Carlos the Jackal and the Return of Terror for Hire | Joby Warrick

[00:00:00] Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies. Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This episode is presented by Matt Fulton and produced by Chris Carr.

[00:00:30] Hello everyone and welcome back to Secrets and Spies. In a prison outside Paris, there's an old man whose memory is failing. He repeats himself, he forgets names, but he still needs you to know he was once the most famous terrorist in the world. 50 years ago, that was true. In 1975, a 26-year-old in a black beret walked into a meeting of the world's oil ministers in Vienna, announced,

[00:00:53] I am the famous Carlos, and took the whole room hostage. Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, Carlos the Jackal, then spent two decades as the face of a new kind of terror, staged for the cameras, and carried out for whoever would pay. My guest today argues that Carlos was never the true believer he played, just a narcissist in love with his own legend, and that the model he pioneered, terror for hire, is back today in the attacks Russia and Iran are running across the West.

[00:01:20] Only this time, their trigger men don't thirst to be remembered. Here to walk us through Carlos' bloody career as two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and former Washington Post national security correspondent, Joby Warrick, author of The Jackal. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Take care. The opinions expressed by guests on Secrets and Spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast.

[00:02:00] Joby Warrick, thanks for coming on. It's great to have you. I've been looking forward to this one. Matt, it's good to be with you. It's a pleasure. Thank you. So, we're here for your new book, The Jackal, The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the world's first super terrorist for folks watching. That's what it looks like. There it is. You got copies, too. There we go. Good. Put it up there for folks.

[00:02:26] So, yeah, we're here to talk about your book, The Jackal. I really loved it. And I think part of why is you didn't just reconstruct Carlos from, you know, the archives, news reports, which I think a lot of people listening, you know, watching know of him. You kind of you went and interviewed him, which a lot of people haven't done that.

[00:02:48] And you open the book with that. The man, as he is now, frail, forgetful, losing the thread of his own stories in his cell outside Paris. And then you snap us back 50 years to Carlos as a 20-something in a black beret, walking into a room full of the world's oil ministers and announcing, I am the famous Carlos.

[00:03:11] Let's sketch that younger man for us. Who was Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez's Venezuela kid who somehow made himself the face of a Palestinian cause he had no obvious claim to? Yeah, yeah, it is. If you're trying to sketch it out and you're drawing a line from A to B where he ends up, it's a pretty crazy curve.

[00:03:32] Because, as you said, here's a guy who ends up in his life becoming a face of the Palestinian terrorist movement or the most recognizable individual in that universe. But he's not a Palestinian. He's not even from that part of the world. He's from another continent. He's from Venezuela.

[00:03:49] Venezuela. And how he got from there, from a childhood that was basically pretty well-to-do. His father was a lawyer, upper middle class, but also a fervent Marxist, which explains a lot of his early thinking and ideology. But, you know, just to cut a long story short, how he did this was he moved himself to the Middle East because he thought this was a place where he could learn to become a revolutionary.

[00:04:16] And that's what Carlos most wanted to be. He didn't care if it was for the Palestinians or for someone else, but he really saw himself as having a destiny to be, you know, kind of a Che Guevara sort of figure, someone who's, you know, involved in revolutions and throwing off tyrannical governments and, you know, defeating imperialists and colonialists. And his shortcut to getting to that life was to move himself to the Middle East and to join up with the Palestinian faction.

[00:04:43] And it happened just by accident of timing to arrive just as a civil war was about to break out. So, young Carlos sort of the adventurer, you know, would-be, you know, revolutionary, just becomes a real guerrilla because he gets caught up in a real war. You call him the world's first super terrorist, you know, I guess sort of maybe structured around like terror built for television. What do you mean more by that?

[00:05:11] Yeah, and it's a bit of a, I must say, we had many, many discussions about the subtitle of the book and what is the meaning of super terrorists. And I typically don't like descriptors like that. We were trying to convey a sense, and this is the sort of the accuracy behind the title, is this is the first person, sort of the international terrorist who becomes globally renowned. People know his name. He is not just associated with one movement.

[00:05:40] He's not, you know, for a while he's a Palestinian terrorist, but after a while he becomes associated with a lot of other groups and a lot of other leaders, everyone from Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein to the Syrian leader to East European, you know, communist governments. So, he's the first one who kind of breaks out of this very traditional mold of being, you know, a terrorist working for an organization and being fairly anonymous to being on the world stage. There's never really been anyone like that who pulled that off.

[00:06:08] And there were a lot of bumps along the way, but our man, young Carlos, actually accomplished it in a remarkable way. Did he invent a playbook others consciously copied, or was he the first specimen of a type that kept recurring? Yeah. Yeah. He had some innovations, but I do think that he was part of an error, part of a kind of a wave of terrorism that came along

[00:06:34] and innovated in a way that later generations of terrorists would find interesting and perhaps worth copying. And a couple of things that became important were the idea of going outside your base, going outside the area where you have a grievance against the oppressive government or whoever you're fighting against, and sort of make a statement on the international stage.

[00:06:56] Go to places that have nothing at all to do with your fight and try to attract as much media attention as you can. Now, Carlos's bosses, his first, you know, supervisors or managers in a group called the PFLP, it's kind of a radical left-wing Palestinian group at the time, they had a couple of ideas. And one of them was you strike, you know, not just the enemy, but you go outside your territory.

