My encounter with Carlos the Jackal, the world’s first celebrity terrorist

After looping the city’s medieval quarter, the tram halted and thesix stepped off, each gripping a heavy duffel bag.They trudged through snow to the world headquarters of OPEC, the international oil cartel, where scores of officials and dignitaries had gathered for the group’s annual conference. Passing a lone police sentry at the entranceway, one in the group sang out a friendly greeting in German: “Hello, Mr. Inspector.” The officer nodded in reply.

Once inside, the terrorists clambered up a stairwell and paused outside the OPEC lobby to open their bags. They covered their faces, stuffed grenades into their pockets and slapped magazines into their submachine guns.

Then they burst into the conference center, guns blazing.

In seconds, the terrorists seized control of the reception area, killing three people. Then they stormed the meeting room where the assembled ministers now cowered in fear. The officials, 62 in all, including some of the world’s wealthiest oil magnates, were quickly declared hostages, prisoners of an unknown gang that had just staged an audacious, unprecedented attack on global leaders in broad daylight in the heart of Europe.

Who were these terrorists? Hours would pass before the hostages fully understood what was happening to them, and their kidnappers’ true motives would remain murky for decades. But the leader, the young man in the black beret, turned out to be quite willing to reveal who he was.

Setting his weapon on a chair, he passed out cigarettes, cracking jokesand apologizing to the hostages for the disruption. Then, smiling broadly, he announced his identity.

“I am the famous Carlos,” he said. “You know who I am.”

But who was Carlos, really? I pondered the question on a damp March morning as I made my way to the French prison where the criminal known as Carlos the Jackal now resides.

It had been 50 years since his most shocking act, the capture of an entire conference of OPEC ministers that made him globally infamous. More than 30 years had passed since the day he was snatched in Sudan in a combined operation by French and American intelligence officials. At the time of his capture in 1994 he had vanished from public view, yet remained a mythical figure in the public imagination, in part because he had managed, astoundingly, to elude Western law enforcement agencies for two decades.

In his heyday he was a swaggering, enigmatic outlaw whose pursuit of luxury and beautiful women made him a tabloid star. Later he became the inspiration for fictionalized villains in novels and films including Robert Ludlum’s “Bourne Identity” series, Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow Six” and the director Christian Duguay’s spy thriller “The Assignment.”

With a reputation that mingled fact and fiction in equal parts, he was the first celebrity terrorist, with a name and image that were instantly recognizable around the world.

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, redefining terrorism for all time. Compared with al-Qaeda’s suicidal extremists, Carlos — the secular terrorist — seemed almost quaint, and he was soon forgotten.

My own career as a journalist was transformed by the attacks on New York and Washington, and I devoted the next two decades to writing about al-Qaedaand its vicious offshoot, the Islamic State, traveling extensively to the Middle East for The Washington Post and as the author of three nonfiction books. But I had not forgotten Carlos.

I was a teenager when he committed his notorious crimes, and I vividly recalled the hijackings and hostage-takings from the first bloody wave of modern international terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s. I knew from my research that al-Qaeda had studied the examples set by that earlier generation and understood the power of terrorism to command the world’s attention. Even the idea of hijacking multiple airliners at once had been inspired by militants of Carlos’s generation.

What did Carlos think of all of it now, I wondered as I approached the prison that morning.

I had been sitting only a few minutes in Poissy Central Prison’s tiny visitor room when I heard the commotion of guards and caught a first glimpse of the famous inmate being led down a corridor.

“Monsieur Carlos! Bonjour!” guards called out, using his nom de guerre, instead of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the name given to him by his Venezuelan parents. The inmate nodded a greeting to one guard. To another he put up his fists for a round of shadowboxing.

He walked slowly but without a stoop and greeted his visitors with a bemused smile. Even as a prisoner, he dressed smartly: khaki jeans, a sweater and a brown leather bomber. He wore a leather cabbie hat that matched the jacket, and when he politely removed it, his other hand reached up to smooth the thinning white hair. He greeted me in perfect English and apologized for his unshaven cheeks. Then he began to flirt shamelessly with a French prison official who happened to be the only woman in the room.

“Are you a real blonde?” he asked.

When finally persuaded to begin a conversation, the toll from age and his many years in relative isolation became clearer. Carlos repeated himself and sometimes lost the thread when relating a story from years ago. One statistic from his past — its accuracy questionable — remained top of mind. “I killed 83 people by my own hand,” the old inmate said, volunteering the answer to a question I hadn’t asked.

He also proved to be quite willing to talk about that faraway morning in Austria. “Oh, Vienna,” he began, drifting into thought. I asked about the three deaths in the opening minutes of the attack, including a Libyan man whom he had shot, execution-style. He looked at me blankly.

“You know,” he said, “we didn’t intend to kill anyone.”

