How the CIA captured Carlos the Jackal

Sasha Ingber: Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

Before he became one of the world's most notorious terrorists in the 1970s and '80s, inspiring movies, books, and future terrorists, Carlos the Jackal was born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez to a privileged family in Venezuela.

As the years passed, his crimes grew more bold, from an attempted assassination to abductions, murder, hijackings, and bombings. Some state leaders tolerated him out of fear that he would target their countries, yet his alliances with militants and dictators soured as the years passed. Journalist Joby Warrick profiled the mercenary terrorist and how American and French intelligence took him down in his new book, The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super Terrorist.

Morning, Joby. Thanks for coming in. 

Joby Warrick: It's a pleasure to be here. I love the Spy Museum. 

Sasha Ingber: Let's just get right into it. What is an infamous terrorist like as a little boy? What was Carlos's upbringing? 

Joby Warrick: Carlos the Jackal, that's not his real name, and he's a very interesting character who comes from a very different part of the world.

Turns out he was born and raised in Venezuela on the opposite side of the world from the, the places that he int- eventually becomes famous. His father was a wealthy lawyer, but also a committed Marxist. He's a guy who was so committed to Marxism that he actually named three of his kids after the founder of the Soviet Union.

That guy's name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. The three boys become Lenin, Vladimir, and Ilyich, our guy, whose real name as a kid was Ilyich Ramírez Sánchez. Grew up in a, in a turbulent time, but middle class upbringing, never wanted for anything, traveled the world, and this is the sort of the origins of this guy who later becomes quite famous as an international terrorist.

Sasha Ingber: What motivated him in the beginning? Was it that Marxist ideology from his father? 

Joby Warrick: As a boy, this young future Carlos was in love with the idea of being an international revolutionary. There were several models for this in that day. There's a, a very famous Argentine whose name was Che Guevara. He has his face on, on those T-shirts and posters and billboards around the world as sort of a symbol of working class or lower class aspirations to overthrow corrupt governments.

And so Carlos wanted to be that guy, wanted to be somebody with a kind of a larger than life personality, who was a hero in some way. It could have been associated or linked to almost any movement, but the idea was the heroism, kind of being this swashbuckling figure that he recognized from, you know, real models in his life.

Sasha Ingber: So he goes to college in Moscow. He catches the attention of the KGB, but they don't pursue him. 

Joby Warrick: Mm. 

Sasha Ingber: What do they see in him or not see in him? Because he doesn't end up working with them, you found. 

Joby Warrick: Right. It was called the Lumumba University in Moscow. It's where people from Palestine, people from Africa, young people from all over the world would come.

The KGB would keep its eye on, on some of these young people to see who might be a, a good informant or a good recruit for them. And they, they thought he was interesting. He came from a Marxist household. He lived in a place where they could certainly use some contacts and some informants. But problem is with Carlos, he, he liked to party a little too much.

He was the kind of kid who had some money. He liked to drink. He liked to show off for his friends. He had an ability to go to, to sort of stores that catered to Westerners and buy liquor and buy expensive clothes. So became very popular throwing parties in the dorms. And there's this famous scene in which the Russian dorm minders come into his dorm after a big disturbance, and they see liquor bottles all over the place.

A prostitute stumbles out of the closet and tells the authorities, "I, I felt sorry for the oppressed, so I came and joined the party." It was just too much even for the Soviets, and they decided whatever his potential, he's just a little bit too rowdy for us, and so they passed him over. 

Sasha Ingber: So then when he's 22, he now gets linked up with a group that is designated by the US government as a foreign terrorist organization, and that is the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

And he's a sleeper agent now. What is he doing? 

Joby Warrick: Well, he becomes an agent for the Popular Front, and this is, again, it's very different from the other Palestinian group because it is Marxist, and that's kind of rare even back then. But Carlos, y- you know, stumbles upon them. There, there are young Palestinians at his university.

He sort of admires their struggle. He moves himself there for a while and gets caught up in a, in a civil war, gets some military training and some experience. But eventually, the Palestinians decide that this kind of asset could probably do us more good as a sleeper agent in Europe. He had good cover for being in London because his mother lived there, so he goes to London, lives a normal life, but is working for the Palestinians all along.

