"The Shah had sold the Kurds out, like Chamberlain in Munich," said Eliezer Tzafrir, the Mossad bureau chief in Iraqi Kurdistan, who was left with just hours to make a hurried getaway. "We were in a big hurry to burn papers," Tzafrir recalled in a recent interview with the US magazine Tablet. "I had to get out of there before the Iraqi army turned me into a kebab."

Whether Israel's support of the Kurds stopped completely in 1975 and when exactly it resumed is not clear. But in 2005 Sargis Mamikonian, a scholar at the Caucasian Centre for Iranian Studies in Yerevan, Armenia, wrote that information provided by Savak and from Kurdish sources may have furnished Israel with intelligence used to carry out one of its most daring missions — to destroying Iraq's nuclear reactor.

"It is plausible to conclude that Israeli intelligence, thanks to its contacts with Kurdish sources and former Savak agents, had obtained valuable location and identification data (although aerial reconnaissance was more important in this particular case) for the Iraqi Tammuz-1 nuclear reactor at Osirak, which the Israeli Air Force bombed in June 1981," wrote Mamikonian.

Such cooperation turned to ashes following the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the ousting of the Shah. In a grand role reversal, the Kurdish territories of Iraq and Turkey may have been used to conduct operations in the newly-established Islamic State of Iran, notes Mamikonian, citing papers from the US embassy in Tehran.

Israel's cooperation with the Kurds in other countries also proved problematic after 1979. The Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Öcalan fled from the Turkish authorities and was granted asylum by the then president of Syria, Hafez al-Assad. Öcalan allied himself closely with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, which was at the time in a state of war with Israel. Even if Öcalan had proved to be amenable to Israeli overtures, Turkey — at the time a close ally of Israel — regarded Öcalan's Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) as its number one enemy.

After 1979, Israel was largely unable to cultivate open relations with Kurds in Iran and Syria. The Israeli-Kurdish ties had remained a well-kept secret until 1980, when Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin openly declared that Israel was supplying the Kurds with military advisers, weapons systems and humanitarian aid.

The next known major manifestation of the ties at the human level came a decade later, following Saddam Hussein's brutal crushing of Kurdish uprisings in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Saddam's chemical weapons attacks killed thousands, and Israel's Kurdish community launched protests, demonstrations and relief operations for their brethren in Iraq.

For a short while, the Kurds and Israelis even faced missiles from the same source when both were subject to Saddam Hussein's attacks, just before and during the First Gulf War in 1991. The missiles were deflected from Israel's economic and business capital Tel Aviv by the prematurely operationalised American Patriot system and hit the nearby town of Ramat Gan instead. The irony escaped no one: Ramat Gan boasts a large Iraqi population, which led many wryly to conclude that Saddam Hussein was once again bombing his own people.