[00:07:24] You send hijackers to Amsterdam or Rome or, you know, and hijack not just Israeli planes, but TWA and, you know, just anything that they could get into. You draw as much attention as you can, and you just have the sort of the central idea is that the more attention we can get people to pay to our topic, you know, a subject that at the time, you know, the world wasn't really caring that much about, the better it is for us.

[00:07:49] And it turns out, ultimately, it backfired a bit, at least a bit, because as it turns out that, you know, people get very annoyed when their plays are being hijacked or when, you know, they're trying to be forced to care about a subject that really isn't on their radar screen. So in the end, it hurts the Palestinian cause more than it helps. The claim at the heart of your book, I think, is that with Carlos, you know, the killing, the rhetoric that he put out, served his ego, not the cause.

[00:08:17] You know, it's a narcissist in a revolutionary's costume. You're also right that you can't point to a single thing that he actually did for the Palestinians he claimed to be fighting for. So in a man like that, I guess, how do you tell the difference between ego instead of belief and ego on top of belief? Like, where's the evidence that there was nothing underneath? Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is that it becomes very clear throughout Carlos's life that he doesn't really care that much about ideology,

[00:08:46] that he's willing to jettison it, especially once he gets kicked out of the Palestinian movement and kind of goes off on his own. He's willing to, you know, work for any cause that he'll get paid for. But it's also the case that he just, he has to make himself the center of whatever he's doing. So when he goes in this sort of epic hijacking or hostage-taking incident in the mid-'70s involving OPEC, and maybe we'll talk about that later. But, you know, he doesn't do it anonymously like, you know, a terrorist group typically would do.

[00:09:15] Maybe they'll, you know, put out a letter or kind of announce who they are and what their demands are. Carlos goes into this hostage-taking situation and declares, I am Carlos. You may have heard of me. You don't, make no mistake, I'm the real guy. And he does things like this throughout his career. He sends letters with his thumbprints on them because he just wants to make sure that everybody knows it's really him.

[00:09:38] So, you know, it's, it's a lot of it is in service of Carlos' ego and in service of Carlos' idea of having a very good time, which is to have adventures, but also have lots of women chasing after him and lots of money and, you know, high living hotels, you know, top flight, you know, top shelf alcohol. You know, this was all who Carlos was. And you can't, as the book points out, you can't point to a single Palestinian that was helped because of what he did. Right.

[00:10:05] The men who came after him and inherited those theatrics, you know, Baghdadi in this leader of ISIS, in this really kind of Napoleonic moment, crowning himself caliph in Mosul on camera, extremely rare for him. Bin Laden holed up in his compound, this frail old man wrapped in a blanket, watching old tapes of himself like a, you know, washed up high school football star obsessed with his own image. I mean, these were vain men and genuine believers.

[00:10:34] The vanity rode on top of that conviction. So if, you know, narcissism, if we say that narcissism is a thread running through all of them, doesn't that make Carlos sort of the odd one out, you know, rather than like so much the prototype everyone learned from? Well, it is true that there is, I think, to be a leader of one of these organizations, you have to believe in yourself and perhaps see yourself as being destined in some way. I think of Zarqawi, who was sort of the godfather of ISIS, and I wrote a book about him called Black Flags.

[00:11:03] But he really believed that God had picked him for this role, that he was going to be the sort of vanguard of this caliphate and the people who came behind him like Baghdadi, rather, would, you know, implement sort of the structure. But he really saw himself as divinely appointed in some way. And Carlos, you know, he talked to him, and as I had a chance to do, and you find out that he does feel that he's divinely touched,

[00:11:30] but only because he survived all these things that nobody should ever have lived through, that he managed to kind of get away with what he did for 20 years before anybody caught up with him. And he sees some kind of strange, you know, divine hand in that. You know, you can certainly argue with his interpretation of providence. But, you know, he was, I think what set him apart was it wasn't just kind of a sense of feeling destined or that he was an important personality in history. I mean, he really wanted to be a celebrity.

[00:11:58] I think this made him different from the others because, you know, whatever bin Laden wanted, he didn't want to really be a rock star. Carlos liked being a rock star, and he kind of lived it to the hilt. So, I mean, you mentioned this bit previously, the operation that really put Carlos on the map, at least in the public image and probably on the radar of, you know, every major intelligence service in the West, where we really see that showmanship and the ego is a 1975 attack on OPEC's headquarters in Vienna. What happened there?

[00:12:28] This was a real unusual one. And I've covered terrorism for my, you know, most of my career. And I've, there've been certainly some bloodier ones, more ambitious terrorist attacks. This just for pure chutzpah, for just audacity. Audaciousness. Yeah, it just, you can't, you can't beat this. So what it does, the idea that Carlos and his, you know, his group, his leaders had, and there turns out there are other people involved, including a very senior Middle Eastern

[00:12:57] person who sort of comes up with the idea as well. But the idea is we're going to hijack OPEC, sort of the cartel, the international oil cartel with 13 of the largest oil producing countries in the world. And we're going to walk into their headquarters during their annual meeting, and we're going to kidnap the entire thing. And this is going to happen in the middle of Vienna, Austria. So Western capital, you know, fairly significant, you know, security military presence. Didn't expect this to happen. They weren't prepared for it.

[00:13:26] But just the idea that you could walk into something like that and kidnap 60 some individuals. So it's all the oil ministers and all their aides and all their secretaries and corral them all in a room. And then over a period of many hours where they're negotiating, kind of talk the Austrian government into giving them a plane with pilots and a tank full of fuel and essentially permission to take his hostages anywhere he wanted to go. And this case turned out to be North Africa.