Sasha Ingber: And now, do they know that he had been drinking, that he'd been sleeping with prostitutes? Has he kind of like, you know, omitted certain details? 

Joby Warrick: The stories are always swirling around Carlos, and so there are people within his group who dismiss him because he's a bit too much of a, a clown, too much of, of a partier, a womanizer.

He's just completely obsessed with women and, and that doesn't really fit with, uh, the MO of, of the Palestinian groups at the time. But they do see him as someone who's capable, 'cause he's obviously very smart. He speaks multiple languages, not just in his native Spanish, but Russian and English and French, and then he picks up Arabic as well.

And he's also the kind of guy, because he has a cover story being in London, because he has, uh, you know, a passport that'll allow him to travel to, to any place in the world really, that's convenient for the Palestinians. He can cross borders. He can go places without, you know, getting on anybody's radar.

He's the kind of guy who can be completely invisible in the society where he lives until it's time to activate him. 

Sasha Ingber: And then this is his opportunity to prove himself. What does he do in London? 

Joby Warrick: For a long time, he just sits, and finally after much nagging, the Palestinians decide, "Okay, well let's give the kid a chance."

They give him a gun. They give him five bullets, five rounds of ammunition, because they didn't trust him with more. And his assignment was to, to go to the house of a wealthy Jewish businessman, guy who happened to be the president of Marks & Spencer, which is a big retail chain, and shoot him, kill him. And Carlos decides to accept the assignment.

On a day in, uh, late December 1973, he goes to this house in St. John's Wood, a very wealthy neighborhood, knocks on the door, kind of barges in, goes upstairs to where this wealthy man is, is in the bathroom, pops open the door, and pulls his pistol and shoots the man right in the face. 

Sasha Ingber: And this is the beginning of what becomes a series of brutal acts and crimes.

But similar to the KGB, ultimately, these Palestinian militants grow tired of him as well. What is it that makes them tire of him? 

Joby Warrick: Eventually Carlos gets in trouble, and this happens throughout his career, with his bosses because he's more interested in himself than in their cause, and that becomes very clear.

Even with his assassination attempt I described, he, he doesn't kill the man that he was assigned to kill. The bullet gets deflected. The man is only wounded pretty seriously, but survives. And this becomes a pattern in Carlos's young career where he kind of pulls off the job, but sort of halfway. He doesn't execute as he's supposed to.

And again, he just wants the limelight, and the Palestinians eventually get tired of that and decide, "Well, you're not really for us.”

Sasha Ingber: One of his most notorious acts comes when he is ordered and funded by the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to target an OPEC meeting in Vienna in 1975. He takes dozens of people hostage.

Tell us about that incident. 

Joby Warrick: I've covered terrorism for much of my career, and this is, I think, the most audacious single act of terrorism. For a 26-year-old to get the idea that he can go to Vienna, Austria, this Western capital with this heavy security presence, and walk into the headquarters of OPEC, which is the international oil cartel, as they're having their annual meeting with oil ministers from all over the world just gathered to talk about oil prices, to walk in there with a bunch of comrades and to take the entire thing hostage.

Sasha Ingber: It almost sounds like a movie with a plot that a producer would say, "No, that's just not possible." 

Joby Warrick: Exactly right. Nobody would say that, "No, you can't, you can't pull that off." But young Carlos did, did it. There's some shooting in the beginning. Three people were killed, but then he takes, you know, all these wealthy oil ministers from Saudi Arabia, from the Gulf countries, from African countries, and they're all his prisoners.

He can do with them as he wants to. And his plan becomes, "I'm going to put them all on a plane, and the Austrians are gonna give me a plane, and I'm gonna fly them off to North Africa," and has this grand scheme of what's gonna happen next. But incredibly, step after step, it succeeds. Carlos is able to talk the Austrians into giving him an airplane with, with a pilot and fuel, and all the, the passengers, these wealthy hostages, get kind of shuffled onto the plane, and off they go to North Africa.

Sasha Ingber: How was he able to, step by step, end up getting what he wants? 

Joby Warrick: That's a very good question. And what happens, what works for Carlos at this occasion and, and also throughout his career, is that he capitalizes on his reputation. By this time, you know, Western European countries know the name Carlos the Jackal because he's killed police officers.

