Carlos the Jackal
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal or simply Carlos, is a Venezuelan convict who conducted a series of assassinations and terrorist bombings from 1973 to 1985. A committed Marxist–Leninist, he was one of the most notorious political terrorists of his era, protected and supported by the Stasi and the KGB. After several bungled bombings, Carlos led the 1975 raid on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries headquarters in Vienna, during which three people were killed. He and five others demanded a plane and flew with a number of hostages to Libya.
After his wife Magdalena Kopp was arrested and imprisoned, Carlos detonated a series of bombs, claiming 11 lives and injuring more than 100, demanding the French release his wife. For many years he was among the most-wanted international fugitives. He was ultimately captured by extrajudicial means in Sudan and transferred to France, where he was convicted of multiple crimes, and is currently serving three life sentences. In his first trial, he was convicted of the 1975 murder of an informant for the French government and two French counterintelligence agents. While in prison, he was further convicted of attacks in France that killed 11 and injured 150 people and sentenced to an additional life term in 2011, and then to a third life term in 2017.
Early life
Ramírez Sánchez, son of Marxist lawyer José Altagracia Ramírez Navas and Elba María Sánchez, was born in Michelena, in the Venezuelan state of Táchira. Despite his mother's pleas to give their firstborn child a Christian first name, José called him Ilich, after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, while two younger siblings were named "Lenin" and "Vladimir". Ilich attended high school at in Caracas and joined the youth movement of the Venezuelan Communist Party in 1959. After attending the Third Tricontinental Conference in January 1966 with his father, Ilich reportedly spent the summer at Camp Matanzas, a guerrilla warfare school run by the Cuban DGI near Havana. Later that year, his parents divorced.His mother took the children to London, where she studied at Stafford House College in Kensington and the London School of Economics. In 1968, José tried to enroll Ilich and his brother at the Sorbonne in Paris, but eventually opted for the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. According to the BBC, it was "a notorious hotbed for recruiting foreign communists to the Soviet Union". He was expelled from the university in 1970.
From Moscow, Ramírez Sánchez travelled to Beirut, Lebanon, where he volunteered for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in July 1970. He was sent to a training camp for foreign volunteers of the PFLP on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. On graduating, he studied at a finishing school, code-named H4 and staffed by Iraqi military, near the Syria-Iraq border.
Name origins
When Sánchez joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1970, recruiting officer Bassam Abu Sharif gave him the code name "Carlos" because of his South American roots. Sánchez was dubbed "The Jackal" by The Guardian after one of its correspondents reportedly spotted Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal on the bookshelf of a friend's apartment in which Sánchez had stashed some weapons. The book belonged to a resident in the apartment, not Sánchez, who probably never read it.Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
On completing guerrilla training, Sánchez played an active role for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the north of Jordan during the Black September conflict of 1970, gaining a reputation as a fighter. After the organisation was pushed out of Jordan, he returned to Beirut. He was sent to be trained by Wadie Haddad. He eventually left the Middle East to attend courses at the Polytechnic of Central London, and apparently continued to work for the PFLP.In 1973, Sánchez conducted a failed PFLP assassination attempt on Joseph Sieff, a Jewish businessman and vice president of the British Zionist Federation. On 30 December, Sánchez called on Sieff's home on Queen's Grove in St John's Wood and ordered the maid to take him to Sieff. Finding Sieff in the bathroom, in his bath, Sánchez fired one bullet at Sieff from his Tokarev 7.62mm pistol, which bounced off Sieff just between his nose and upper lip and knocked him unconscious; the gun then jammed and Sánchez fled.
The attack was announced as retaliation for Mossad's assassination in Paris of Mohamed Boudia, a PFLP leader.
Sánchez admitted responsibility for a failed bomb attack on the Bank Hapoalim in London and car bomb attacks on three French newspapers accused of pro-Israeli leanings. He claimed to be the grenade thrower at a Parisian restaurant in an attack that killed two and injured 30 as part of the 1974 French Embassy attack in The Hague. He later participated in two failed rocket propelled grenade attacks on El Al airplanes at Orly Airport near Paris on 13 and 17 January 1975. The second attack resulted in gunfighting with police at the airport and a seventeen-hour hostage situation involving hundreds of riot police and the French Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski. Sánchez fled during the gunfight while the three other PFLP terrorists were allowed passage to Baghdad, Iraq.
According to FBI agent Robert Scherrer, one MIR and one ERP member were arrested in Paraguay in June 1975. These two would have possessed Sánchez' phone number in Paris. Paraguayan authorities would then have handed over the information to France.
On 26 June 1975, Sánchez' PFLP contact, Lebanon-born Michel Moukharbal, was captured and interrogated by the French domestic intelligence agency, the DST. When two unarmed agents of the DST interrogated Sánchez at a Parisian house party, Moukharbal revealed Sánchez' identity. Sánchez then shot and killed the two agents and Moukharbal, fled the scene, and managed to escape via Brussels to Beirut.
In November 1976 the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs claimed Sánchez and his wife were shot to death in central Bogota on 24 November.