[00:13:56] And, you know, long story short, he ends up releasing them and collecting a lot of money. So he became rich out of the thing. Like millions, tens of millions. Tens of millions up to 50. There's between 25 and 50 seems to be kind of the realm. Carlos won't admit to any of it because it was kind of a dangerous thing to do is to take money from your terrorist bosses. But he pulled it off and after it was all over, he was internationally famous because he did announce himself in the beginning. I am the famous Carlos.

[00:14:25] And he was swaggering around with his, you know, leather jacket and his beret, sunglasses, submachine gun, you know, really trying to look the part. And, you know, it was on every tabloid front page in the world. And so in that sense, he really got, it was self-fulfilling. I am the famous Carlos. Oh, he certainly was after that was over. This was Gaddafi that bankrolled that operation, was it? Yeah. And this has been kind of been a hard thing to tease out because there've been all kinds of theories about who was really behind it.

[00:14:54] There was a film that came out about Carlos in 2010. So the theory became this was an Iraqi organization. And there is some evidence that suggests the Iraqis may have been aware of it. But the idea, the thing was bankrolled and supported by Muammar Gaddafi. So it gets into, you know, here, nothing to do again with Palestinians, really. It was Muammar Gaddafi's anger against other Arab countries for not, you know, tightening

[00:15:24] the screws on the West with oil prices. In the mid-70s or early 70s, they had, you know, had this international oil embargo that drove up prices around the world. Any of us who are old enough can remember some long lines at gas stations and just spiraling prices for gas. And, you know, OPEC caused that. And, you know, Libya wanted to keep the pressure on. Saudi Arabia and some of the other countries thought, let's kind of cool it a bit because we don't want to strangle the sort of global economy.

[00:15:53] That's not good for us either. And so in this little fight over gas prices, Muammar Gaddafi got the idea, well, let me just stage a terrorist attack. And kill a couple of oil ministers, to make my point, but to do it covertly because Gaddafi didn't want anyone to know he was responsible for it. So it took, you know, much, much later and additional evidence to come out. And also Carlos's own testimony, and believable in this case, confirming that, yeah, that was Gaddafi's idea. And we pulled it off.

[00:16:22] And then he kind of abandoned us in the final stages and almost had us killed. Let's take a break and we'll be right back. Wadi Haddad, the PFLP chief who at this time was essentially Carlos's boss, if we could say

[00:16:52] that he had one. And he shared that objective of he wanted the Saudi and Iranian oil ministers executed as part of this, right? Yeah. And the idea was, and this was essentially about oil, but also it's because the oil embargo happened because the Arab states wanted to kind of protest Western support for Israel after the 1973 Yom Kippur war. So this is one of the series of, you know, major wars in between Israel and its Arab neighbors,

[00:17:20] the big one in 67, another one in 1973. And the oil embargo was to punish United States for bankrolling the Israeli military machine. And so they wanted to make that point too. Wadi Haddad, who was the head of the PFLP and Carlos's boss, wanted to sort of make the point, wanted to kind of punish moderate Arab states for being weak on Israel. And so that was part of the message that was being delivered.

[00:17:46] And the one way they wanted to deliver that message was not just by hijacking OPEC, but they wanted to execute two senior leaders. They wanted to kill the Saudi minister of oil, young guy named Yamani, and then also the Iranian oil minister who was, at the time, the Iranians were US allies. This is when the Shah was still in power. So the idea, you kidnap the whole thing, but you take these two guys aside and execute

[00:18:13] them. And Carlos agreed to do it, but didn't ultimately. And it's, you know, the book explains this very torturous journey in which they're popping around different places in North Africa. And finally, Carlos caves in to demands from the Arabs who say, you know, let these guys go, don't kill these two people, and you'll be a rich man. And the money started to make a lot of sense to Carlos. So he ended the thing and pocketed his money and just ran off to have a good time.

[00:18:41] I think what's really interesting to me about that whole episode, because it kind of, when you look at it, it runs against the grain of how the mythology around Carlos usually kind of discusses him. You know, it's this like prized weapon for hire, super competent, you know, but at the same point, like very capable, but at the same point, he seems like a nightmare to actually have to use, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And bumbling. I mean, it's, you know, it's hard to say.

[00:19:11] I mean, if you look at any terrorist group and their track record, do they bat like 500, you know, 400 or, you know, 500, you know, how successful really are they? Well, Carlos messes up a lot. And in this incident with OPEC, and he manages to pull off the hostage taking and hijacking, gets all his hostages away. But then he fails to execute, fails to kind of fulfill the number one part of his mission, the sort of top command, kill these two ministers.

[00:19:40] And he doesn't do it. And his bosses get so angry with him that they kick him out of the Palestinian movement entirely. So he's essentially exiled. You know, they talked about maybe even killing him as punishment. But this is the end of his career for the Palestinians. But it happens again and again. There's this recurring theme where Carlos tries to blow something up and puts his bomb in the wrong place, you know, shoots a rocket to try to knock down a plane. The rocket misses. Yeah. And we could talk about some of these.

[00:20:09] But there is this sense that despite his ambition and, you know, arguable bravery, he screws up a lot. And it gets him in trouble constantly, including with his sponsors. It seems like a relic of the time, maybe. I mean, I was really struck in your book, growing up mostly post 9-11, the ease with which this kept happening, you know, like the plane hijackings.