He's got this, uh, international reputation. He's been in all the newspapers. So one of the first things he does when he takes over this OPEC conference is to announce himself. "I am the famous Carlos. You may have heard of me." And that evokes some fear and s- respect. This is somebody we have to take seriously.

This is not just some random kid who's trying to pull something off here. This is a, an, an established criminal, somebody with an identification, and someone who has, it's been proven, the willingness to, to shoot somebody at point blank range. He's completely fearless and has no reluctance or hesitance about killing people, and this becomes the reason that people follow his commands and do what he wants them to do.

Sasha Ingber: And he made millions off of the ransom of these ministers, and yet what you share in your book and what you told me is that he also ended up being asked for his autograph by some of the very people that he was holding hostage. 

Joby Warrick: How crazy is this? So you have an international terrorist who's also kind of a, a big ego, and because he's so charismatic and so daring, and also I have to say frankly charming because he takes all these hostages, and then he puts his gun down, and he talks to them, and he hands out cigarettes and plays real nice.

And by the time the thing is over, some of his hostages are, are asking for his autograph, and that's not the first time it happens in his career where people think, "Wow, this is, this is like a celebrity. Let's, let's get to know him." And, and he milks it completely. He loves the fact that people know who he is and thinks he's cool, and loves the fact that somebody who's his prisoner will walk up afterward and say, "Hey, can I have your autograph?"

And he certainly gives it to them. 

Sasha Ingber: By 1981, he is looking for more financial backers, and he finds one in the dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu, who asks him to target Radio Free Europe in Munich, which ultimately is a, a bastion of free press- which, uh, was covertly funded in its early years by the CIA Tell us more about that moment in his career as a terrorist.

Joby Warrick: So by the early 1990s, Carlos is essentially a free agent. He's broken with the, with the Palestinians completely. He's working with dictators. That's who's paying him, and he's very happy to bend his ideology, whatever it is, to do jobs for them and, and earn some money. And Ceaușescu, like most of the East European leaders, hate Radio Free Europe more than anything.

It is, as you said, it was started by the CIA in the 1950s, so they see it as a kind of American propaganda machine. In truth, it's actually... It hires real journalists, and they do real news reporting and put out, you know, daily reports in multiple languages and beam it into Eastern Europe and into Russia to give people in those parts of the world some sense of what freedom is like.

And of course, you know, these, Ceaușescu and these others despise the idea of it. And so they've long fantasized about trying to shut it down, and they've used various techniques to try to jam it. But the idea emerges in the early '80s is let's blow the place up. And what better person to do that job than Carlos the Jackal, who's free and on the loose and, and very happy to, to do it for some money.

So a plan goes into effect in, in, in 1981 with Carlos in charge to put a big bomb outside the building in, uh, in Munich and try to take it off of the air forever. 

Sasha Ingber: And they don't take it off the air forever. 

Joby Warrick: Yeah. 

Sasha Ingber: This ends up ultimately being about 24 hours? 

Joby Warrick: Yeah. It is a great disappointment to Ceaușescu certainly because not only does it not take it off forever, it's really just a brief period of time.

It's back basically a day later, broadcasting as ever. And worse from Ceaușescu's point of view, Carlos bumbles the, on, on the placement of the charge. He put it on the opposite side of the building where the Czech studio was, so it didn't even blow up the right place. Nobody from the Romanian studio was even injured.

Sasha Ingber: And yet even communist leaders who saw him as a tool ended up also sort of resenting him. 

Joby Warrick: Yeah. 

Sasha Ingber: What is their reason for getting tired of this man? 

Joby Warrick: They let him live in these nice hotels and s- and fancy villas. They tolerate, in some ways encourage him. They have meetings with him to find out what he's up to.

They make no effort to stop him until Carlos begins to make problems for them. And the attack on Fr- on Radio Free Europe was a case in point. They were so afraid after they saw the damage that he created that it was gonna blow back on them. By the mid-1980s, Carlos is becoming persona non grata even in Eas- Eastern Europe.

Sasha Ingber: But other than the RFE incident, he isn't really targeting Americans or the United States, and yet you point out that the CIA is interested in him. He is on their radar. Why is that? 

Joby Warrick: In the 1970s, terrorism was not a priority. They were so focused on the big problem of the day, which is the competition with the Soviet Union and with China, you know, sort of Cold War conflicts all over the world.