For the 62 hostages crowded into OPEC’s conference room, the terror of the early moments was soon replaced by bewilderment and, for many, a peculiar fascination. Carlos, with his oversize ego and flair for showmanship, quickly took center stage. By the end of the ordeal — which ultimately spanned three days and as many countries — some would ask for his autograph.

In the gray light of the conference room, it was clear to the hostages that their captor was young. His leather coat, light beard and rakishly cocked beret gave him more than a passing resemblance to Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the iconic Argentine revolutionary, an effect that seemed calculated.

Despite his gang’s executions in the opening moments, he spoke to his captives brightly, offering reassurances in crisp English and French, then switching at times to Arabic and Spanish. As he did so, his attention was diverted at one point by loud sobbing from a corner of the room.

A frightened young secretary had been crying since the ordeal began, and now she struggled to catch her breath. Carlos walked to the spot where the young woman lay, and leaned in close.

“You can go home. You are too beautiful to die,” he cooed. She got up and ran, and no one moved to stop her.

Yet the others would be kept hostage for days, threatened at gunpoint and wired with explosive charges placed aroundthe conference room. Carlos explained that his group — he called it the Arm of the Arab Revolution — was fighting for the cause of a free Palestine.

As he spoke, one of the OPEC secretaries, commandeered by the terrorists to serve as their stenographer, typed up a list of demands. These included an Austrian accession to broadcasting a pro-Palestinian statement on TV and radio every two hours. Then, in the morning, authorities would be required to deliver a bus and driver to the OPEC building to shuttle the terrorists and hostages to the airport. There, a long-haul airliner and crew must be waiting on the tarmac to fly them wherever they want to go.

Carlos vowed to execute hostages at 15-minute intervals if the Austrians failed to comply.

But why would avowedly pro-Palestinian terrorists attack OPEC, an international organization whose members included Arab states that were among the Palestinians’ chief supporters? It was a question raised by Iraq’s chief diplomat in Vienna, Riyadh al-Azzawi, who volunteered to serve as a mediator, relaying messages between the terrorists and the Austrian government. Four hours into the ordeal, Azzawi was allowed into the OPEC building to meet Carlos, who explained the terrorists’ intent with his usual flair.

“We are revolutionaries, not criminals!” Carlos told the ambassador. “We are the Arm of the Arab Revolution!”

“But you are not Arab,” Azzawi observed.

Carlos declined to mention another of the attack’s objectives. The 26-year-old had strict orders, given to him by the mission’s secret sponsor, to murder two of OPEC’s highest-ranking representatives. Marked for execution were Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the charismatic young energy chief for the government of Saudi Arabia, and Jamshid Amouzegar, the interior minister and designated OPEC ambassador for Iran, a country then ruled by pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The killings would have to wait until the final stages of the hostage drama, and yet the young terrorist decided that it would be humane to let the victims know ahead of time.

Yamani was first to learn of his fate. The Saudi official became frightened when Carlos took him by the arm and escorted him from the conference room to a side office. But instead of the shooting he expected, Yamani was showered with compliments, followed by an apology. Carlos had orders to kill Yamani, he said, but he didn’t want to. The terrorist had great respect for “such a man of intelligence,” and he hoped that the Saudi would understand his “noble aims and intentions” and harbor no bitterness.

Yamani felt his anger rise. Was this some kind of cruel joke? He studied the face in front of him, this audacious 26-year-old with the jarring ability to be vicious and charming in the same breath — a stranger who now held Yamani’s life in his pale, uncalloused hands.

“How do you inform me of your intention to kill me, then ask me not to feel bitter against you?” he demanded.

Unruffled, Carlos continued with his monologue. Assuming the Austrians provided the plane as demanded, he said, the terrorists would fly their captives to several Arab capitals, releasing hostages and making political statements along the way. At the last stop, in Yemen, the Saudi official would, unfortunately, have to be shot.

“I am just making you aware of the facts,” he said.

The Carlos sitting next to me, in his mid-70s and visibly in decline, often struggles to remember. It is quickly clear that many facts are no longer in his grasp.

I asked again about the death of the Libyan economist whom he personally shot in the opening moments in Vienna. “I don’t remember that,” he said, seeming genuinely confused.

For some of his deeds, he often has found it convenient to forget. During his first trial in France after his arrest — when he was still in his 40s and the media attention was white-hot — he could remember nothing about the killings of two police officers and an informant in central Paris, a crime for which he first captured the attention of the Western world and earned himself a colorful nickname.

In two subsequent trials, he claimed to know nothing about tossing a grenade into a crowded shopping center in Paris in 1974, or the campaign of bombings and shootings in Western Europe and Lebanon after the arrest of two of his gang members in 1982. The trials resulted in three life sentences, all but guaranteeing that he will never again be a free man.

Still, I press. What details did he remember about OPEC? Who, exactly, had put him up to the hostage-taking in Vienna and demanded the execution of the top Arab officials?