[00:20:37] There's a line in there early on in the book where you mentioned, you know, they just sort of got around. Airlines just sort of got around to putting up like metal detectors and everything. It just seemed like such a quaint kind of like, yeah, you think you do that at some point. I don't know. But there's a lot of that, like the whole idea of using aviation and aircraft like the Black September Revolutionary Airfield, you know, bringing all these planes into Jordan and everything like that kind of model that we saw.

[00:21:07] Of course, you know, like Bin Laden and Ramzi Youssef with the Bajinka plot and everything, like you really kind of saw the beginnings of that there and what Carlos and Wadi Haddad were sort of plotting, you know. Yeah. There's no end of ambition. And you see all these, you know, so the later attacks are kind of echoes of things that happened in the 70s, including the one that you mentioned where, you know, it's the idea of hijacking multiple planes at the same time in a choreographed way.

[00:21:33] And in this case, bringing them all to the same place and taking all the passengers out and turning them into hostages in a big TV drama. That happened in September 1970. It was Wadi Haddad's idea. And it was, you know, quite impressive as a logistical operation in the sense that you could send terrorist teams to multiple cities and they hijack planes and they have them all brought to the same place. And then you have this spectacle that the world's media has to cover, you know, decades before 9-11 happened.

[00:22:02] These guys are doing that kind of thing. And as you rightly note, their ability to get away with it is just remarkable for two reasons. One is airport security is just laughable compared to what it later became. It ratcheted up quite a lot after 9-11, of course. But before, you know, in the 70s and 80s, you could go to an airport with a bomb or a grenade hidden inside your clothes or a handgun and nobody would catch you.

[00:22:32] You could rely on being able to get onto a plane. You could probably get away with a fake ID, a passport. You know, there were just so many ways that you could work around the system. And if you succeeded in pulling off the mission, you're probably going to get away with it. And you're probably going to get away with a plane and maybe some money and some hostages to, you know, to exchange for prisoners. Because European nations, Western nations in general, had not yet learned the lesson

[00:22:58] that if you cave in, if you give in to terrorist demands, you're just going to invite them to come back and do it again. But you see again and again, sort of the capitulation by the democracies. And if I could just mention one just wild incident to me was this, it's a hijacking of a Lufthansa plane. This is again, one of Wadi Haddad's operations where this, it was a shakedown for money. Wadi Haddad, you know, had his ideology, ideological views, but he also really wanted cash as well

[00:23:27] to run his operation. So he demanded $5 million from Lufthansa. And Lufthansa decided very quickly, oh yeah, yeah, we'll give you the money. But because the demand was to give them cash and mix currencies, they had to scramble around to try to get the Italian lira or French francs or whatever the sort of list of currencies was. So they get the money together and it just put in a big satchel and dropped off to the Palestinians along with a note on top that says, sorry, we couldn't get one of the currencies

[00:23:57] that you wanted. So we were $500 short. Please accept our apologies. $500. $500 short. And just can you imagine today? It's, it just was a completely different world. Yeah, yeah, it's, we've, we've come a long way in, in many respects. That's definitely one of them. Something else really that, that, that's interesting, I think was new ground that you charted in this book.

[00:24:23] A lot of new archival material has come out in, in, in the last few years. It really kind of exposes, you know, of course, after the OPEC hit, Wadi Haddad kicks him out of PFLP and he goes to Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain as sort of, you know, for hire gun for the Soviet bloc. Lives there much of the rest of his career, but a lot has come out that sort of put that

[00:24:49] relationship with the Soviet client, Carlos's relationship with the Soviet client states in a kind of interesting perspective. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that. Yeah, it is. It's really interesting. And there's a lot of speculation in the U.S. Some of this emerges during the Reagan era where the intelligence community, the leaders of the community really believe that every bad thing in the world was connected to Soviets somehow, including all the terrorist groups. They were either getting instructions or getting money or weapons.

[00:25:19] Turned out to be true in some cases. And one case was really true was with the PFLP. This was Wadi Haddad and this far left, relatively, well, let's say secular and Marxist terrorist organization. They actually recruited Wadi Haddad as an agent. There's archival evidence of that. It went up to top levels of KGB.

[00:25:45] There's discussion of Wadi Haddad in particular and his code name and what the plans were with him. So there was this relationship that did exist. The Soviets had a different view of Carlos, though, because he'd actually, they knew him because he'd gone to school in Moscow as a youth to university and did poorly. His grades were bad. He was constantly in trouble. He got his girlfriend pregnant. He ended up getting kicked out. And part of the archival record is the KGB saying, we're not interested in this guy.

[00:26:14] He's too much of a troublemaker. So they passed over on him. But later on in Carlos's life, after he gets kind of booted out of the Palestinian movement, he finds it very convenient to locate in Eastern Europe because he sees the communist governments as ideological allies. Surely they'll accept him or welcome him as a hero. What really happened is they were surprised in the beginning. They didn't invite him to come, but they were fascinated by him. And they decided, well, yeah, we'll let Carlos live here and we'll let him stay in very expensive

[00:26:44] hotels and run amok in town, in several cases, banishing weapons and even shooting agents at one point, walking around Budapest in a white linen suit so he's not being discreet at all. But they were sort of charmed by him and in some cases ended up coordinating with him or at least allowing him to do attacks in the West with their full complicity and sometimes with their sponsorship.

