OPINION:
Carlos the Jackal is 76 years old and has been in French prisons for three decades. When Joby Warrick went to see him, the old communist had an explanation for his long survival: “Allah has protected me all these years.”
Marxists, Islamists and those who fuse the two insist that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Still, discredit where discredit is due: It was Reuters’ global head of news who invoked that phrase in a memo to his staff after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been President Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, rebutted such moral equivocation. “No cause and no grievances can justify the murder of other people’s children,” I recall her telling me.
I despise terrorists, but I am embarrassed to acknowledge that they fascinate me the way some people are fascinated by venomous snakes.
I have read and even written a little about Carlos over the years, but now I know much more about him thanks to Mr. Warrick’s new book, “The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist.”
Mr. Warrick is a superb storyteller, but my purpose here is not to review his biography. Instead, I will touch on some of the lowlights of a celebrity mass murderer’s career to emphasize the links connecting communists, Islamists and terrorists.
The man who would become Carlos the Jackal was born in Venezuela, the son of a wealthy Marxist lawyer who named him Ilich Ramirez Sanchez — a tribute to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, also known as Lenin.
In the 1960s, Sanchez moved to London with his mother. From there, he went to Moscow, where his father had arranged for him to attend Patrice Lumumba University.
Studious he was not. In 1970, he was expelled for excessive drinking, womanizing and partying.
His next port of call was Beirut, where he showed up at a newspaper office he knew was a gateway to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP, Mr. Warrick notes, was “regarded by Western governments as the most dangerous and ambitious terrorist group in the Middle East.”
Bassam Abu Sharif, newspaper editor and PFLP recruiter, asked Sanchez why he wanted to join the Marxist-Leninist organization. His reply: “I want to fight the enemy.”
Asked who that would be, he said flatly: “The Israeli capitalist imperialists.”
For two years, Sanchez drew no high-profile assignments. Then, in December 1973, he entered the London home of Joseph “Teddy” Sieff, former chairman of Marks & Spencer — an elegant retailer where Sanchez liked to shop — and shot him in the face. The prominent Jewish businessman somehow survived.
In 1974, Sanchez bungled an attack on the London branch of an Israeli bank. Later that year, he threw a grenade into a shopping arcade in Paris, killing two people and injuring 34.
On June 27, 1975, three officers of France’s domestic counterintelligence service arrived at a Paris apartment where they believed Sanchez was staying. A young woman answered, and then, from the bathroom, appeared a young man who the officers suspected was their quarry.
He calmly told them they were mistaken, displaying a passport identifying him as Carlos Martinez from Peru.
The woman said she would play some Latin American music for the guests. Sanchez offered whiskey.
He then pulled out a semiautomatic pistol and opened fire. Two of the officers were killed; the third was seriously wounded. Sanchez fled.
A month later, British police raided a London flat he had used as a safe house. He was not there, but among his belongings was a copy of “The Day of the Jackal,” Frederick Forsyth’s novel about a globe-trotting assassin. The Guardian ran a headline dubbing the fugitive “The Jackal.” The name stuck.
On Dec. 21, 1975, Carlos the Jackal led a six-member commando team from the PFLP’s breakaway operations wing in an assault on an OPEC ministers’ meeting in Vienna. He proudly announced: “I am the famous Carlos! Maybe you’ve heard of me!”
The attackers killed three people and took more than 60 hostages.
Mr. Warrick thinks the operation was likely commissioned by Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who was furious that the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo — intended to punish America for assisting Israel during the Yom Kippur War — had petered out.
By 1993, Carlos had set up housekeeping in Khartoum with a beautiful new Jordanian bride. Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad all had camps in or near the Sudanese capital. Osama bin Laden was living there too, in a villa with four of his wives.
French and American spies tracked him. In 1994, while he was recovering at Ibn Khaldoun Hospital from surgery on a varicose vein in his scrotum, apologetic Sudanese soldiers grabbed him and put him on a plane to France. Trials and life sentences followed.
Last year, Mr. Warrick visited Prisoner No. 11939, who proudly claims to have killed 83 people by his own hand, to have given orders resulting in at least 1,000 additional murders, and to have slept with more than 400 women. He married three of them, the last his French — and non-Muslim — attorney, whom he wed in a Muslim religious ceremony in a French prison in 2001.
In 2003, he published “Revolutionary Islam,” a 273-page manifesto in which he praises bin Laden and the attacks of 9/11 and instructs revolutionaries of all stripes — leftists, atheists and others — to accept Islamist leadership.
His book did not become a bestseller, but today its call to action — that the revolutionary left should march behind Islamists in the struggle against Americans, Israelis, capitalists and imperialists — is being taken up on campuses and city streets by young people who have never heard of Carlos the Jackal.
The old communist-Islamist must be pleased.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
Follow the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.