The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist

“In his new book, Joby Warrick traces the rise and fall of Carlos the Jackal, the notorious terrorist-for-hire.

 

THE JACKAL: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist, by Joby Warrick

 

Carlos the Jackal, the international terrorist, was vain. He wore nipped-waist suits, Italian loafers, fine neckties and sometimes, in a nod to his hero Che Guevara, designer berets. He was a good dancer. He liked luxury hotels and well-curated wine lists. Women adored him. He’d stroll with one on each arm.

 

It must have bothered Carlos when, in 1975, the first known photograph of him was beamed worldwide. He was 25 at the time. In the black-and-white image, he wears a leather jacket, tinted oval glasses and a sinisterly aloof mien.

 

It became the most recognizable headshot of the second half of the 20th century. It appeared on Interpol’s wanted posters and on the front of newspapers and magazines globally. Carlos’s visage was never emblazoned on a collectible Slurpee cup, but if Charles Manson had managed a 7-Eleven, it would have been.

 

It was bad enough that the photo blew his cover. It also made him resemble a frog. (The likeness was intentionally bad. He was in semi-disguise for one of his many fake passport photographs.) It had to hurt, too, that he looked chubby. He’d struggled with his weight since childhood, when he was called El Gordo. Even when thin, he loathed his fleshy man boobs. He had plastic surgery to flatten them out. This was, contra the myths about him, possibly the only plastic surgery he had.

 

Carlos’s many contradictions — he was a Venezuelan who became the world’s most famous terrorist for the Palestinian cause, a stone-cold killer who considered himself a humanist, a despiser of Western imperialism who was knocked out by its charms — are laid bare in Joby Warrick’s authoritative and acutely readable new book, “The Jackal.”

 

Warrick is a longtime national security correspondent for The Washington Post. One of his previous books, “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS” (2015), won a Pulitzer Prize. His new book functions as a pocket history of terrorism’s early modern period, and it details how Carlos’s exploits helped provide the template for later bad actors such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

 

Carlos was part of a new, charismatic and highly mobile new breed. He joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1970, and, over the following two decades, became one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. Warrick tracks his atrocities, and the intricate and sometimes spasmodic planning that went into them.

 

In a public bathroom in London, Carlos fired a bullet into the face of Joseph Sieff, the Zionist owner of the British retail giant Marks & Spencer (where Carlos, being Carlos, sometimes shopped). Sieff was lucky to survive. The gun jammed after the first shot.

 

At Orly airport in Paris, Carlos twice led teams that fired surface-to-air missiles at El Al airliners, once from the airport terminal’s roof. They missed both times.

 

On a fashionable Left Bank street in 1974, Carlos casually lobbed a grenade into a crowd of shoppers, killing two and wounding 34. The victims included a young girl whose hand was blown off. Less than a year later, Carlos shot to death two members of the Directorate of Territorial Security, the French intelligence agency, and one of his P.F.L.P. bosses, who’d betrayed him.

 

Carlos and his accomplices frequently took hostages, most notoriously at an OPEC meeting in Vienna on snowy December day in 1975. It was the largest mass kidnapping of government officials in a single event, and it became a split-screen spectacle.

 

The captors were provided with an Austrian DC-9 to fly out with dozens of hostages. The televised drama played out over two days of negotiations, as the plane landed in Algiers, then in Tripoli, then in Algiers again. Eventually the hostages were released, though three people were slaughtered in the initial assault.

 

Carlos and his mentor, Wadi Haddad, the leader of the P.F.L.P.’s military wing, believed the world had stopped paying attention to the plight of Palestinians and their struggle to reclaim ancestral lands. Islamic fundamentalism was not at the core of their concerns: Jew hatred was. They were determined to make Westerners see Palestine, by any means necessary, including targeting non-Israeli civilians.

 

It was a different era. There’s strange comedy in watching Western authorities let Carlos and his cohort repeatedly slip through their hands. French intelligence officers didn’t yet carry guns regularly. When the terrorists were caught, they were often given short prison sentences and time off for good behavior. The C.I.A. didn’t yet have a counterterrorism division. Airport security was lax.

 

Warrick is alert to other forms of black comedy. Kosher, not halal, food is accidentally procured for a large group of Palestinians. Terrorists get sulky. Their weapons fail and they take wrong turns. A German militant is nicknamed Schnitzel because it’s all he eats.

 

During the OPEC siege, one of Carlos’s colleagues got thirsty and took a slug from a water bottle. He’d never tasted carbonated water and thought he’d been poisoned. He had a deranged coughing fit while detonator cords dangled from around his neck.

 

Carlos had been born into a prominent family in Caracas in 1949. His father was a lawyer and a passionate Communist: He kept a large portrait of Stalin in the house. He named each of his three sons after Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. Carlos’s birth name was Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. “Carlos” was simply an alias that stuck. I use it here for simplicity’s sake.

 

He was nicknamed “the Jackal” because it was thought that he’d read “The Day of the Jackal,” Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 best seller about a coldblooded assassin. Carlos dug the name. “The jackal is a very nice little animal, you know?” he said. “It’s a predator, but very pretty.”

 

He went to grade school in Venezuela, then was packed off to London to live with his mother during high school. His family wanted him to pick up some culture. At his father’s insistence, he attended college at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, a Soviet-era school for foreign students. There he met Palestinians for the first time and slowly became radicalized.

 

He decided that stodgy classic Moscow communism was not for him. He wanted to be a swashbuckling revolutionary in the Che mold. At the time, the P.F.L.P. proclaimed itself Marxist. Carlos traveled to Lebanon, passed screening and signed on. He had, as Warrick puts it, “wandered into someone else’s fight.”

 

Haddad, Carlos’s mentor, recognized that he had a potential star. Carlos was an expert marksman. He spoke French, Russian and English in addition to Spanish. He was light skinned and resembled a man of the world — he could mingle in places most Middle Eastern terrorists could not.

 

Carlos and Haddad eventually had a falling out, and Carlos started his own terror consortium. There were high times. His fame, like Bruce Springsteen’s, burned most intensely from 1975 to 1985. Later, the money began to dry up. Carlos had a style to maintain. “Just because we’re fighting a revolution doesn’t mean we have to eat crap!” he said at one point. He began to freelance, taking commissions for the money alone.

 

He rationalized these jobs, but others thought him a mercenary, a revolutionary sellout. An accomplice turned him in out of disgust. After years on the run, Carlos was captured in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, in 1994, nabbed while under sedation for surgery to repair a painful varicose vein in his scrotum. This capture, by French authorities with an assist from the C.I.A., is one of this quietly rigorous book’s best set pieces.

 

This isn’t the first book about the Jackal. His career was shrewdly evaluated most recently in Jason Burke’s “The Revolutionists,” published earlier this year. Warrick acknowledges his many predecessors. He persuasively notes, fighting through the cliché, that new information has come to light.

 

Amazingly, Carlos is still alive. At 76, he’s a prisoner at Poissy Central Prison, outside Paris. Warrick visited him there. He isn’t as sharp as he once was, but he remains proud of his achievements in corpse making. He’s aware that he remains a celebrity. At the end of their interview, Carlos turned to a prison employee and gave, Warrick writes, “an old Marxist salute: a fist in the air.”

 

THE JACKAL: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist | By Joby Warrick | Scribner | 348 pp. | $30” [1]

 

1. You Say You Want a Revolution? How Much Are You Paying?: Nonfiction. Garner, Dwight.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Aug 10, 2026.