[00:27:12] The Romanians in particular decided that Carlos looked like a very good agent that they could use. So they hired him to do some jobs in the 80s. Right. Interesting you bring that up. So one of his contract jobs relates directly to today's issue of hybrid warfare. So in 1981, his people bombed the offices of Radio Free Europe and Munich for the Romanians for Kaučescu's regime. The target, of course, you know, broadcasters, journalists, dissidents, people that Kaučescu

[00:27:41] wanted silenced. Forty years later, modern regimes have the exact same target list. So in many ways, the jobs Carlos pioneered are sort of more in demand than they've ever been. Yeah, I think he was very much on the cutting edge there because Carlos, one thing that I think is undeniable in terms of his influence was he kind of proved the feasibility of a

[00:28:08] kind of terrorism in which if you are a Middle East dictatorship or East European government or autocracy and you wanted to lash out at your enemies but you didn't want to take responsibility or have any visible links to the crime. One way to do that is to hire a criminal professional, someone like Carlos, who knows how to do the job, knows how to work in the shadows, knows how to communicate covertly and can pull off

[00:28:36] pretty significant bombing or attack of some kind, silence your critics and there's no blowback for you. So in Carlos' case, one of his big attempts, as you said, was to try to silence radio for Europe and that, as people probably know, was this huge broadcaster started by the United States, funded by U.S. State Department money with hundreds of journalists working in Munich,

[00:29:01] West Germany at the time, broadcasting real news and information across the Iron Curtain. And it was all the local languages from Russian to Czech to Bulgarian, Romanian and all the Eastern European governments hated it and particularly Ceaușescu just wanted it silenced. So he sends his guys to meet with Carlos and they offer him money and said, you know, can you do this for us? And Carlos takes a look at the job and said, yeah, I can pull up radio for Europe for you.

[00:29:31] And in the book goes on to explain there were some wrinkles. It didn't go quite as everyone planned, but Carlos did, you know, blow up a very big bomb and put Radio for Europe out of commission for a day. And pretty soon they were able to get back on air and it wasn't much of, had no long-term effect, but Carlos proved, I guess, that he could do it. But again, you look at what's happening today and there's a remarkable trend.

[00:29:58] You know, I've been, I've written about this myself, that you've seen less activity from the jihadi groups, Al Qaeda, you know, we can never discount them completely, but their leadership has been decimated. ISIS appears to be, you know, just a shell of what it once was. But the Russians and the Iranians have a really interesting active terrorist program that's going on right now involving hired hands, you know, people who are, you know, non-citizens,

[00:30:25] people outside their usual orbit that they contract to do jobs in the West. And it can be everything from, you know, an attack on an Iranian dissident. This just happened a couple of years ago in New York where the Iranians hired a convicted murderer, an American, a guy who was from Brooklyn, you know, spending time in prison for a murder conviction, recruited him to try to hire a prominent Iranian critic who was living in New York.

[00:30:51] Paid him a good chunk of money, you know, set up the operation and then put the guy, you know, sent him off to do the job. He ends up, you know, failing. But that has, that same model has been repeated dozens of times. Russians and the Iranians both finding it in their interest at times to hire a mercenary, to hire somebody to do something that kind of thing that Carlos did back in the 70s and 80s. Let's take a break and we'll be right back.

[00:31:32] Carlos in his time, of course, was a star. You know, his entire method that was, he made himself the story. A lot of the, a lot of the people that we see roped into these operations now, you mentioned the, the attack or the attempted attack in, in Brooklyn. There's a Iranian dissident broadcaster in London who was attacked by random Romanian thugs. You know,

[00:31:58] Hell's Angels have been recruited into this as well. Swedish teenager recruited on, on Snapchat. It's sort of like the people who are being roped into this now are kind of like the opposite of that, you know, like faceless, disposable, no manifesto. It's, it's in, in, in a way it's like the anti-Carlos. Like what, what do they actually inherit from him in that, in that tactic? You know?

[00:32:23] Yeah. I think that Carlos was, was valuable because the name did mean something. So if you have someone who named, who named, named Carlos to Jackal on your payroll that, that can potentially, you know, strike fear in, in, in your, in your adversaries. But for the most part, you're right. It's not, it's better to be anonymous. It's better to hire somebody who has professional experience, but is not looking to kind of hog the limelight. And in most cases, you know,

[00:32:50] who would be? It's really kind of unusual that Carlos was so determined to have this kind of face forward on all these occasions. So yeah, what you see more recently, it's, it is, it's a mix of, of, you know, some of the people who are hired for these, these outsourced terrorist attacks are, are, are fairly low level thugs who can just be paid a few thousand dollars and sign up for something on, on telegram. It's been called, it's not my term, but violent gig economy. So you can apply for a job

[00:33:20] and, and, and, and get paid. And there are some individuals who are participating, who are, you know, part of organized crime groups, you know, they're structured, well-known, but the individual players, yeah, the individuals are not well-known. And even the, you know, sort of the bigger drug cartel organizations with few exceptions, they're, you know, these are, these are not sort of household words to most people. And that seems to suit the Iranians and Russians

[00:33:47] more. It doesn't help them to have somebody with a, with a famous name. It's better to hire somebody who's a pro, but someone you've never heard of before, because you can probably get away with it, you know, more, more easily. It's almost like sort of what we're seeing with this, with, with these attacks now, it's, it's not exactly Carlos repeated, but Carlos kind of corrected, you know, like that same model, but with the one thing that kept breaking down around him,

[00:34:13] the ego, the need to, that, that, the being a loose cannon, you know, making it about himself, like that flaw engineered out. That's, that is a good way to look at it. So this was a successful test case in the seventies and eighties where you got, uh, where you're trying out a new model for, for international terrorism. It worked, but it sure had a clunky side. The clunky

