When Terrorism Was First Fashionable

T errorism is once more en vogue. College students, third-rate musicians, and second-rate actors have come out unabashedly in favor of a terror group committed to the destruction of the world’s sole Jewish state. The West is wracked with self-doubt and extremist movements aided by foreign funds and a dangerous utopianism.

Readers of Joby Warrick’s new book, The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist, might note that what is old is new again. Warrick, a longtime Washington Post correspondent, has authored several bestselling books on modern terror groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. But his latest work examines the career of an altogether different type of terrorist.

Carlos the Jackal is a name from the distant past, before the era of suicide bombers and the unadulterated slaughter of 9/11 and October 7. Carlos was born Illich Ramirez Sanchez in 1950, the son of a wealthy Venezuelan lawyer whose love of communism led him to name three of his sons Vladimir, Illich, and Lenin — all after the communist dictator.

Sanchez was born into privilege and accompanied his mother to England after his parents’ divorce. At his father’s urging, he went to college in the Soviet Union and briefly studied at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Illich, Warrick notes, “refused to apply himself academically, and he developed a reputation as a troublemaker.” A considerable allowance from his father gave him the means to buy expensive whiskey and champagne that most of his fellow impoverished students couldn’t afford. This “greatly enhanced his popularity on campus,” especially with women.

Inspectors from the school found empty booze bottles and a naked prostitute hiding in his dorm room closet. Illich participated in an unauthorized protest outside the Venezuelan Embassy, got a girl pregnant, and had what the KGB called an “appalling record as a student” — these were the final straws for the young Venezuelan.

Illich was sent packing. But some of the hallmarks of his later career — the hard partying, narcissism, and a sort of flippancy — were already evident. He viewed the Soviets as stodgy, and inspired by Che Guevara, he went looking for a Marxism of “the swashbuckling kind.”

He found it in the Middle East. A Lumumba classmate had talked passionately about the Palestinian “cause,” sparking his interest. Illich traveled to Lebanon on a whim and without knowing a soul there. He soon linked up with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Soviet-backed terrorist group led by the bookish terror mastermind Wadie Haddad. Illich was trained in their camps in Lebanon and Jordon before eventually returning to London.

When a family friend asked where he had been, he bragged: “I’ve been in the Middle East, learning how to kill Jews.” Indeed, Illich’s first target was Joseph Edward Sieff, a prominent British businessman and the vice president of the Marks & Spencer retail chain. Sieff was targeted purely for being Jewish and donating to Jewish and pro-Israel causes. Sieff survived being shot in his own home by Illich, but the young terrorist had demonstrated his commitment to his superiors.

Additional terrorist attacks followed, including throwing a grenade into a commercial center in a busy Parisian district and two failed attempts to shoot Israeli airliners at a Paris airport. While these attacks were bumbling, they displayed a callous disregard for innocent lives. Eventually, the police tracked him down at a party in one of his girlfriend’s houses that functioned as a safehouse. There, the young terrorist murdered two police officers along with their informant, his old boss, and wounded another detective.

Investigators found several of Illich’s passports, including one named “Carlos,” a small arsenal, and Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 bestseller The Day of the Jackal. The tabloids had a field day. Illich was now “Carlos the Jackal” and came to believe the myth of a super, globe-trotting terrorist that the press invented. Indeed, he would use his newfound infamy as a calling card and a way to attract foreign patrons, from the communist bloc of Eastern Europe to Arab autocracies in the Middle East.

In December 1975, Carlos and six other terrorists took ministers at the OPEC conference in Vienna, Austria, hostage. “I am the famous Carlos, you know who I am,” he told them. That operation sealed Carlos’s legend, but its ignominious end — and longstanding rumors that Carlos pocketed millions in bribe money — led to his ouster from the PFLP.

Carlos became a terrorist for hire, offering his services to the highest bidder. His ideology had always been more about Carlos than communism, and his sponsors soon grew tired of him. He evaded capture for nearly two decades, adding to his mystique.

Carlos had been the unlikely avatar of the mostly secular and Marxist-inspired terrorism of the 1970s, embodied by hijacking planes and taking hostages. By the time that French and American authorities nabbed him in Sudan in the 1990s, a new era of terrorism was underway.

CIA authorities tracking Carlos made note of new up-and-coming terrorists in Sudan whose religious piety and austerity contrasted sharply with the hard-partying Venezuelan. Osama bin Laden and other Islamists, fresh from their jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, were using Sudan as a training ground. They were the future, and Carlos was the past. Or so it seemed.

The naked narcissism and privilege, Marxism, and antisemitism are back, and we are only beginning to reap their consequences, from college campuses to the halls of Congress. In his well-written book, Warrick tells the story of both a man and an era that birthed our own.