That starts to change little by little, and it starts to change because of hijackings. And eventually, by the mid to late '70s, the CIA has, has decided that this is our struggle, too. We need to invest in it. We need to create specialized counterterrorism units. And they begin to turn their focus to Carlos in, in particular.

And later on, there are rumors, in fact, more than rumors, that suggest that Carlos is involved in plots against an American ambassador in Egypt and other things that indicate that, that he has begun to target Americans.

Sasha Ingber: There was also a rumor that he had been tasked to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.

Joby Warrick: Yeah. This is a crazy moment, a very credible threat sort of lands with the CIA, suggesting that indeed there's a plot against President Reagan.

And the persistent story from informants is that Carlos is running it. And it is taken so seriously and, and, and there's coordination with our allies, the French and others, to try to, search airports to look out for Carlos everywhere. Security is increased for, for President Reagan.

And eventually the report comes back from the informants that the plot was called off for whatever reason. And to this day, we don't know how much substance there was to it. We don't know if it was a serious threat against Reagan or more aspirational. 

Sasha Ingber: When we come back, how the CIA started tracking Carlos the Jackal, eventually leading to his arrest.

Now you learned from intelligence archives that the CIA had actually penetrated Carlos's inner circle, and only you, Joby, would be able to uncover all of this and piece it together, as you have so many stories in the past. Tell us more about this informant and how he came to help the agency. 

Joby Warrick: You mentioned that eventually Carlos wears out his welcome with everyone, and many of his close friends and allies eventually decided that he was too hypocritical, he was too obsessed with himself, and turned their back on him.

And one of the ones that did this was one of his closest allies. He was a young Swiss man. He actually was from the Italian section of eastern Switzerland, and he joined Carlos's gang. He was associated with it several times because he thought that Carlos was the real thing, that Carlos was actually doing something for the Palestinians or doing something for sort of the international revolutionary cause.

But as he was up close and was able to see the guy and watch what he did, it became clear that it was a lot of posturing and, and not much substance. So this, this Swiss guy, his name is Bruno Bréguet, decides at one point that he'd had it, and he ends up walking into an embassy in Switzerland and asking for the CIA.

And he introduces himself to Americans, and that becomes a very well-cultivated relationship with CIA handlers in Europe that lasted over several months, all of it with the purpose of figuring out where Carlos was and how eventually the CIA could catch him. 

Sasha Ingber: Why did he choose the CIA as opposed to a European intelligence service?

Joby Warrick: I think, and, and this is very much the case at the time, that Bruno saw the CIA as being the most capable. 

Sasha Ingber: So he walks into this embassy, and does the CIA immediately welcome him with open arms, or are they skeptical that maybe this man is actually a dangle... that he is sent there to gather information on the United States and isn't actually genuine in what he's going to be providing?

Joby Warrick: The story we have to piece together comes from declassified cables. They're not a complete story, so we don't know what happened if there was some maybe a period of kind of hits and misses where they d- they don't connect. But eventually, the CIA decides to take him very seriously, seriously enough that they make him a paid informant.

They give him $3,000 a month, which is a, you know, pretty decent stipend, and they meet with him in hotels in Switzerland and Austria over several months. And then presumably they tested him and evaluated him, checked his evidence, decided that he's telling a good story. And, and you could tell from the cables that as time went on, they were very convinced that he was the real thing, that he could lead them to Carlos, and so they put a lot of time and effort into making this relationship work.

Sasha Ingber: What was he sharing that proved to be valuable? 

Joby Warrick: There were debriefings in the beginning in which Bruno basically tells the story of Carlos. He explains what he's been up to, talks about some of the events that he was connected with, which ones were real, which ones were not, who his allies were, and really gave the CIA the book of Carlos.

It really helped them understand who he was and, and his, his capabilities and intentions. The thing they want to do most is to obviously capture or i- if, if the opportunity arises, take Carlos out in some way using a proxy force or something. That becomes harder because Bruno doesn't seem to know exactly what Carlos's plans and what his movements are.

That he knows that, that Carlos is living in Damascus. That's a very hard place for the agency to operate. But eventually he does get a breakthrough when he comes to the CIA and says, "Carlos is being expelled from Damascus. He's on the move. There's an opportunity now to flush him out and catch him." And this does very much lead to the ultimate chapter where he's cornered and caught.