[00:34:36] side was the guy who at the middle of it, who was just too, too much trouble in many cases. And you do see as time goes on that everybody gets tired of Carlos at the end. Everybody ends up breaking with him and sitting and packing and telling him, you're never going to come back here again. So he wears out his welcome everywhere in the world. So it does seem like today, some of the, the, you know, the terrorist attacks that have the same general model, they've kind of ironed out

[00:35:05] that wrinkle. You don't see any massive egos caught up in anymore. That's a good thing. Yeah. As you said, he sort of wore out his welcome everywhere. The Hungarians expelled him in, in, in the late eighties. He ends up in Khartoum in, in Africa. And I think it's, it's very, I don't want to say poetic, but there's a, there's a good kind of narrative there that the kind of third act of his career, the twilight of his career, he's a, I don't know if you want to speak

[00:35:35] about this physically in pretty bad shape. It's a condition that I would, I would not want hearing it described for sure. And kind of, you know, looking for work washed out, what washed up, but still hunted by everybody. You know, the CIA is on his tail here, the Israelis too. I was Yeah. This is kind of a, for Carlos, a pretty sad chapter. He ends up after being booted from every other place on earth and, and having sort of humiliating experiences, trying to,

[00:36:04] trying to worm his way back into various places, been just being turned away again. He goes to one place in the world where somebody like him can, can restart. And that place at the time was the city of Khartoum in Sudan. And it's, you know, we think of it now and we think of the, sort of the decades of war and, and just, just, uh, you know, a place of, of intense misery and, and hardship. Back then Khartoum was the place to be if you were an international terrorist

[00:36:33] organization. So it was almost like you, the shopping mall or guys in the CIA called it the Superbowl of terrorism because Osama bin Laden was there. He was still fairly unknown. The 1993, he had a compound, he had, uh, had, you know, his pretty large entourage of people figuring out what they were going to do, you know, post, uh, you know, after their, their being kicked out of Saudi Arabia. Hamas, which was still a new group was there. Hezbollah was there. Abu Dhabi Nadal,

[00:37:02] who was like a bloodthirsty Palestinian terrorist that a lot of people forgotten about, was just probably the bloodiest of his time. They were all sort of co-linked, located in this one place. So it was literally the, you know, the one city in the world where Carlos could walk down the street and, and, and nobody would give him a second look because he was, he was well within his element. And it was interesting. He tries to, you know, establish ties with some of these groups,

[00:37:27] including with bin Laden. What's interesting, there's this very tiny moment in the book where the two meet each other before in Lebanon, and this is at the height of Carlos's career where he's trying to look around for kidnapping, this possible kidnapping victims. And the idea that was seized at the time was let's hijack, let's, let's kidnap somebody from this wealthy bin Laden family. They've got lots of

[00:37:53] money and they're, they send their kids to various places for the summer. And so Carlos was sent to, to Lebanon to scout out the bin Ladens. And he saw and met a young Osama who was only 17 years old and came back to his bosses saying, you know, this is pretty good. I think we could easily kidnap some of these kids and, and, and ransom them for a few million dollars. So it was like almost a collision of these two, you know, the, the terrorists and the future terrorists coming

[00:38:18] together in this very weird way. But in, in Africa that, you know, in Khartoum at the, at that time, Carlos could be anonymous. He didn't, you know, didn't use his real name. He had an assumed name, but everybody knew who he was. He had a nice villa. He had a new wife and he was living, you know, fairly comfortably in Khartoum, despite it's, you know, it's, it's, it's troubles. You could still, you have a pretty decent meal at one of the hotels in town and there were nightclubs

[00:38:43] where a guy like Carlos could go drinking and try to meet women despite even being married. This was kind of, this is his pastime was, was chasing women. So he had a fine time until the CIA figured out that he was there. And once they knew that Carlos was in their town, the local station, then sort of, sort of, it was an operation was started. We're going to find them. Once we find them, we're going to figure out a way to take him in, take him in.

[00:39:12] It really makes you wonder also like how different, I mean, that, that, that, that, that story that you mentioned about that, that crossover between him and, and bin Laden really makes you think how, how different history could have been if, if he had, you know, kidnapped a young, a teenage bin Laden, you know? Yeah. That is one of those pivot moments. And there's several of those, but that's, that's one that strikes me because I guess the whole world could have ended up in a, you know, on different course. Everything would be different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, after chasing Carlos through

[00:39:41] these archives, these old case files, interviewing associates, people who, who hunted him, you finally got what almost no one else gets. You sat down across from him in his prison cell outside Paris last year, I, I believe it was. What was it like to be in a room with him now? Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of time to anticipate because it is, it is a very rare thing to get to interview Carlos. And it's not because Carlos doesn't want to be interviewed

[00:40:10] because he'll, he'd say yes at the drop of a hat. I sent a note to one of his lawyers, you know, can I, can I meet you? And Carlos was sure, sure. Come Paris, you know, I'll, I'll meet you in my cell. We'll have a conversation, but the French do not want him to have the microphone. They don't want to send him out and, you know, let him, you know, just blather on about, you know, this sort of this, his interpretation of, of, of history because it's, it's offensive,

[00:40:37] frankly, for the French. Carlos killed a lot of French people. He was convicted of murder multiple times. And in those trials, you know, Carlos being Carlos made a, made a big scene and was, you know, did, you know, conducted his own defense and just, you know, claimed that he was innocent and that, or that he was justified and just, just really, just lots of really incendiary language and French are, you know, quite tired of him. And so they don't allow him to do interviews

