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Introduction: Carlos the Jackal

Harold Jaffe

Portly and graying in a cream polo shirt and wine-red ascot, he sauntered into the courtroom looking more like an aging Latin lounge singer than the most notorious international terrorist since Che Guevara.
     But Carlos the Jackal quickly dispelled any doubts about his revolutionary zeal.
     "My profession is professional revolutionary," he asserted in his raspy tenor.
     "My domain is the world.
     "My mission is to transform your dreams into nightmares."

     Why do you say that about nightmares and such? What do you have against ordinary people, Carlos?
     It's on behalf of ordinary people that I say it.

     It was only now at the start of his trial for the 1975 killing of two French intelligence agents and a Lebanese comrade, that the public has had a close-up look at the man, who, while eluding authorities for decades and carrying out attacks that by some estimates left 123 dead and countless numbers discomfited.
     Existed only in grainy black and white photographs.
     The insouciant, overweight terrorist acknowledged that his given name was Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez.

     How did you get that weird name, Ilyich?
     My parents were Communists. They admired Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. I have a brother named Lenin and another named Vladimir.
     Hell of a name for a Venezuelan kid to be saddled with. Ilyich.

     Carlos the Jackal gained his international notoriety as the Cold War-era mastermind of deadly bombings, assassinations, and hostage dramas.
     He was reputed to have conceived the 1975 seizure of OPEC oil ministers, and he was involved in the 1976 Palestinian hijacking of a French jetliner to Entebbe, Uganda.
     Which climaxed with the celebrated Israeli commando raid.
     Subsequently turned into an award-winning motion picture produced and directed by Spielberg, I believe.
     In the process Carlos the Jackal got to rub elbows with the ruthless Ugandan dictator and prodigious sex maestro Idi Amin.

     Is it true what they say about Idi Amin?
     What who says?
     Six-feet-seven, 340 pounds, and hung like a Brahma bull in stud? The only tyrant who's supposed to come close to him -- and he's at least a few light years behind -- is Castro of Cuba.

     Early in his career, Carlos the Jackal was also linked to the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
     Though Mossad, the Israeli secret service, later reported that it was Gaddafi, the Libyan warlord, and not Carlos the Jackal who was involved.
     Like Carlos the Jackal, Idi Amin, and Castro of Cuba, the outlandishly costumed Gaddafi fancied himself a sex virtuoso, with however the crucial distinction of being radically under-endowed.
     According to Mossad.
     After eluding capture for decades, Carlos the Jackal is being tried for the Paris killings of two French investigators and an athletic Arab.
     Formerly a comrade in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who the Jackal suspected was an informer.
     With thinning hair and graying mustache, the paunchy Venezuelan once known as a ladies' man pranced, preened, and beamed at the six women in the nine-member jury as they took their places.
     Drawing muffled laughter from the standing-room audience.
     According to the prosecutor, a razor-thin, sallow-visaged bachelor named Yves-Alain Chabrol, the Jackal had a "very utilitarian concept of sex, namely to seduce those creatures who could serve him in his terrorist projects."

     You have been portrayed as a fat child who was desperate for attention. Is it true that fellow students in Venezuela called you "El Gordo," the fat one?
     I didn't go to school in Venezuela. I went to public school in London then to Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow.
     One theory is that your relentless sexual predation was an overcompensation for your obesity.
     I was fat and I'm still somewhat fat. That's all there is to it.
     Is it true that you bedded more than seventeen hundred females in your time?
     My time is now. I'm not yet erased. History is still being constructed.
     So you expect to somehow get out of prison and continue your philandering.
     I expect to infect your dreams tonight.
     Not me. I surf the net. I play and romp on my website. But I never, ever dream.

     Carlos the Jackal faces 30-year prison terms for each of the three killings.
     He was convicted in absentia in 1992, but French law requires a retrial when and if the defendant is physically present.
     Repeatedly describing himself as a "professional revolutionary in the old Leninist tradition," Carlos the Jackal insisted he was fighting "for humanity, for the people of Palestine."
     And against "the McDonaldization of civilization," allegedly propagated by "barbaric America and Zionist state terrorism."