Sasha Ingber: And when he's kicked out of Syria, he then moves on to Jordan, where the Jordanians are potentially looking to cultivate him. The CIA finds out, Carlos disappears, and he surfaces in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where a lot of terrorists are hanging out in the neighborhood. The CIA knows that Carlos is rather entranced by women, as we started out this conversation, a trend from the dormitory rooms, and this ultimately leads to his capture in some sense.

Yeah. Can you walk us through what you uncovered? 

Joby Warrick: Womanizing is just part of Carlos's personality, and women who've known him say he has an obsessive interest in women, that almost any woman that walks in a room is a potential target. He's just incorrigible in that way. But it ends up being a good thing for him in some ways because women do things for him throughout his career.

They, they kind of, uh, bend to his will certainly throughout most of his career, but it also gets him in trouble a lot. And in Khartoum, so he moves himself there after this kind of wandering exodus through the Middle East and, and ends up at a place where a terrorist like himself can feel safe because the place is essentially as, as the CIA people who are there call it, a terrorist Mecca, the terrorist Super Bowl.

All the bad guys are there. Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, you know, before anybody heard of Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden was there. Hamas was there. And so Carlos could walk down the street and nobody would give him a second look. But he also had baggage, if you would call it that. He had a new wife. He didn't bother to get divorced from his last one, but he decided that he would marry this young Jordanian woman who was beautiful and was a dental hygienist and fell in love with him.

Sasha Ingber: Yeah, why? What's the point of getting divorced? 

Joby Warrick: That's right. And, and, you know, he, he converts to Islam, and I've always believed that probably the reason he did that is because he could become a bigamist then. He can have two wives and, and, um get away with it. So basically, this is his life in Khartoum.

But his, his wife wants to have kids, and they haven't succeeded in that. She hasn't become pregnant. And they decide after some medical investigation that the cause might be Carlos. He had a, a physical condition, not to get into too much detail with it, it's rather intimate, but he had kind of varicose veins of the testicles, and it's a condition that's quite painful at times, but it also restricts the sperm count.

And so they decided to get a medical procedure to get this problem taken care of. Well, the CIA becomes aware of this, and if you're planning to catch one of the most famous bad guys in the world, and you're worried about a shootout, what better way or what better time to try to apprehend him than when he's incapacitated in some way?

When he's undergoing a surgery or a surgical procedure, he's under anesthesia, he's certainly decommissioned. You've got a good shot at, at catching him then. 

Sasha Ingber: Okay, so let's just back up for a second. We're talking about some sperm that has trouble. Fascinating details. The book, I mean, it writes itself with what you found.

But this is a very wealthy man who has already been a fugitive for a number of years now. Does he have any inkling that the agency is planning to pounce after he goes to get this operation done? 

Joby Warrick: Carlos's operational security is, is never very impressive. But he- he's very lax about who's watching him, what he says, who he talks to.

He blabs about his plans to people who he really shouldn't trust. He's very open about how he lives. He goes to, you know, public, uh, hotels and restaurants, and goes for a swim and gets his hair cut, and even though he's using a fake name, you know, everybody knows who he is. And eventually, Carlos was so well-surveilled, uh, that the CIA could, you know, move into an apartment next door and put a big telephoto lens pointing straight down into his courtyard, and take pictures of Carlos when he came out in the morning scratching his belly and just walking around and exercising.

Sasha Ingber: Right. They even join him at a club where he's on the dance floor. 

Joby Warrick: I love this scene because Carlos has such a predictable lifestyle. He goes to these clubs almost every night, that after a while, the CIA doesn't have to follow him everywhere, but they do sometimes go out with him. And there's this one occasion where Carlos goes to a private club.

Drinking is officially forbidden in, in, uh, Sudan, but he gets away with it anyway. And he's there with his wife on this particular night, you know, having a good time, drinking, getting drunk, dancing on the, on the dance floor. And the agency people are, are kind of watching from the sidelines, just fascinated.

There's the world's most famous terrorist, and he's right there on the dance floor. So what do they do? They actually get up and dance, too. There's a, there's a one woman, uh, officer along, and so they kind of walk out and stand literally inches from Carlos, and they're dancing, and they're watching him to see what he's...

