Carlos the Jackal: Terrorist to some, revolutionary to others

A file picture taken on March 7, 2001 at the Paris courthouse, shows Venezuelan terrorist Illich Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos (C), arriving for his appeal against French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere. AFP PHOTO / JACK GUEZ

What you need to know:

The world’s terror mastermind of the ’70s and ’80s is in the news again, this time for crimes committed in France. His lawyer-cum-wife says the current trial is politically motivated while his president Hugo Chavez refers to his as a liberator. For a man who enjoyed the support of numerous heads of states, life has taken a rather bleak turn

Amid tight police security and swarming paparazzi, a burly man descends the staircase out of a courtroom wearing a wide grin and waves a clenched fist to the small crowd of curious onlookers.

To the younger spectators, the face stirs nothing; but to the folks who were old enough in the ’80s and ’70s, the man evokes memories of exploding cars, hostages and hijackings.

His name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known to the world as “Carlos the Jackal”. Although modern-day commentators have branded him a “dinosaur remain” whose methods fade to child’s play compared to today’s terror tactics, The Jackal still ranks as one of the most prominent terrorist masterminds the world has ever witnessed.

Already serving a life imprisonment sentence for the last two decades in France for killing two French undercover agents, the Venezuelan Marxist was ordered back to the courtroom in May by anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere on charges of “killing and destruction of property using explosives” in France in 1982 and 1983.

Three other members of Carlos’ gang, being tried in absentia, are Johannes Weinrich, Christina Frohlich and Ali Kamal Issaw.

While Germany has refused to extradite Weinrich and Frohlich, Palestinian authorities have claimed that Issaw is still “on the run”.

Lawyer and wife

A panel of anonymous judges is expected to deliver the ruling mid-next month. If found guilty, The Jackal and his co-accused will end up facing long sentences.

Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, his lawyer and the wife he married while in prison, has alleged that her husband’s trial is politically motivated and based on evidence dug up from dusty secret service archives.

But, in his trademark defiance, Carlos boasted in an interview with a Venezuelan newspaper of committing more than a 100 attacks that claimed more than 2,000 lives during his terror career.

However, he exonerated his group from any wrongdoing by alleging that most of his victims were imperialists, and that innocent civilian deaths were very minimal.

“There were very few. I calculate that they were fewer than 10 per cent,” Carlos said. “So out of 1,500-2,000 killed, there were not more than 200 civilian victims.”

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1949 to a Marxist father and a Catholic mother, Carlos the Jackal shot to fame during the height of the Cold War by instigating a series of bombings and high-profile hijackings.

Many believe constant contact with his father’s socialist literature converted young Sanchez into a keen student of communism, with his imagination stirred up by South American communist heroes of the day such as Che Guevara, Camillo Torres and Carlos Merighella.

His influential father’s connections were to prove vital for connecting Carlos to groups and institutions that would mould him to what his biographers have called “the Osama bin Laden of his day”.

One of these favours was getting enlisted in Camp Mantanzas in Cuba, where he studied guerilla warfare, bomb and weapon skills under Soviet instructors.

After his parent’s divorce, Sanchez and his brothers ended up in London, where his father’s connections proved vital again, this time securing the radical Marxist a place at the then prestigious Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow — which, according to the BBC, “was a notorious hotbed for recruiting foreign communists to the Soviet Union”.

But being a troublemaker was by this time his second nature, hence his expulsion in 1970 for joining a street protest organised by Arab students came as no surprise.

But his stay at the Moscow institution proved pivotal in his career since this is where he met elements from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a group that preferred the use of violent means like plane hijackings and bombings in their advocacy for an independent Palestinian state.

Day of the Jackal

Sanchez enlisted in the PFLP in 1970 and was given field name Carlos due to his South American roots.

He was dubbed “The Jackal” by British newspaper The Guardian after one of its reporters allegedly spotted Fredrick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal among the fugitive’s belongings.

Many believe the book, and the two movies derived from it, was actually inspired by the terror mastermind’s dramatic lifestyle.

Ramirez Sanchez’s reputation in the PFLP soared during the Black September war that pitted Palestinian organisations against the Jordanian Army, where he is said to have committed acts of “exemplary bravery”.

While living in London, Carlos had developed a taste for women and wine, which was to be part and parcel of his bloody career until his arrest in Khartoum in 1991.

Unlike Osama bin Laden, whose portraits shows a turbaned and bearded character, Carlos the Jackal cultivated the image of a tough looking playboy with a taste for Havana cigars, alcohol and Che Guevara berets.

But the Casanova image belied the venom and zeal that drove the then most feared terrorist to mastermind the murder and maiming of thousands.