     You have been called an anti-Semite. Is that a fair characterization?
     Aren't Palestinians Semites?
     You tell me.
     If I tell you you will distort it or forget it.

     French sharpshooters were deployed around the courthouse for the weeklong trial and all entrances were equipped with body scanners.
     Unlike the spectacular OJ Simpson trial in the US, L'Affaire de Jackal was neither being televised nor reported on the Internet.
     Which, experts say, is an expression of France's unremitting hostility to high technology.
     Which France rather simplistically identifies with the United States.
     With whom France has had a hate-love affair since the US liberated them from the Nazis.
     With whom the French--not known for their moral stamina--were conveniently playing footsie.
     The jurors, their alternates, and the three judges were each appointed two bodyguards, a chauffeur, and a bulletproof Citroën sedan.
     Extravagant protection from an absurdly narcissistic, grossly overweight, revolution-spouting gasbag at the end of his tether.
     Once known as a crack marksman with a flair for Latin dancing and seduction.
     Coddled son of a wealthy Communist lawyer-father and opera-singer mother.
     Aficionado of vintage French wines and Havana cigars.
     As proud of his delicate hands and feet as of his idealization of the colonized and oppressed.
     Carlos the Jackal was, indisputably, the international terrorist superstar par excellence.
     The Jackal fell hard after French agents captured him in Khartoum, Sudan.
     (With the complicity of Sudanese leftists).
     Drugged him, dumped him in a body bag, and spirited him to Paris, depositing him in solitary confinement in a high-security detention center north of the city.

     It's been reported that you were especially close to your mother, Kirsten, the opera singer.
     She was a cabaret, not an opera singer. Her name was Concepción.
     Sorry. I confused your diskette with Danny the Red's. The overweight Maoist terrorist. Who despised Germany as much as you despise the US. Concepción, your mother, modeled herself on Marlene Dietrich, didn't she? The whole bisexual thing. Was that an influence on your own sexuality, which reputedly has not been strictly limited to females?

     Carlos the Jackal lived behind the Iron Curtain, hence beyond the grasp of Western governments, for years.
     But life on the lam became increasingly onerous.
     With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, his East Bloc protectors faded into the masonry.
     Which coincided with the already-corpulent Jackal putting on weight, especially around the hips and buttocks.
     And with his once theatrical blue-black Latin hair falling out in clumps.
     When his main Middle Eastern protectors no longer had any use for him, the Frogs made their move.
     Carlos the Jackal, who speaks Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and bumbling French, has spent his time behind bars boning up on French law and studying the language in preparation for the trial.
     French legal procedures are complex and time-consuming.
     And if you are not fluent in their fetishized language you might as well throw in the towel.

     Have you made satisfactory progress with your studying of French law?
     I'd make better progress if they supplied me with the texts I've requested.
     For a reputed cocksman like you the enforced celibacy must be a considerable sacrifice.
     I've made sacrifices for thirty years. That's what it means to be a professional revolutionary.

     Flashback to June 27,1975.
     Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez was posing as a lumpy 26-year-old mathematics student in a tiny Latin Quarter flat in a side street near the Sorbonne, when two unarmed investigators knocked.
     Raymond Queneau and Jean-Luc Gabin, of the Direction de la Sécurité du Territoire, France's FBI, were investigating an attack on Israel's El Al airlines at Paris' Orly Airport in January of that year.
     Queneau was slight and sly like a ferret, whereas Gabin was large and gruff like a bear.
     Accompanying the two investigators to 11 Toulier St., Arrondissement 5, was Muammar Moukharbal, a fellow militant-turned-informer from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who had been apprehended earlier that month.
     Moukharbal (Lebanese) bore an uncanny resemblance to the youthful Omar Sharif (Egyptian).
     Even to having a sexy gap between his top two front teeth.
     However he walked springily on the balls on his feet like Sean Connery as 007.
     As the mustached Moukharbal raised his right hand and pointed to Carlos the Jackal, the Jackal pulled out an UZI machine pistol and opened fire, killing the rangy Arab and the two Sécurité agents on the spot.
     He then fled Gaul.

