Parviz Sabeti

Parviz Sabeti (; born 25 March 1936, in Sang-e Sar) is an Iranian lawyer and former SAVAK top deputy under the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Born in Sang-e Sar, Semnan province, Sabeti received a law degree from the University of Tehran and joined the SAVAK, Iran's intelligence agency in the Shah's regime, in 1957. He quickly rose to become the acting director of the SAVAK's so-called third division, the Division of Surveillance and Pursuit, and later became its director. Historian Abbas Milani describes him as "like a character from a le Carré novel" and says that "As his fame and reputation grew, his name and face disappeared from the public domain."

Biography Parviz Sabeti was born in 1936 into a Baháʼí Faith family. However, his father lost his right to be part of the Baháʼí community, and Parviz Sabeti never became a practicing Baháʼí.

Although Sabeti was philosophically against Marxism and radical Islam, he believed that arresting and prosecuting members of such groups should not be the only course of action. The cycle of actions and reactions of dissent, revolt, then crackdown would continue until the government, through substantial reforms, attempted to remove the roots of dissatisfactions and create more room for the participation of people in the political system. Impressions by the Shah towards Parviz Sabeti had changed by the late 1970s when Sabeti, as the de facto security advisor to the Prime Minister and spokesman for the government, provided a long and impressive TV interview exposing the plots by the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein against Iran, with the collusion of internal enemies of the Shah. He continued to provide two more such interviews exposing the tactics of two major opposition groups, one Communist and one Islamic-Marxist.