[00:41:05] typically. And in my case, it was, it was really restricted, no cameras, no recording equipment, you know, one hour and change is, is what I had with them. And then there was, the other rule was there was not going to be a Q and a style magazine style interview where I basically ask open-ended questions just to let him kind of fill in the blanks. So I could observe him. I could get a sense of the man. I could use some quotes from our conversation just to kind of illustrate points, but it was,

[00:41:31] it was quite restricted, but, but yeah, so those are the terms I agreed to. I traveled over to Paris and to, drove to this little prison outside Paris. It's a town called Poissy. And if I can describe it, you've got this really old building that you could walk around it and you wouldn't know it was a prison. It used to be a convent, you know, centuries ago. And then in the forties, when the Nazis took

[00:41:55] over part of, part of France, the Gestapo held this facility and used it as a place to torture and, you know, and kill partisans. And now it's a prison for, you know, for lifers like Carlos. And, you know, I get there, I, you know, I'm anxious. Is he, is he going to follow through? You know, maybe he's going to be sick or just claim he doesn't want to meet me the last minute. So I'm in this little tiny visitor's room and down the hall comes, you know, I hear, hear the voice. And then

[00:42:21] I see the guy and he's, it's a little bit, I have to say a little bit underwhelming because, you know, I've, I've studied his career. I kind of know what he was like when he was vibrant and, you know, in his prime. And now he's 75, 76 now. And, you know, a little stooped, a little slow. And then when you get to talk to him a lot slow, it turns out that his, his mind is fading.

[00:42:45] He, he's very forgetful. He loses his dread in conversation. There's many things he claims not to remember at all. And so, you know, I didn't expect to get a lot of just, just revelatory material out of it. And it's a good thing because Carlos is not up for that anymore. He mostly just was happy to brag about a few things, you know, you know, declare that he had no remorse for any of these attacks that he's accused of. And then you just walk away, just feeling, wow, this is pathetic on

[00:43:14] so many levels, including the fact that the guy still lives in this universe where he's this superhero and, you know, one of history's great figures. And in the impact of his life, you just, except for the people that he killed, it's, you can't point to really much of anything. Certainly, you can't point to much good that he did for any of the groups that he claimed to be fighting for during this life. Let's take a break and we'll be right back.

[00:43:55] Throughout your career reporting on terrorism, and of course, you've done tons of it, but you've also studied, you know, the men who came after Carlos on ISIS, on his leadership, Al Qaeda, that whole, that whole generation of jihadists. We can think of Carlos as unique in a way for his time, especially

[00:44:17] when I sort of look down that line, you know, Carlos to Bin Laden, to Zarqawi, to Baghdadi, I see the same streak of vanity running through all of them, right? The obsession with image, with destiny, the inflated sense of their role in history, the performance of the self. Do you think it's a real pattern or is there kind of a personality trait that keeps recurring in these figures or is Carlos like genuinely his own species?

[00:44:47] Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really interesting. And you could also, you could imagine a psychological study looking just to that, that point, maybe there'd be a good university course at some point. I think there are different flavors of this, of this, you know, egocentric, you know, individual at the center of the organization. And in each case, they are kind of thrust into a role that they didn't necessarily seek, you know, Bin Laden's a bit of a, a mix. He was kind of this, you know,

[00:45:16] son of this very wealthy Saudi engineer who, you know, finds his mission in, in Afghanistan fighting communist and then feels in some way that he was kind of touched by destiny and was fighting this holy war. And, and Zarqawi, the ISIS godfather was, had been a, you know, a thug, a delinquent, spent time in Jordanian prisons and ends up, you know, getting this vision for himself that he was

[00:45:44] destined to fight superpower and, and move himself to Iraq to wait for the Americans to come and, and really had, had us figured out in a way that, that, you know, maybe more so than, than some of our own leaders did. But again, saw himself as, as an important historical figure. I think each of them saw themselves to get touched in some way that the, the sort of the, the massive ego at the center is, is indispensable. I think it's, it's a reason that some groups succeed and others don't because

[00:46:10] you need to have this driving personality that maybe is a bit crazy or maybe a lot crazy in order to kind of get people to do what they, what they want. And then these, this strange flavor, the variant on this is, is someone like Carlos who, you know, is again an accidental figure in many ways, didn't set out to be exactly who he became, but believed he was destined for this role, but also just, just felt that

[00:46:37] his own ego was, was, was really the center in a way that kind of like more typical of a criminal narcissist as we think of those people who have no ability to empathize with others. And part of the reason the ideology is so, so thin with him is because he, he, he could really project into sort of thinking of the problems of other people. It was just really about Carlos and his world and his needs. That makes it a

[00:47:03] little bit different, but I do think there is this commonality of, of kind of very big and a little bit or a lot warped personalities that drive these movements and make them succeed over time. Yeah. So as we, as we, as we close out here, you know, any, any student of terrorism, I think will quickly see that it's a, it's a tactic, right? That will always be there in a way, but something that

[00:47:30] is unique about it is that it constantly reinvents itself where every, you know, so often kind of morphs into something new. It's always dangerous in a, in, in, in its own way, but it's, it's sort of unique to the, to that time period, right? That, that you're looking at it. So we could go from, you know, Carlos to the big jihadist groups that at their peak, you know, ISIS, Al Qaeda,

