Mossad operatives were in northern Iraq training Kurdish fighters for the battles with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, until the Shah pulled the plug, ending support for the Kurdish rebellion with his 1975 Algiers agreement with Saddam.
Thirty-three yeafterfter he left the Mossad, Israel's external intelligence arm, one memory sometimes wakes Yossi Alpher at four in the morning.
The cables also reveal that the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan personally lobbied senior South African intelligence officials in October 2009 against the country endorsing the findings of a UN inquiry, led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, into alleged war crimes carried out during Israel's three-week bombardment and invasion of Gaza in 2008/09.
These were secret relations and that's the job of the Mossad, which reports to the prime minister".
"I'm not saying the head of Mossad would have decided differently had I offered a different opinion, but it's an incident that stays with me".
Mossad operatives like Alpher courted both countries and ethnic or religious minorities within them.
He was summoned by Mossad head Yitzhak Hofi and told that Mossad's Tehran representative, Eliezar Shafrir, had received a plea to assassinate Khomeini from Shapour Bakhtiar, appointed caretaker prime minister by the Shah to head off growing protests.
"The Mossad is under the prime minister, there is no anomaly whatsoever in the fact that Ben Gurion the prime minister assigned this task to the Mossad," Alpher explained.
Israel had released him in exchange for Jordan's release of two agents Mossad had sent on a botched mission to assassinate a Hamas official in Amman.
"Customers ask me whether I'm a Jew or an Arab before they get into my cab," says a taxi driver.Shabtai Shavit, a former chief of the Mossad spy agency, wrote that the zeal for Jewish nationalism could yet destroy Zionism: "The nation of Israel is galloping blindly in a time tunnel to the age of Bar Kochba and his war on the Roman Empire".
Others take a different tack, and say that bombings which have killed Muslims were staged by the CIA or by Israel's security service, Mossad, to undermine support for the jihadis.
