Accused #13 in the Shah's Iran

In 1953, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi--the Shah of Iran--rose to absolute power in a CIA-assisted coup d'etat dubbed Operation Ajax. As Iranian citizens began to learn of their government's involvement in the coup, ordinary people--scholars, lawyers, students, military personnel--began to disappear.

   Drawing on the political and geographic history of Iran before the 1979 Revolution, this memoir of a political prisoner of the Shah's regime recounts a soldier's brutal arrest, imprisonment, interrogation and torture by state security over 50 days in 1969 and 1970.