Carlos the Jackal: Terror for Hire

There are few men in history that have single handedly struck terror into the hearts of thousands. In America, we recognize names such as Ted Kazinzky and Timothy McVeigh with a cringe, as thoughts about these men also bring memories of the pain and destruction they brought to the United States. Also in these ranks you could add Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, for the terror they brought on September 11th. These are terrorists of contemporary times, however, and they all pale in comparison to the evil of one man, whose countless acts of violence over a span of two decades held an entire planet in thrall.

The story of Carlos the Jackal begins not with Carlos, but with Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Carlos was born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez on October 12th, 1949. His father, Jose, was a very Marxist businessman, who ironically began his life after his teenage years as a man of the cloth. After three years of study in a seminary, he left, proclaiming himself an atheist and becoming a devout Marxist. Jose had three sons, all of whom were named after Lenin. Ilich was the eldest of the three, and Jose saw to it that he was properly schooled in the more sophisticated points of Communism. Young Ilich joined the Venezuelan National Communist party at the young age of fourteen, after years of being schooled in leftist thought and idolizing the likes of men like Che Guevara.

Ilich’s homelife was an unstable one, as his father was not much for monogamy and often spent time with other women. His mother, who was a devout Cathloic, took Ilich and his brothers Vladimir and Lenin away from Venezuela for a time. She eventually returned, only to find another woman in her marital bed with Jose. She divorced him later.

Ilich’s life proceeded to take him to London, where his mother moved with him and his brothers after divorcing Jose. Ilich began the life of a playboy and bad student in England, where he is often recalled as being a man who loved to drink and to be with women even more. Carlos, fueled by his father’s money, mingled with some of the richest and most influential residents of London, some of which were contacts that would come back to Ilich in a very different way later in his life. He was called on by the Venezuelan Youth party to go to the Eastern Bloc and organize some teenagers into action, which would have been his first action ever politically. Before he could go, his father came and decided to usher Ilich and his brothers to Paris to study at the Sorbonne.

Upon arriving in Paris, Jose found a city in upheaval. Violent student riots were occurring, and Jose wanted his children to have no part of this. Through some contacts he had in the upper echelons of his business network, he was able to grant Ilich and his brother Lenin access to the Patrice Lumumba University of Moscow. Ilich went to study there, and quickly returned to the lavish living lifestyle that he had lived in London. His teachers were not amused by Ilich’s inattentiveness to study, and things began to grow less stable for the spoiled party boy. Ilich was offered the opportunity the be the Venezuelan Communist representative to Bucharest, but he spat on the offer and offended the party. He was expelled from the party not long after that when he began to support a rebel faction that the party was trying to quell in 1969.

While he was a student at Lumumba, he became interested in the Palestinian struggle against Israel. His curiosity was piqued by the rhetoric Palestinian students there used to describe their struggle against Israel. They spoke particularly reverently about one man, by the name of Wadi Haddad. Haddad had previously been a man who wanted to create a Palestinian state through diplomatic means, but after the humiliation the Arab states experienced after the Six Days War, he turned to terrorism. He was the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, commonly known as just the Popular Front.

Ilich arrived in the Middle East in the summer of 1970, and the head recruiting officers of the Popular Front allowed him and several of his classmates to go to Jordan to participate in a terrorist training camp. Bassam Abu-Sharif, the primary recruiting officer of the Popular Front, was impressed with the strength of Ilich’s convictions, but found it odd that a South American man had such a Russian name. It was from that point on that he was christened with the name that would be remembered: Carlos.

Carlos did well in his training in Jordan, but ached for more substantial action. This was his first experience with firearms and explosives. Though the directors of the camp kept the recruits on their toes with fake attacks, Carlos refused to take the attacks seriously. He desired real action, and he was able to participate after Israeli jets attacked one of Yasser Arafat’s compounds. One of Arafat’s guards was killed. After returning from