Is he suspicious? Is he, uh, does he look, look like he's armed? Trying to get a sense of what it might be like to catch him, and he's completely oblivious. And so they end up having this wonderful night on the town. Carlos is there. They gather their intelligence, and then they, uh, they understand that, yeah, we can catch this guy.

Sasha Ingber: I really want there to be video footage of this. Yeah. And if there is, I'm gonna bother you after this interview to, to, to see if I can see some of it. 

Joby Warrick: I've been told it exists, and so we're still trying to, to put our hands on it. 

Sasha Ingber: So the CIA is getting closer and closer, but they realize that they do not have the ability to arrest him The French, it's a different story.

Yeah. He has committed a lot of crimes on their soil, from shootings to bombing campaigns. They arrested a girlfriend of his, and so some of this was also in retaliation. He's tried in absentia, and that is part of what leads to these two countries working together. 

Joby Warrick: So again, this is the early '90s, so it's a different era.

Uh, some of the things that we do routinely after 9/11 haven't really happened yet. And there is this legal problem the CIA has. They've developed a really good file on him, and they know where he is. They know how they could potentially catch him. But they find to their horror that no paperwork exists that would give them authority to extradite him, to take him to the United States.

And the reason is because as far as anyone knew, Carlos had never killed an American. He had never overtly attacked any American facility except for Radio Free Europe, and the evidence of that was not very good. So there was no paperwork. There was no indictment. There was no warrant even for Carlos' arrest.

And so they end up turning to their allies, the French. The French certainly wanted him. He'd killed people in France, so there were actually, as you said, there had been convictions in court. And so it was easy to bring the French in. They absolutely wanted to catch him. They wanted to try him. And so this becomes, instead of a CIA operation, it becomes CIA/French joint operation to finally capture him.

Sasha Ingber: So Carlos goes in for this testicular surgery, not a, a phrase that I expected to be using

Joby Warrick:  On the podcast 

Sasha Ingber:... sitting at the International Spy Museum, but hey. He goes in for the surgery, and then what? 

Joby Warrick: At this point, since the French are involved, the French have a different way of operating, and they brought in the Sudanese government, which I think the CIA never would have done, never would have thought that they could trust the Sudanese enough to have them Participate without blowing the operation completely.

The French have their ways. They have very close ties to the Sudanese. And so when Carlos has his surgery, he's immobile because of his bandages and things like that. So when he's in a recovery room, he gets picked up by the Sudanese and taken to another villa for his security, and as he's there, there's just all these officers swarm in on him, pick him up in his bed and put him on, on a gurney, and whisk him out to a car and then take him to the airport where a French plane is waiting for him.

So it was interesting, the French weren't actually in the room to pick him up, but they guided and directed the operation to bring him out of hospital recovery and take him straight to the airport where they could, they could take him from there. 

Sasha Ingber: And does this all go off without a hitch? 

Joby Warrick: It does because the Sudanese, there's stories that they were paid millions of dollars to participate in this, so they don't interfere with Carlos leaving the country.

And yeah, Carlos gets on the plane. They put a bag over his head. Nobody's speaking, so he doesn't know who has him, so it's a very confusing moment for him. Plane takes off. Carlos is bound with a head covering. He doesn't know where in the world he's going, and he begins to try to kind of feel the movements of the plane and get a sense of where he's going.

And at first he thinks, "Well, maybe they're taking me to Saudi Arabia, and, and that's, that's bad. They'll probably execute me." Then he decides, "Well, no, no, they're going up the, the coast and they're gonna take me to Israel." And this is his, his great nightmare 'cause he just figures the Israelis will torture him to death.

But no, the plane keeps going and going and going. And finally, when it lands and the, so the, the door opens and he can smell, you know, it's summertime in Europe. He can hear French voices. He knows he's in France, and he relaxes. 

Sasha Ingber: Wow. So does somebody say to him, "Hey, Carlos, the good news is the surgery was fine. The bad news is you're gonna be in prison for the rest of your life." 

Joby Warrick: For a very long time. He, he's glad that this is a country of laws. He's gonna be tried. He's gonna have a lawyer. He always believes somehow in his mind that he's gonna have another great escape, that somehow he's gonna be freed or, you know, there'll be a prisoner exchange with Venezuela or somehow he'll get out.