OPEC raid in Vienna
From Beirut, Sánchez participated in the planning for an attack on the headquarters of OPEC in Vienna. On 21 December 1975, he led a six-person team that attacked the meeting of OPEC leaders. The team took more than 60 hostages and killed three: an Austrian policeman, an Iraqi OPEC employee, and a member of the Libyan delegation. Sánchez demanded that Austrian authorities read a communiqué about the Palestinian cause on Austrian radio and television networks every two hours. To avoid the threatened execution of a hostage every 15 minutes, the Austrian government agreed and the communiqué was broadcast as demanded.On 22 December, the government provided the PFLP and 42 hostages an airplane and flew them to Algiers, as demanded for the hostages' release. Ex-Royal Navy pilot Neville Atkinson, at that time the personal pilot for Libya's leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, flew Sánchez and a number of others, including Hans-Joachim Klein, a supporter of the imprisoned Red Army Faction and a member of the Revolutionary Cells, and Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, from Algiers. Atkinson flew the DC-9 to Tripoli, where more hostages were freed, before he returned to Algiers. The last hostages were freed there and some of the terrorists were granted asylum.
Expulsion from PFLP
In the years following the OPEC raid, Bassam Abu Sharif, another PFLP agent, and Klein claimed that Sánchez had received a large sum of money for the safe release of the Arab hostages and had kept it for his personal use. Claims are that the amount was between US$20 million and US$50 million. The source of the money is also uncertain but, according to Klein, it was from "an Arab president". Sánchez later told his lawyers that the money was paid by the Saudis on behalf of the Iranians and was "diverted en route and lost by the Revolution".Sánchez left Algeria for Libya and then Aden, where he attended a meeting of senior PFLP officials to justify his failure to execute two senior OPEC hostages – the finance minister of Iran, Jamshid Amuzgar, and the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Zaki Yamani. His trainer and PFLP-EO leader Wadie Haddad expelled Carlos for not shooting hostages when PFLP demands were not met, thus failing his mission.
After 1975
, Gerhard Mertins, Sergio Arredondo and an unidentified Brazilian general traveled to Tehran in 1976 to offer a collaboration with the Shah regime to kill Carlos in exchange for a large sum of money. It is not known what actually happened in the meetings. In September 1976, Carlos was arrested, detained in Yugoslavia, and flown to Baghdad. He chose to settle in Aden, where he tried to found his own Organization of Armed Struggle, composed of Syrian, Lebanese and German rebels. He also connected with the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. They provided him with an office and safe houses in East Berlin, a support staff of 75, and a service car, and allowed him to carry a pistol while in public. From here, Carlos is believed to have planned his attacks on several European targets, including the bombing of the Radio Free Europe offices in Munich in February 1981. Several journalists have claimed Carlos' organisation was also backed by the Romanian government of Nicolae Ceaușescu which provided them with a base, weapons, and passports, and commissioned the Munich RFE offices bombing which conservative author Alfred S. Regnery claimed was part of an unsuccessful hunt for a Romanian defector, former General Ion Mihai Pacepa. Romanian authorities denied ever sponsoring Carlos, and no relevant documents had been discovered in Romanian archives as of 2021.On 16 February 1982, two of the group – Swiss terrorist Bruno Breguet and Carlos's wife Magdalena Kopp – were arrested in Paris. The car was found to contain explosives. After their arrest, a letter was sent to the French embassy in The Hague demanding their immediate release. Meanwhile, Carlos unsuccessfully lobbied the French government for their release.
In an attempt to force the French to free the two, France was struck by a wave of terrorist attacks, including: the bombing of the Paris-Toulouse TGV 'Le Capitole' train on 29 March 1982 ; the car-bombing of the newspaper Al-Watan al-Arabi in Paris on 22 April 1982 ; the bombing of the Gare Saint-Charles in Marseille on 31 December 1983, and the bombing of the Marseille-Paris TGV train on the same day. In August 1983, he also attacked the Maison de France in West Berlin, killing one man and injuring twenty-two other people. Within days of the bombings, Carlos sent letters to three separate news agencies claiming responsibility for the bombings as revenge for a French air strike against a PFLP training camp in Lebanon the previous month.
Historians' examination of Stasi files, accessible after German reunification, demonstrates a link between Carlos and the KGB, via the East German secret police. When Leonid Brezhnev visited West Germany in 1981, Carlos did not undertake any attacks, at the request of the KGB. Western intelligence had expected activity during this period. Carlos also had relations with the leadership of Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia. The Stasi asked Carlos to use his influence on ASALA to tone down the Armenian group's anti-Soviet activity.
With conditional support from the Iraqi regime and after the death of Haddad, Carlos offered the services of his group to the PFLP and other groups. His group's first attack may have been a failed rocket attack on the Superphénix French nuclear power station on 18 January 1982.
These attacks led to international pressure on Eastern European states that harboured Carlos. For over two years, he lived in Hungary, in Budapest's second district. His main cut-out for some of his financial resources, such as Gaddafi or George Habash, was the friend of his sister, Dietmar Clodo, a known German terrorist and the leader of the Panther Brigade of the PFLP. Hungary expelled Carlos in late 1985, and he was refused sanctuary in Iraq, Libya and Cuba before he found limited support in Syria. He settled in Damascus with Kopp and their daughter, Elba Rosa.
The Syrian government forced Carlos to remain inactive, and he was subsequently seen as a neutralized threat. In 1990, the Iraqi government approached him for work and in September 1991 he was expelled from Syria, which had supported the American intervention against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.