Mansur Rafizadeh

Mansur Rafizadeh is a male with an Iranian background who worked in multiple intelligence agencies and later authored an autobiography. He worked for the monarchy of the Pahlavi dynasty (or the Shah) during the 1970s and the CIA in the early 1980s, at a minimum. He worked in Manhattan in the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, diplomats with the Islamic Republic of Iran stated Rafizadeh was an agent of SAVAK (the Shah's intelligence agency/secret police) in the U.S., a claim he denied at the time. Years later, he confirmed the claim. In his 1987 autobiography, Witness: From the Shah to the Secret Arms Deal, An Insider's Account of U.S. Involvement in Iran, Rafizadeh said he was the U.S. director of SAVAK. Reviewer Nikki R. Keddie, a scholar at UCLA, stated that book could not be recommended for a general audience, as it was "too unreliable to be truly informative". In 1992, a female who also had links to the Shah, Parivash Rafizadeh, was murdered on her front lawn in New Jersey, and The New York Times reported that Mansur was likely her brother-in-law, though they could not confirm this.