His famous face and colorful nickname had spawned a thousand stories.
I knew most of them and understood that many were inventions: bits of Carlos the Jackal lore that over the decades had fused the real criminal - who carried out a series of assassinations and terrorist bombings between 1973 and 1985 - and the mythical outlaw portrayed in books and films.
It was sometimes hard to tell the difference.
So, when a rare opportunity arose to meet the man in person, I leapt at the chance. It’s how I found myself, on a late winter morning last year, face to face with the last century’s most infamous terrorist.
Carlos sat inches away from me in a prison outside Paris, his dark eyes flitting around the dingy visitor’s room from beneath a leather cabbie hat, his knees in tan dungarees nearly touching mine.
I studied the face, now stubbled with whiskers and framed by thinning white hair, that had once leered from the front pages of newspapers around the world. Hardly intimidating now, he smiled charmingly, perfectly relaxed.
Who was this Carlos, really, I wondered?
The man had grown old in prison, and when he spoke, it was with a high, raspy voice that frequently trailed off in mid-sentence.
We prattled a bit about topics that I thought might interest him: old comrades of his I had met; the 2010 Netflix docuseries about his life that he has claimed to detest. But he often appeared confused and struggled to remember details.
Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known by his nickname Carols the Jackal, was once one of the most feared men in the world
The convicted terrorist claims to detest Netflix's 2010 docudrama on his life, starring Edgar Ramirez
I began to wonder what insights the 76-year-old could possibly share, and indeed, if even he could distinguish between reality and the fiction he helped promote in the decades when his name evoked fear and fascination across much of the world.
But then, in a flicker of self-awareness, he said something that startled me.
'I should have died a long time ago,' he said.
The confession felt true. It seemed impossible that such a man could have survived to old age.
I spent months preparing for the meeting. Carlos quickly agreed to it, but the French authorities, who almost never allow the old outlaw to give interviews, relented only after a year of requests, and insisted on stringent controls: no recording device or photographs, and a very limited period of time.
As I pored over old police files, I was repeatedly amazed by the old criminal's ability to commit audacious acts of violence, often killing without pity, and then slip quietly away, repairing to an opulent villa or luxury hotel to live the life of a playboy until he was ready to strike again.
Such a lifestyle simply would not be sustainable now. Even in the relatively permissive 1970s, before intrusive airport security and ubiquitous surveillance, it strains credulity that he managed to get away with so much, for so long.
Before his 22nd birthday, the Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez had been inducted into a Palestinian militant group and survived a brutal civil war in Jordan that killed thousands of his comrades.
He became a terrorist sleeper agent in London at 23, waiting for months for his first assignment, which arrived in late 1973, along with a semi-automatic pistol and five bullets – his overseers didn’t trust him enough to give him more.
As ordered, he tracked down and shot a wealthy London businessman who had drawn the ire of Palestinian militants over his support for Israeli causes. The victim survived, barely, and the mysterious young gunman slipped away unnoticed – the first of many such escapes over a 20-year terrorist career.
Carlos with his partner at the time, Magdalena Kopp and their daughter Rosa, around 1990
Carlos appears in court in 2000 facing charges connected to his bloody attack on an OPEC conference in 1975
A court sketch from 2017 shows Carlos during his French trial for the deadly bombing of a busy shop in Paris
He led a team that fired rocket attacks on airliners at France’s Orly airport, then left the scene to dine at a fine Parisian restaurant that same evening.
He tossed a grenade into a French retail center, killing and maiming shoppers. Then, looking the part of a businessman in his tailored suit, walked over bodies and broken glass and blended with the crowds in the streets.
In 1975 he pulled off one of the most audacious terrorist acts of the era, seizing control of a gathering of OPEC oil ministers in the Austrian capital and taking the entire assembly hostage.
He drove back a police rescue attempt and then was allowed to escape in a hijacked airliner packed with executives he would trade for ransom money.
European and, later, American law enforcement and intelligence agencies chased him around the globe and came close to catching him multiple times.
Other foes pursued him as well. His erstwhile Palestinian allies eventually turned on him and considered killing him but didn’t.
His later employers included ruthless Middle East dictators and East European communist bosses who inevitably grew annoyed with his behavior and disappointed with his failure to complete assignments to their satisfaction.
