Teymur Bakhtiar

Bakhtiar was born in 1914 to Sardar Moazzam Bakhtiari, a chieftain of the eminent Bakhtiari tribe.

He studied at a French school in Beirut (many Iranians were Francophiles at the time: e. g. Amir Abbas Hoveyda and General Hassan Pakravan) from 1928 to 1933, whereupon he was accepted to the renowned Saint-Cyr military academy.

After returning to Iran, he graduated from Tehran's Military Academy.

His cousin, Shapour Bakhtiar, and he went together to both Beirut and Paris for higher education.

Then he was made a first lieutenant and dispatched to Zahedan.

Bakhtiar's first wife was Iran Khanom, the daughter of the Bakhtiari chieftain Sardar-e Zafar.

In 1946, having received the relevant order of the Shah's government, Teymur took part in pacifying the Khamseh region.

He organized a kind of guerrilla struggle against soldiers of the Red Army and the separatist movement, as a result of which many separatist fighters were killed in clashes with pro-Shah forces.

Suppressing the armed resistance of the nomadic Khamseh tribes, the government sent him as governor to Zahedan.

Bakhtiar rose rapidly in Iran's military after the fall of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953.

A close associate of Prime Minister Fazlollah Zahedi, he was promoted to military governor of Tehran.

One of his first major successes was the capture and trial of Mossadeq's minister of foreign affairs, Hossein Fatemi, who had actively fought the military government that succeeded Mossadegh's period in office.

Bakhtiar waged an extensive campaign against the communist Tudeh party; he arrested and had 24 Tudeh leaders summarily tried and executed, including Khalil Tahmasebi, the assassin of former Prime Minister Ali Razmara.

From August 1953 to Autumn 1954, about 660 of the most ardent supporters of the ousted prime minister were arrested.

Of these, 130 were former employees of the oil enterprises in Abadan.

A significant part of the arrested officers were members of the Tudeh party.

All those who escaped execution were sentenced to various years in prison.

Throughout 1953, minor scattered armed protests by opposition representatives against the military government continued.

For these accomplishments, he was appointed modern Iran's youngest three-star general in 1954.

On 19 October 1954, the death sentence of the first group of officers from Tudeh was carried out.

On 30 October, was shot the second group of Tudeh officers consisting of 6 people, on 8 November, the third group of 5 people.

And on 10 November, by the verdict of a military tribunal, Hossein Fatemi was executed.

Before being executed, he was brutally tortured.

With the full support of the Shah's court and the West, the new government brought down brutal repressions against members of the pro-Mossadegh and leftist organizations, figures known for their anti-monarchist views.

The government managed to break almost all the military and political resistance of the opposition.

In the spring of 1954, ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, publicist Seyyed Hossein Makki and other leaders of right-wing nationalists made an attempt to organize mass protests against the Zahedi government.

However, the demonstrations that began at their call did not lead to a change in the existing situation.

By that time, the court and the government had become masters of the situation, having established full control over the army, police and gendarmerie, strengthening the Shah's imperial guard.

Bakhtiar was made head of the newly formed intelligence and security service SAVAK in February 1956.

He ruthlessly crushed any opposition to the regime, including communists, socialists, and Islamists.

Under the General Bakhtiar, SAVAK turned into an effective secret agency of internal security to combat the enemies of the monarchical regime of the Pahlavi dynasty.

Their daughter, Golnar, married Kambiz Yazdanpanah, the son of Morteza Yazdanpanah, in Tehran in 1960.

At that time, the Bakhtiaris were extremely influential; Muhammad Reza Shah's second wife, Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiari, and the Shah's last prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, were both related to Teymour Bakhtiar.

After World War II when the USSR refused to withdraw its troops from Iran, the separatist movement intensified in a number of regions of the country.

After Prime Minister Jafar Sharif-Emami was forced to resign in May 1961 due to ongoing demonstrations against large-scale rigging in the parliamentary elections, Teymur Bakhtiar hoped to become the new Prime Minister.

Shah made a bet on Ali Amini.

General Bakhtiar then contacted the US Embassy in order to enlist their support for a "coup" against Amini.

Teymur Bakhtiar (1914 – 12 August 1970) was an Iranian general and the founder and head of SAVAK from 1956 to 1961 when he was dismissed by the Shah.

In 1970, SAVAK agents assassinated him in Iraq.

He was an asset in the British military network in Iran.