But what happened instead, he gets tried a number of times and is sentenced three times to life in prison. There's no death penalty in France, so he was not gonna be executed, but it becomes very clear that Carlos will spend the rest of his life behind bars. 

Sasha Ingber: And today he is sitting behind bars in a prison outside of Paris.

What is his life like? 

Joby Warrick: Yeah. I was fortunate, I guess I will use the word, but I had a rare opportunity to get to meet him in person, to go to that little prison, which is a fascinating place. It's a old building that was once a convent, you know, y- centuries ago, and it became a place that the Nazis used in, during World War II to torture French partisans.

So it's got a very colorful history. Now it's a maximum security prison. And inside those walls, Carlos has a pretty decent, apparently a double cell. I wasn't able to see the room itself. But he has, you know, a fair amount of liberty within prison walls to get on the internet, to read, to write letters to people.

He gets a few visitors. So it's a fairly comfortable life, but he's not getting out. It's basically this is his universe until he dies. 

Sasha Ingber: Does he have any regrets for what he spent these years doing? So many people who were killed, the chaos that came in his wake. 

Joby Warrick: Hmm. I asked that question because I, I, I was very interested in knowing the answer to that.

Because here's someone who created a lot of carnage in his life, and yet he's had decades now to think about it. He's been in trials where victims and their families have come to court to testify and describe the things that, that he did and the impact on their own lives. So does a man like Carlos begin to feel remorse after he's been sitting in prison for a while?

If he does feel remorse, he doesn't show any sign of it, because I pushed him on, "What about these innocent victims, and what about these people who were killed and maimed?" And he does not acknowledge any of it. He says, "There were no innocent victims," said, "Everything I did was for a larger purpose, and it was for the international revolution, and thus justified, and I did all the things that I had to do and, and should have done as, as who I was."

And the only regret that I could get him to acknowledge was, was a very twisted one, because he said, "I regret that I didn't kill a few more people." And what he meant by that is, it's as horrifying as that is to hear, is that if he'd been a little quicker on his gun, if he'd been a little bit sharper down in Khartoum, he might have caught those CIA people who were following me or the French people who came after me.

And he resents his arrest, blames, you know, all kinds of traitors for doing him in, and, "Gosh, I just wish I would've killed him," he says. 

Sasha Ingber: Remarkable. So now we know how he feels about the Sudanese, about the CIA, about the French services. You've sat down with terrorists from ISIS, from Al-Qaeda, from other terrorist organizations.

What was it like to sit down with Carlos, having come from that history of meeting so many people who had been behind atrocities before? 

Joby Warrick: Most of the, the people in the terrorist world that I've met through my life, and you're right, I've met some really interesting people, there's always been a sense that at least they really are committed to what they, they, they profess that the reason for their terrorism is something that is so intensely personal or based on such rage that they feel justified. And I... not that you'd ever respect or, or condone what they do because it's always horrible. There's never an excuse for that kind of violence. But at least they're, th- they're not hypocrites about it.

Carlos, when you see him and when you really kind of pour into his life story, y- you don't get a sense that he really believed that much in anything except for Carlos. He was basically trying to s- set himself up to live well and to have interesting adventures and be admired, but that rings kind of shallow.

And when you see him as an old man, there's something very pathetic about it that makes it a little bit more poignant than, say, if he had been Osama bin Laden and, and spent his lifetime in prison instead of being killed. You know, tabloids loved him, loved to write about him. But beyond the fame, there's really not much to it, and I felt a bit sad for him about that.

Sasha Ingber: So what motivated him was the money. It was the, the fame, the glamour, the women, the power of it. Was there a moment for you as you were working on this book where you wondered if you were contributing to that feeling for him? 

Joby Warrick: Hmm. 

Sasha Ingber: Even as an old man when he looks back, did you ever feel like maybe you were falling into that role- 

Joby Warrick: Hmm

Sasha Ingber: in telling his story? 

Joby Warrick: When you meet Carlos, there is still this residual charm. He's very friendly, um, speaks in perfect English. But it was my, very much my goal as I wro- approached this book is this man will not be glorified in any way. In, in you're writing about hi- his actions, and people may read it and say, "Wow, that, that took a lot of ingenuity."