[00:47:55] organize themselves as somewhat like nation states or like fortune 500 companies to now like the gigification of terrorism, the, the open source of it. That's its own sort of insidious, dangerous thing that, that Western security services all over the world. They're really sort of struggling to, to confront in, in this next iteration. So maybe we should leave people with this, you

[00:48:20] know, knowing everything, you know, about the man who pioneered modern terrorism in so many ways and everything that you're seeing in the threat that's reemerging now that he kind of was kind of like ahead of his time in this way. What worries you most about the version of Carlos? That's, that's coming. I, that, that sort of sequence you describe is something I've been struck by a lot because

[00:48:45] there is, each generation seems to learn on, on, from the last. They've, they've find ways to get around security safeguards that are, that are kind of erected to stop terrorism. They find sort of innovative ways to get around them. East group historically, at least over the last half century is more bloodthirsty than the last. I mean, Carlos's colleagues in the beginning, they, they took pains not to, to kill a lot of people. There's sometimes the deaths that happened were inadvertent. They

[00:49:14] really wanted to make a point. They wanted to get on camera. They didn't want to kind of have blood baths. You know, Al Qaeda had a completely different idea and was willing to kind of have a large, large scale sort of mass casualty events. And then ISIS was just pure evil in the sense that just as, just, you know, the more, the bloodier, the more brutal, you know, the more they reveled in it and the more they were willing to put it on camera. There'd be horrible video, you know, videotape

[00:49:41] beheading or crucifixion or just, just. Yeah. Burning's. Yeah. Burning's. I mean, I, I had to, as part of my research for that book, I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at just really shocking stuff. And then the new wrinkle that came after that is just, it's, it's the most insidious in that it's the hardest to stop because sort of the model was this, sort of this, you know, you know, inspired terrorism, ISIS particularly people were inspired by ISIS to commit an atrocity,

[00:50:10] is that it's, it's kind of crowdsourced. There's no, there's no admission fee. There's no membership. You don't have to join the group first and get indoctrinated and then get told what to do. You can kind of commit an act of terror by yourself in their name and you get credit for it. You kind of maybe posthumously become part of the brand. And, and that means that, you know, any disaffected

[00:50:35] person with, with a, with a loopy idea about making himself famous or kind of, you know, getting revenge against the world because your life didn't turn out so well, you've got a convenient excuse. You can become an ISIS fighter. And, and we've seen so many just awful events that have taken place because people latch onto that, that very attractive, you know, perverted idea. And so,

[00:50:59] you know, we've seen that, you know, run its course. You still occasionally have those attacks and it's, you know, because there's no shortage of people who, who, who were driven by whatever forces in their lives to do something that, that desperate and that terrible. But then you have to wonder like now what is the next way? Well, you know, throw AI into it. And that's something that keeps me up at night lately is to, well, you know, terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS both were enamored by

[00:51:27] the idea of making biological chemical weapons. AI is, is, you know, chat TPT or just whatever, you know, platform they can, they can manage to harness is, is potentially a way for them to become much more powerful, to create more potent weapons, to just sort of brainstorm more, more creative ways to get around security, more clever ways to make bombs and places to put them. So,

[00:51:51] a whole new opportunity is arising. You've got, and now you've got these, you know, multiple groups that have reasons to want to commit acts of terrorism. Lots of people who may want to, to commit an act and, and, you know, do it on their own, become a lone wolf, lone wolf profile, but, but looking for an opportunity and, and AI just, just opens endless routes to doing very bad things. And that's, that's the part that's scary as I think about where we're going right now.

[00:52:21] Yeah. And I think as we, you know, hold that idea of what's, what's coming to, I mean, I also guess that we're recording this a couple of days after the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And I think it's, it's a good time to sort of remember that. I mean, you can even also look at, you know, October the 7th and, and, and Hamas and just a truly shocking horror of the details of, of that attack, you know, in, in that way, leading up to that, there was a thought that

[00:52:48] I think you could build, literally build a wall around Hamas and that would keep it back, you know, keep it at bay, you know, behind over there, they're shut off. We don't have to worry about it, but it's like terrorism itself in that way. It's, it's like water. It will find a crack to seep through. And if not, if there isn't a crack already there, it'll wear down that wall and make its own way out, you know, you can't contain it forever.

[00:53:14] Yeah. With tactics that might be very primitive as it turns out in the case of Hamas, low tech, but maybe something that's, it's high tech and something we haven't even thought of yet, but there's always a way and, and it's, it requires constant vigilance. And that was the theme I was just in New York last week for the 9-11 celebrations and, you know, spending time with, with guys who fought the last battles with Al Qaeda. And this is the thing that this,

[00:53:40] or this theme that they kept kind of repeating and emphasizing is you can't slacken your, your attention, your focus. This is, it's going to happen again. There's going to be some new way that, that somebody is going to try to do this. We can't divert our, our, our attention because we're focused on other things. We really, really have to commit significant resources and, and train personnel to looking at this problem and trying to anticipate the next,

[00:54:07] the next 9-11 or, or whatever the terrorists come up with. Absolutely. Well, Joby, this has been a real pleasure. Thank you for the book and for coming on. I know you got it behind you there. I'll hold it up a little closer for folks watching there. It's called The Jackal, The Rise of Carlos, the World's First Super Terrorist, and it's out now. We'll have links to it in the show notes. Yeah. Thank you again for coming on. This was

[00:54:34] great. Real, real honor to have you with us with your career and your body of work. Thanks, Matt. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

[00:55:12] Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.