The attack’s sponsor never identified himself, and speculation ran rampant in the immediate aftermath of the events and in the years that followed. A prominent theory, embraced by authors and filmmakers for decades, was that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was responsible.

Evidence that has more recently come to light points in a different direction. Carlos, during my meeting, confirmed the truth: The deadly terrorist attack on OPEC in 1975 was ordered by one of the cartel’s own members: Moammar Gaddafi, Libya’s impetuous autocratic leader.

From my meeting, and in secretly recorded telephone conversations facilitated by Carlos’s lawyer on behalf of Israeli filmmaker Yaron Niski, an authentic story gradually emerged. It begins in the summer of 1975 when a furious Gaddafi was fuming over the diminishing impact of the 1973 Arab oil embargo.

OPEC nations had dealt a staggering blow against Western economies by cutting off oil supplies, demonstrating for the first time the bloc’s power over the United States and other Western countries whose support for Israel had drawn Arab wrath. Global shortages triggered huge spikes in gasoline prices and forced American motorists to wait in endless lines for fuel. Oil-producing countries, including Libya, were suddenly raking in profits on a scale they could have scarcely imagined in the years before the embargo.

Within OPEC, Libya advocated raising prices still further, ratcheting up the pressure on the Western powers and former colonizing countries he despised. But others, chiefly the Saudis and Iranians, favored moderation, fearing the economic blowback that a global recession might bring. When the moderate voices began to prevail, Gaddafi hatched a plot to hire a team of terrorist commandos to do them harm.

The plan to murder the Saudi and Iranian ministers was personal to Gaddafi, and ordered by the Libyan strongman himself. But using Libyans to carry out the plot was too risky, so Gaddafi found a surrogate: a young terrorist with a murderous reputation called Carlos the Jackal.

Carlos would ultimately spend most of his criminal career in a similar fashion: a terrorist for hire, carrying out bombings and shootings on behalf of powerful clients who kept their sponsorship hidden.

The kind of mercenary terrorism he practiced created a template that others would follow.

In recent years, both Iran and Russia have been linked to scores of terrorist acts and attempted assassinations carried out by modern-day jackals. The hirelings include petty criminals as well as mobsters and professional smugglers, many of whom use encrypted communications platforms to accept assignments as part of what experts describe as the violent gig economy. One particularly shocking recent case occurred on U.S. soil: According to U.S. officials, Iran recruited a Brooklyn pipe fitter and convicted murderer for a failed attempt to assassinate an Iranian dissident who had drawn Tehran’s ire. The deal was negotiated by an Iranian agent who befriended the would-be assassin in a New York prison.

Carlos’s stint as terrorist mercenary for Gaddafi ultimately did not end well. As I reveal in my new book, “The Jackal,” Gaddafi appears to have changed his mind about the OPEC operation and abandoned Carlos and his five comrades even as the hostage crisis was still underway.

Carlos eventually fled, making off with millions of dollars in ransom payments, but he was thereafter rejected by Gaddafi and abandoned by his erstwhile Palestinian militant allies. For the rest of his criminal career, Carlos would be mostly on his own. An intense, deep-seated grudge against the Libyan would stay with him, even after decades in prison.

“A crazy guy,” Carlos said of the dictator who was eventually murdered by his own people during the Libyan uprising in 2011. “Because of Gaddafi,” he said, “we almost all died.”

On that wintry day in late 1975, it was all still ahead of him. Carlos had his 62 hostages, many of them VIPs he could later swap for money. Twelve hours into the kidnapping he also had command of a chartered DC-9 passenger jet, which was soon crowded with OPEC ministers and their aides.

Of the multiple dangers that lay ahead, some were apparent in the plane itself. Manfred Pollak, an Austrian pilot who volunteered to fly the aircraft, became alarmed at the sight of oxygen tanks that had been brought aboard to aid a wounded terrorist. Pollak worried about the risk of an explosion and summoned Carlos to the cockpit to issue a stern warning. Even a tiny spark — say, from the lighting of a cigarette, a common occurrence on airliners in the days before smoking bans — could lead to disaster for passengers and terrorists alike, the pilot said.

“I know, I know!” Carlos replied, visibly annoyed. “This is not the first airplane I’ve hijacked!”

“But for me it’s the first time!” Pollak shot back.

Carlos had lied. In his brief terrorist career, he’d done many things, but commandeering a plane wasn’t on the list. His first attempt would be anything but smooth. He’d initially intended to fly to Tripoli, the Libyan capital, but the plane lacked sufficient fuel. So instead he set his sights on Algiers. Later he decided it should be Tunis. Or maybe Baghdad.

The outside world was watching, mesmerized, to learn the fate of the hostages and their colorful captor. Carlos, the narcissistic young killer who had dreamed of gaining international renown as a revolutionary, had at last secured his moment in the spotlight. The other details he would make up as he went along.