But you also get a sense of a man who is very violent, very brutal, uh, who's betrays everybody around him, who's terrible to, to some of his own employees or, or aides. And you're, you walk away with a, with a sort of a portrait of someone who's just deeply troubled and is, I think, of this sort of the, the proper diagnosis, if I were a psychiatrist, would be to say that he's a classic criminal narcissist, the kind of mind who has no empathy toward other people, uh, who only sees himself or thinks about himself, and because of that sort of twisted view, is able to commit at- atrocious acts without feeling any remorse for them.

Sasha Ingber: So what would you say that all of the, the movies, the documentaries, the books, uh, that he inspired, and I remember being a little kid and watching movies about hijackings that were certainly based on him and his persona, uh, what did they get wrong about this man? 

Joby Warrick: For one thing, it, it's, it's funny 'cause you do see those films, and there was a real cottage industry of kind of Carlos books and movies, and also just movies that created Carlos-like figures.

And he shows up in so many movies in, in the '80s and '90s in particular where he's the stereotypical bad guy is, is kind of this Carlos figure. And then when, when you get to really study his life, none of it is as impressive or, or successful as it's portrayed in the film. In, in, in reality, he can be quite bumbling sometimes.

His vanity is so grating sometimes that you just feel like, wow, I'm exhausted with this guy. So the, the real person is, is kind of a poor relation to the sort of the character that p- is portrayed on TV, and, and I guess that's a good thing. 

Sasha Ingber: It's always interesting to think about the person versus the persona.

Joby Warrick: Mm. 

Sasha Ingber: So when we think about terrorism today, what is Carlos's legacy? Uh, are there aspects of what he did that you're seeing be relevant today? 

Joby Warrick: Yeah, there are two things. The one is the value of, of media as far as terrorism is concerned, and that's not a new concept. But really, it was Carlos's generation that decided that terrorism was not just about committing acts of violence against an enemy.

It's about creating a spectacle, about getting people from around the world who have no interest in the cause to pay attention. And this was kind of the mantra of some of the Palestinian leaders who hired Carlos, is they wanted... They, they felt that you could hijack a plane, it was more effective than, than killing, you know, 100 Israeli soldiers in, in battle, that the whole goal, the objective, was to force people to confront the realities that they wanted them to see.

And Carlos was very much of that, uh, of that same view, but he also had the extra twist of, of seeing himself as a, as a, as a character attached to that. So it wasn't just a, the spectacle, but it was this spectacular individual who was behind it all. And that model becomes important to later groups like Al-Qaeda, who also saw the value of mass spectacle.

They were much more bloodthirsty in their attacks and, and, and, you know, did not mind at all, like, in fact, sort of valued mass atrocity. They wanted many, you know, many deaths and injuries much more than Carlos and his com- compatriots. But they, they did see, uh, that if you hijack three planes at once It's, it's, it makes a, it makes a much bigger m- you know, media, uh, rush than if you just did one plane or did something that in a relatively obscure way.

So that was one, and the other was the idea of, of state-sponsored terrorism as we, we came to know it. Uh, because Carlos really created the template for a kind of terrorism that is really geopolitical. It's not a- about religious zealotry or, or any of these ideological reasons. It's one country or one figure, political leader deciding to attack a rival and using terrorism as the way to do it, and Carlos was, was that.

He was a mercenary terrorist who would work for anybody. Uh, that, that model, so th- this idea of mercenary terrorism remains with us, and is actually, I would argue, it's, it's becoming more prominent now because you see Russia doing it. You see the Iranians doing it, hiring criminals, drug dealers, others to, to, you know, carry out an assassination or to bomb, uh, a synagogue or do other things that, y- you know, done by professionals 'cause the criminals know how to do it, but hopefully without any blame or blowback falling on them.

That was Carlos's specialty, and I'm afraid we're seeing it again in the 21st century. 

Sasha Ingber: Joby Warrick, really appreciate you coming on. 

Joby Warrick: I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for having me. 

Sasha Ingber: Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. If you like the episode, give us a follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating or review. It really helps. If you have any feedback or you wanna hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast@spymuseum.org. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and this show is brought to you by N2K Networks, Goat Rodeo, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.