Dispatches from the Danger Zone: Where is "The Jackal"?

It has been about ten years since the terrorist named “Carlos the Jackal” was sentenced to life in prison in France for murder.  He was lucky to have missed the guillotine.  It was banned by France in 1981. 

“Carlos” is a Venezuelan Communist named Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. His father was a left-wing Venezuelan lawyer who named his three sons Vladimir, Ilich and Lenin all borrowed from his Russian hero.  He arranged for the boy to attend Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where Ilich made the KGO connections he would often use in his terrorist activities over the next twenty years.

Ilich, or Carlos as he likes to be called, is now pushing 60 years old.  He has a round flat face like a pizza pie and eyes like little olives pushed into the dough. 

So what’s happening to him these days?

I ran into a fellow recently who played a role in his capture and I asked him that. 

Carlos had been snatched from Khartoum in the Sudan by intelligence agents while recuperating from a minor operation on his testicles.  He was fortunate it didn’t turn into a more major operation.   

After he was punched out in the middle of the night (he was sleeping in a villa) and had a hood pulled over his head, he was sewn up tightly into a canvas bag and hauled in a van to the airport.  He was shaking and bleating because he thought Israeli intelligence had caught him—and it occurred that he was about to lose completely those which had just been surgically repaired.  Later, he said his arrest was a “Zionist plot”.

As it was, the French (and others) had him and he was whisked by jet to Paris. He had been under surveillance for many months.   

It was a particularly careful surveillance because Carlos was invariably armed and had a trigger-happy reputation.  Once, years before, he had spotted a car following him as he drove in Communist East Germany. Carlos stopped at a red light, went to his trunk, pulled out a submachine gun and killed the two East German intelligence officers in the car behind him.  And the East Germans were supporting him at the time! 

With that in mind the US, Egyptian and French officers who followed him and photographed him and bugged his home in Khartoum were extraordinarily wary of being spotted.

Any chance the French will ever let him out, I asked?   

“Oh there is always that possibility,” said my source, though it was for the murders of two French counter-intelligence agents and a Lebanese informant (a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and friend of Carlos) that Carlos was sentenced to life.

The French are letting him use a computer from his comfortable cell and he has access to the internet, my friend said.  He   has his own website.

No. Yes. 

This is the fellow who worked with the Red Brigades, Black September, M-19, the Baader-Meinhoff gang, the PLF and terrorist states like Cuba, Syria and Libya; who had a hand in the slaying of the Israeli athletes in Munich and is wanted by a half-dozen European countries; who kidnapped the OPEC oil ministers in 1975 and was involved in the pro-Palestinian hijacking of the French jetliner to Entebbe, Uganda in 76’, the one that ended in the Israeli commando raid and the murder of an elderly Jewish woman passenger. He is responsible for the murders of about 80 people.  He has directly wounded and injured about 200 other human beings.  That’s the fellow.   

You never know what the French might do.

You’ll be interested to know that the name “Carlos the Jackal” was the sole invention of a newspaper reporter.

He assigned it for no good reason –a take-off on the Frederick Forsythe novel about an assassin -other than the reason reporters usually have for lying: it makes a better story.

Actually Carlos was going by the name of “Bernie” at the time. “Bernie the Jackal”

It just doesn’t work.

But I like it so I may call him that.

Bernie isn’t lonely in that French prison. 

He married his French lawyer and they are allowed to have sex together.  Her name is Isabelle and she is drawn to the strong, nasty types.  She once represented the notorious Nazi Claus Barbie, known as “The Butcher of Lyon.”

A couple of other interesting facts from the Bernie the Jackal file.

He has become a radical Muslim.  He now declares that he is an ardent supporter of Osama Bin Laden.  He praised the New York Trade Towers attack on 9/11 and called it a “lofty feat of arms.” 

He is also a fan of Hugo Chavez, Cindy Sheehan’s buddy who runs Venezuela.

In fact Chavez and The Jackal are pen pals. They write back and forth.

In one letter, printed in Harper’s, Hugo Chavez said this to his boy Bernie the Jackal:

“Time delivers miracles only to those who maintain a righteous spirit, to those who understand the true meaning of things.”

Sooo 1960’s. Does that have that revolutionary sound?  I mean is that Bobbie Seale writing to Huey Newton and the Black Panthers?

Hugo Chavez president of Venezuela, who recently called President George Bush the most evil man in the world refers to Bernie the Jackal as “my distinguished compatriot.” Go figure.

Also, the latest episode of Danger Zone Radio is now available for download.