If you want to really argue this, you need to bring out specific claims one by one, as many have been either fake or overblown, or misattributed to SAVAK (acknowledged by the terrorists who taken over and are in charge now.) But in general, I do not believe it was anything out of the ordinary of the statecraft employed by the US or Britain in the Cold War era or arguably even the Bush era. In fact, post hoc, it is obvious they were too soft, as they released all these terrorists in the wild and let the country taken over. It is a failure of SAVAK and the security apparatus.

So yes, I would unequivocally argue to any extent the intelligence apparatus was actually operating, not only golden era objectively justifies those measures, but even for lots of the troublemakers themselves, turns out letting criminals loose to take over the country actually makes things worse; many of such Marxist-terrorists who claimed they were mistreated under the old regime were treated much much worse, or lost their lives, during the first years of the Mullah regime.