Abstract
Since the 1990s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been publishing documents from the Pahlavi dynasty's feared intelligence apparatus service known as the SAVAK [Intelligence and Security Organization of the Country]. These documents referred to as the SAVAK documents were often reports written by SAVAK's numerous informants and contain information from the most banal to analyses of covert political activities to transcripts of tortured confessions. The published volumes of these documents are organized along themes: cities, political parties, events, or individuals and contain some facsimiles of the originals. But there is no sense of these documents' provenance, where they are housed, what they were bundled with, etc. The peculiar nature of this "archive" hand in hand with the difficulty of access for scholars of Iran raises a number of intriguing questions: What are the SAVAK documents really? Is there actually a SAVAK archive? Can the historian use these disaggregated documents as reliable sources for history? And if so, how?