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. Early life 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. 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. Military career 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. 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. For these accomplishments, he was appointed modern Iran's youngest three-star general in 1954. From August 1953 to Autumn 1954, about 660 of