishmael Jones. “The internet-driven communication between Iranians worldwide and those in Iran is frenetic.”

“The CIA already has a cooperative program in place with [certain American publications],” he adds. “Reporters from [those publications] meet regularly with the top CIA officials–not a conspiracy hatched in a smoke-filled room, but the natural result of reporters working hard to develop top-level sources within the CIA. Just switching [those reporters] for journalists who serve the Iranian diaspora would do the trick. These journalists will be eager to [cooperate].

http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html

Written in 1954 by one of the coup’s chief planners, the history details how United States and British officials plotted the military coup that returned the shah of Iran to power and toppled Iran’s elected prime minister, an ardent nationalist.

The document shows that:

- Britain, fearful of Iran’s plans to nationalize its oil industry, came up with the idea for the coup in 1952 and pressed the United States to mount a joint operation to remove the prime minister.

- The C.I.A. and S.I.S., the British intelligence service, handpicked Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi to succeed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and covertly funneled $5 million to General Zahedi’s regime two days after the coup prevailed.

- Iranians working for the C.I.A. and posing as Communists harassed religious leaders and staged the bombing of one cleric’s home in a campaign to turn the country’s Islamic religious community against Mossadegh’s government.

- The shah’s cowardice nearly killed the C.I.A. operation. Fearful of risking his throne, the Shah repeatedly refused to sign C.I.A.-written royal decrees to change the government. The agency arranged for the shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlevi, and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the father of the Desert Storm commander, to act as intermediaries to try to keep him from wilting under pressure. He still fled the country just before the coup succeeded.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/#documents

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/appendix%20B.pdf