     Hating Israelis doesn't prevent you from using their UZI machine pistol.
     I use whatever technology works most effectively. Nor do I feel enmity towards individual Israelis.

     Carlos the Jackal's fingerprints on the UZI and his own later description of the killings have given the prosecution a seemingly air-tight case.
     But these being the French, anything is possible.
     In 1979, the pan-Arab newspaper, Asharq al Awsat, published an interview, purportedly with Carlos the Jackal, in which he acknowledged killing Muammar Moukharbal as a "traitor to the cause of the people."
     Carlos the Jackal has since denied giving the interview and claims he was framed by Mossad and French police agents.
     Who, at the instigation of the US, wanted to create a rift between France and the Palestinian cause.
     "It wasn't an interview but an article," the Jackal insisted.
     "The author wasn't a journalist but a poet.
     "Moreover she was in love with me.
     "She portrayed me as she imagined me."
     The Soviet Union had expelled Carlos the Jackal as a troublemaker in 1970 when he and his twin brother, Lenin, were reportedly spending more time partying than studying at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow.
     According to the documents, Carlos the Jackal and Lenin persisted in drinking enormous quantities of tequila rather than Russian-produced vodka.
     Which didn't exactly endear them to their rabidly nationalist hosts.
     In his defense the Jackal claimed in his memoirs that he had nothing against vodka, but didn't want to get poisoned from the radiation that had leached into the grain used to produce the vodka after Chernobyl.
     Fair enough, except that the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster occurred sixteen years later, in 1986.

     Patrice Lumumba. Was he the one they murdered in South Africa?
     That was Steve Biko. They murdered Lumumba in the Congo.
     Are you and Lenin identical twins?
     Yes. Only he wears a vandyke like his namesake. As you see, I have just the mustache.
     Carlos, I'd like to propose an exercise. I say a name and you say immediately what pops into your skull. Agreed?
     Do I have a choice?
     No. Here we go. Evita Peron?
     G-spot squirting.
     Che?
     G-spot squirting.
     You already said that. I'll repeat: Che?
     Antihistamine.
     The Kennedy clan?
     No prepuce.
     Mother Teresa?
     Piss Christ.
     Chairman Arafat?
     Funky curry.
     Madonna?
     Henry Kissinger.
     Is it true that you had a sexual liaison with Madonna? Idi Amin fore and you aft? Maybe it was the other way around. It was DP in any case. According to Mossad. Double-penetration. By two of the fattest-assed terrorists in Christendom. Was she as good as advertised? Madonna?

     After his rejection by the Soviet Union and the Arab states, first the corrupt Communist secret police of East Germany then Bulgaria harbored Carlos the Jackal in the mid-to-late 1980s.
     Keeping a wary eye on his activities on their soil.
     But evidently not worrying much about his depredations in other venues.
     Which at that juncture included the horn of Africa, southeast Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean.
     It remained to be seen whether Carlos the Jackal would win over the jury with his rambling answers mixed with bravura, flirtation, and sloganeering in his bumbling French.
     A former mistress-turned informer, Dominique Sanda, reportedly a pre-op M2F transsexual who lives on the formerly chic isle of Ibiza, was expected to testify for the prosecution when the trial resumed today.

     Carlos, have you ever had the sense of an infinitely tender, infinitely merciful entity circulating around and through us day and night?
     Now that you mention it.
     To my way of thinking, it's the Godhead, or the head of God.
     To my way of thinking, it's Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, at the Revolution's deepest penetration, his eyes on fire, his pantaloons bulging at the crotch, his vandyke razor-sharp, grey but not yet white.

     Postscript: The unrepentant revolutionary terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal was, today, sentenced to life in prison for the killing of three souls on the left bank of Paris in 1975.
     Carlos the Jackal's response before being shackled and led away?
     "Viva la revolución!"
     However several in attendance disputed this. According to them, Carlos the Jackal's final words were "Allahu akbar!", the terrorist Islamic slogan which means "God is great."

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

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