But, rather than killing him as a mob chieftain might do, they simply allowed him to move on.
Decades later, the old inmate exhibits no sign of remorse for his crimes, and refuses to acknowledge that his attacks claimed innocent lives.
In our conversation, in a visitor’s room a few steps from the solitary cell where he has lived for years, he struggled to explain his extraordinary record for narrow escapes.
At one point as we talked, he asserted a belief that his lucky escapes revealed the guiding hand of divine providence. It was Allah, speculated Carlos, who claims to have converted to Islam years ago.
'I think God has protected us,' he said.
The Jackal has become something of a mythical outlaw, portrayed in books and films including the Netflix miniseries, Carlos
Carlos became a terrorist sleeper agent in London at 23, ordered to track down and kill a wealthy London businessman
He tossed a grenade into a French retail center, killing and maiming shoppers, before disappearing into the crowd
Rescuers pass the a victim of an explosion at Marseille's railroad station. The attack was carried out by Carlos the Jackal
A more convincing explanation is that Western societies of that era were simply not prepared to deal with a terrorist of Carlos’s capabilities and proclivities.
In the early 1970s, despite a wave of hijackings, airports had not yet invested in the kinds of security measures that would stop a terrorist from boarding a plane armed with a gun or a grenade hidden in his clothes.
Border security was relatively lax, and customs officers could be outsmarted by a criminal with a talent for forging passports or making intricately crafted disguises. Law enforcement agencies of the time did not share data about security threats with neighbors as routinely as they do now.
Moreover, Western democracies grappling with international terrorism’s first wave had not yet absorbed an essential truth, one that would seem glaringly obvious in hindsight: Acceding to terrorists’ demands only encourages more terrorism. Again and again, when forced to confront a crisis such as a hijacking or the seizing of hostages, governments simply caved in.
Western countries had not committed resources to create intelligence networks for tracking terrorists, or invested in specialized anti-terrorism units with the weapons and skills to end hostage crises.
Most shockingly, by today’s standards, government ministers often simply allowed terrorists to walk away, and in many cases helped them, providing airplanes, flight crews and even cash to facilitate their escape.
Carlos, during his OPEC caper, was awarded a DC-9 jet as his getaway vehicle and a multi-million-dollar payout in exchange for a promise to end the hostage drama peacefully.
Public outrage forced governments to adopt tougher policies in the 1980s, and spending on counterterrorism surged dramatically following the al-Qaeda attacks of the 2000s.
Yet in recent years, with global threat levels declining, priorities have begun to shift. In the United States, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have shed hundreds of experienced counterterrorism specialists, raising questions about capabilities to detect and deter terrorist plots in the future.
In 1975, after seizing control of a gathering of OPEC oil ministers, he was allowed to escape in a hijacked airliner
The once feared terrorist is now an old man, living out the rest of his life in a maximum security prison outside Paris
Meanwhile, new threats continue to emerge. While al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have been dealt crippling blows, experts since 2022 have documented a rise in 'outsourced' terrorism, linked to Russia and Iran. Both countries have begun secretly hiring criminals to commit acts of terror – from fire-bombings to assassinations – as a way of covertly undermining their geopolitical rivals.
The perpetrators now are modern-day Carloses: mercenary terrorists who can apply for jobs on encrypted social-media platforms as part of what analysts are calling the 'violent gig economy.'
The recent attacks, including this year’s Moscow-backed attempts aimed at former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, argue for toughness and resourcefulness in the face of new kinds of threats.
Carlos may have been the ultimate escape artist, getting away with his crimes with a frequency that, decades later, amazes even the Jackal himself as he reflects on his life from inside a prison.
But his ability to sustain a grisly record of successes for two decades cannot be attributed to talent, or even to divine providence.
It happened because Western societies of that era lacked the will and the means to stop him.
He is now a relic from a different time. But his story serves as a reminder of why vigilance against new, advanced forms of terrorism are still urgently needed.
This article is adapted from the new nonfiction book, The Jackal, by Joby Warrick, published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in the US, and by Swift Press in the UK. Warrick is a veteran national security correspondent who worked for The Washington Post for nearly three decades. He is the author of three other nonfiction books.