Carlos was associated with all the major terror events of the ’70s and ’80s, from the killing of 11 Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics, the bombings of numerous Jewish interests in Europe and the take over of the French Embassy in The Hague to the hijacking of an Air France jet on its way to Uganda by Palestinian militants that led to the famous raid on Entebbe by Israeli special forces.

“When one wages war for 30 years, there is a lot of blood spilled... mine and others,” the Jackal said in 1997 during his trial in France. “But we never killed anyone for money; but for a cause, the liberation of Palestine”.

In most cases he perfected methods that Al-Shabaab is said to have adopted in Kenya recently. He would walk into an establishment, throw a grenade and then disappear into the crowd.

In one such case targetting Edward Sieff, then president of Marks & Spencer and a respected member of the London Jewish community, Carlos walked into Sieff’s house and opened fire. The lucky man survived.

Unbridled bravado

However, The Jackal cemented his place in the history of terror and earned a global reputation for ruthlessness and unbridled bravado when, leading a band of six misfits, he stormed an Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meeting in Vienna, killed the security detail and took 70 people hostage.

Shocked, the Australian government succumbed to all the group’s demands that included airing political messages against Israel and providing a plane to Algeria.

Sanchez and his gang released the hostages in Algiers, where he reportedly collected a cool $1 million (about Sh94 million at current rates) from former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who had supported the OPEC hijack. Several PFLP agents later claimed that Carlos diverted huge sums of money collected from Arab hostages to his personal accounts.

OPEC never held another meeting for 25 years and PFLP suspended Carlos for failure to execute the Saudi Arabian oil minister and his Iranian finance counterpart.

From there on, The Jackal became a freelance terrorist working for the highest bidder in the Eastern Block and other Arab nations opposed to the West.

He formed a group of Marxist mercenaries called Organisation of Armed Struggle that was composed of Syrian, Lebanese and German rebels; and shifted his base to the communist East Berlin.

First wife

The Stasi, the East German secret police, is said to have provided him with an office, safe houses and a support staff of 75 in Berlin, from where he conducted raids against numerous French interests in and outside France.

Many have connected his acceptance in Germany to the fact that his first wife and accomplice Magdalena Kopp, with whom they have a daughter, hailed from that country. Kopp was later arrested in France in possession of explosives and sentenced to several years in prison.

Examination of Stasi files after the unification of Germany in 1991 revealed that Sanchez had connections with the Soviet KGB, probably as an agent.

The documents also implied that he might have worked, at a fee, for other security apparatus in the Eastern Block to assassinate dissidents living abroad.

While efforts by the American CIA and the French secret service to capture the terror mastermind had proved futile for many years because of the shifting Cold War alliances, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991 proved to be the final nail in The Jackal’s coffin.

Forced to change houses

He was forced to change houses and countries as frequently as he changed faces and identities on official documents, and that is how he eventually ended up in Khartoum.

Having learnt of the radical Marxist’s whereabouts, French and US intelligence agencies traded deals with the Sudanese government that led to his capture in 1994.

This is how it happened:

After undergoing a minor testicular operation in a Khartoum hospital, Sudanese officials duped him that he needed to be moved to a villa for protection from an assassination attempt and would be given personal bodyguards.

One night later he was in a Paris-bound plane, having been tranquilised and bound in his sleep by his Sudanese bodyguards.

In December 1997, Carlos the Jackal was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Clairvaux Prison. After converting to Islam, he married his lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre in 2001.

Two years later, he published his prison memoirs entitled Revolutionary Islam in which he defends the use of violence in search of justice and voices support for slain Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, whom he crowns as his successor.

Besides writing, the legendary terror mastermind whiles his life in jail through occasional hunger strikes and writing letters to prominent people, including US President Barack Obama.

In 2005, Sanchez launched a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights that his long years of solitary confinement constituted “inhuman and degrading treatment”.

The plea was rejected. Fellow countryman and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez praised Carlos the Jackal in a 2009 speech where he said the man was not a terrorist but a “revolutionary fighter”.

Contacts with dictators

During his heyday as a terrorist-for-hire, The Jackal is said to have had contacts with the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Fidel Castro, among other dictators of the Cold War era.

Apart from the famous Fredrick Forsyth novel Day of the Jackal from where the terror legend got his name, many books have been written and movies done on him.

Billy Waugh’s Hunting the Jackal, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, Charles Lichtman’s The Last Inauguration and Robert Ludlum’s Bourne Trilogy are just a few examples of books in which Ilich Ramirez Sanchez features prominently as an antagonist.