During his time in prison, under duress he confessed to being an agent of the SAVAK (Persian: ساواک, short for سازمان اطلاعات و امنیت کشور Sāzmān-e Ettelā'āt va Amniyat-e Keshvar, National Intelligence and Security Organization) the secret police, domestic security and intelligence service established by Iran's Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
[citation needed] He was jailed during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi,[2] and in 1974, with Ali Khamenei:[3] On a cold winter day in 1975, I was about to be transferred from the cell we'd been sharing.
Now he lives in France, where he has written his latest book: Letters to my Torturer: Love, Revolution And Imprisonment in Iran.
[11] ٍ English: Persian: There are some bumps in the narrative—it is not clear at some points when Mr. Asadi is addressing Brother Hamid, for instance, and whether some passages were written on command, as part of his elaborate "confession" in jail, or some years later in Paris....
Nevertheless, Mr. Asadi has offered the world a powerful testament to what transpires in the prisons of Iran—a nightmare that the country's radical Islamic leadership clearly would be only too happy to export.