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Two weeks ago, plainclothes officers stopped three women as they were about to board an airplane at Tehran airport, loaded them into cars, and took them away without explanation.

They became the latest people to disappear into a place that all educated Iranians know and fear, a place known as Section 209. These women were writers with relatively moderate views, on their way to attend a journalism seminar in India.

They had government permission to attend, their passports had been stamped and none of them had ever had problems with the law.

Mansoureh Shojai, Sadigheh Taghinia and Farnaz Seifi were lucky: They were released on bail after a day of frightening interrogation, and charged with the nebulous crime of "acting against national security." Countless others remained in cells around them, held for months without charge.

Nobody knows how many people are currently held in Section 209, a tile-walled wing of Evin prison, a sprawling complex hidden behind a barbed-wire entrance on a street in northern Tehran.

But former inmates say the numbers have increased dramatically in recent months, as Iranian officials have cracked down on journalists, activists and academics, accusing dozens of people of spying, collaborating with Westerners and undermining the Iranian revolution. Few get charged with any crime, but huge numbers are locked away, and sometimes tortured, in Section 209.

The wing is forever associated, in the minds of both Iranians and Canadians, with Zahra Kazemi, the Montreal photographer who was arrested while taking pictures outside the prison in 2003. Inside, she was tortured, brutally abused and then beaten to death.

Her death made many Iranians aware of the prison's brutal and shadowy nature, and has recently provoked a surprising movement to have Section 209 shut down, even as it seems to have reached its highest population levels since the 1980s.

Section 209, which has been used since the 1960s, is today run by Iran's various security services, and it houses prisoners who have somehow fallen afoul of some branch of Iran's government or its religious authorities. To anyone but the Iranian government, they would be known as political prisoners, though a great number of them have not been charged with any crime, even though some have been held for months.

Iranians who have recently been in Evin prison say there are dozens of students, journalists, Internet bloggers, newspaper editors, human-rights activists and scholars held there, sometimes in cruel conditions, including a form of solitary confinement known as the "white torture" (the lights of the windowless, empty cell are constantly left on, for months at a time). Beatings are not uncommon. And the name of Ms. Kazemi is routinely evoked. Omid Memarian, a young journalist who was held in Section 209 starting in 2005, for operating an Internet blog (he was released after refusing to confess to espionage) said his interrogators invoked her name. "While interrogating me and beating me up, the interrogator said, 'I don't want you to be the next Zahra Kazemi.' They knew they'd gone too far, and they didn't want that kind of attention again," he said.

Ms. Kazemi's case has had a profound effect in Iran. On one hand, it has destroyed relations with Canada: After trials against the prison officials who led her torture came to an indecisive end in 2005, their progress apparently blocked by the Iranian government, relations became extremely tense. In November, Iranian parliamentarians accused the Canadian embassy in Tehran of being a "den of spies" and threatened to close it down.

But it has also galvanized many Iranians, including members of the country's legislature, against the practices taking place in Section 209. There is currently a petition circulating in Tehran that has collected 300 signatures from intellectuals and public figures, calling for it to be closed. It has reportedly been signed by highly placed officials in the Iranian government.

The debate over Section 209 provides a telling example of the diffuse and contradictory nature of Iran's leadership, and the competing forces that vie for control of the country's resources and institutions. At a moment when Iran's development of a potential nuclear weapon has led to a perilous standoff with the West, it is becoming apparent that no one person or institution has complete control over the country's relations with the world or with its own people.

The current crackdown on intellectuals, students and journalists appears to be led by Iran's religious authorities and the branches of government they control, observers say. It is especially aimed at anyone who has contact with foreigners. Iranian Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie and the Tehran prosecutor-general, Saeed Mortazavi, both staunch hard-liners, have been leading the crackdown, which includes placing articles in state newspapers denouncing Iranians who have contact with foreigners.

"The Intelligence Minister has come out clearly and said there is a network of foreigners who are taking money from Western governments and using it to try to start a velvet revolution in Iran," said Hadi Ghaemi, an Iranian human-rights activist who has recently written reports on the country's prisons for Human Rights Watch.

But as the prison becomes more heavily used by the government, its use of torture and the number of people imprisoned without charge or trial have become sources of embarrassment to others in the government, which is attempting to demonstrate to other Middle Eastern countries that its Islamic revolutionary regime is a model worth emulating.

This has led to calls for reform from within the government. Ayatollah Hashemi Shahroudi, head of the Iranian judiciary, passed a bill banning mistreatment of prisoners meant to prevent "Abu Ghraib practices" within Iran, including torture and arbitrary imprisonment.

The problem, observers say, is that many of the organizations holding prisoners in Section 209 do not fall under the authority of the elected Iranian government; they answer to the clerics who stand above the government, or to rogue factions within the security services and the Revolutionary Guards. Some are loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and not to parliament; some are loyal only to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

"The petition against Section 209 shows how Iranian activists and politicians are against this behaviour by the judiciary . . . but this part of the judiciary is connected to the non-elected part of the government, and they have the power to arrest people and put them in solitary confinement," journalist Mr. Memarian said.

Even prison authorities do not have the power to control what is happening inside Iran's prisons. Various cell blocks are controlled by various organizations with varying agendas. "The use of solitary confinement and 'white torture' isn't necessarily authorized by the government; the factions doing this are pretty much close to the hard-liners and the supreme leader. We know that the Intelligence Ministry is very involved in threatening families," Mr. Ghaemi said.

This has led to absurd situations, where the authorities who actually run the prisons are sometimes more reform-oriented than those placing the prisoners there.

"I encountered some people in the judiciary system, while I was in prison, who were more reformist than people I knew outside," Mr. Memarian said. "They asked me to work together, something with [activist groups] to get the system changed. . . . I think it's the first time in history that someone's been asked to change the judiciary system by the same people who are accusing him of crimes."