Our knowledge of the 1953 coup has been distorted in part because US documents remained classified until recently – the British ones remain so; and in part because revisionist historians have argued endlessly that external powers played merely secondary roles while the primary actors were internal ones, namely the conservative clergy. The new documents show that without the CIA there would have been no royal participation, no parliamentary obstructionism, no tank officer coordination, and no clerical involvement. The coup, by undermining the legitimacy of the monarchy, helped pave the way to the 1979 revolution – precisely the reason the shah had been reluctant to lend his name.