Carlos - Portrait of a terrorist

AUTHOR’S NOTE

“Tell them I’m the famous Carlos,” he instructed the Iraqi chargé in Vienna where, shortly before Christmas 1975, he and a gang of Palestinian and German guns for hire shot their way into the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries and took eleven oil ministers hostage.

Fleet Street preferred to call him “The Jackal”. In the first decade of a century plagued by monkish suicide bombers, their identities forgotten almost as soon as the videoed farewells released by their controllers fade from our screens, the chubby Venezuelan hedonist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez now seems like a creature from a remote past. Brought up in Caracas, London, Moscow and Paris he is the son of a doting Catholic mother and a lawyer who converted to Marxist Leninism naming his boys Lenin, Ilich and Vladimir. In the early seventies he was one of several foreigners - mostly Germans and South Americans - who joined the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Lebanon. (It was founded by Dr George Habash, who was born into a Christian Palestinian family.)

Thus began a career that was often as bungled as it was pleasure loving and started, as it continued, soaked in the blood of innocents with a grenade tossed in a crowded Left Bank café owned by a Jew and Edward Sieff surprised in a bathroom of his London home and shot in the face. Long life and the practise of terrorism rarely go together but Carlos survives, albeit serving a “life sentence” in a French jail from which, barring some daring escape, he will only emerge alive as a very old man.

This was my first book and was published by Andre Deutsch in London and Holt, Rinehart and Winston in New York. French, Spanish and Finnish editions followed. Then six months after Carlos’ capture in August 1994 the Mandarin paperback edition, considerably revised and lengthened by 35,000 words, appeared.

The original book grew out of a three part Review Front series of about 10,000 words I wrote in 1976 for The Observer, then owned and edited by David Astor. In them I was given the time and space to investigate the two events which, in the space of six months between June and December 1975, had earned Carlos the notoriety he yearned for. These were the shootings in Paris of a Lebanese informer and three agents (one survived) of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French security service. The other was the kidnapping of the eleven oil ministers of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries as they sat in session in Vienna.

The Mandarin edition enabled me to correct some of the errors which occurred in the original version because I was writing too close to the events in question. Some eyewitnesses, for very understandable reasons, were not so forthcoming then as they were twenty years later . For instance Suhail Nasser, a Lebanese citizen who was working for the Kuwaiti oil ministry and part of its delegation to OPEC, told me about the death of Yousef Ismirli, a gallant Libyan gentleman who came close to making Carlos’ story a much shorter one. At the same time I have had to revise my opinion about the involvement in the OPEC raid of Ismirli’s boss, Colonel Qadaffi. Originally I could find no evidence for it. This is no longer the case. The reasons for my change of mind become apparent towards the end of Chapter Twelve.

In other respects I have had the satisfaction of being proved right about events that, for the most part, could only be the subject of speculation at a time when Europe was divided and those chinks in its iron curtain that existed often revealed no more than a tantalising shadowland. In those days I discussed the possibility that the young Venezuelan was run by the KGB and its fraternal Warsaw pact intelligence services with additional help from Cuba’s Direcion General de Inteligencia. (Just as contingents of the Cuban army did Moscow’s bidding in Africa, particularly in Angola.)

It now turns out that Carlos, who had been expelled from Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University, did indeed enjoy for many years the protection of some of the Communist governments of Eastern Europe, particularly the East Germans and the Hungarians. He was shielded and, to a certain extent, controlled by their intelligence and security services. Carlos and the middle-class West German terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof gang, or the Red Army Faction as they preferred to call themselves, frequently operated out of East Berlin. Just after the wall came down, and on the eve of German unity, what was left of the old GDR authorities obligingly arrested eight of them. Markus Wolf, the former East German espionage chief, confirmed in an interview he gave shortly after Carlos’ capture, that the Venezuelan and the others had all been under the protection of General Erich Mielke, the Minister of State Security.

None of this came as a total surprise. For years there had been evidence that the Komitet Gosudanstvennoy Bezopasnosti and the other Soviet intelligence services were quite prepared to use the Eastern European services to do its dirty work abroad. Klaus Rohl, the divorced husband of Ulrike Meinhof, confessed at his trial in the early seventies that he had received 400,000 dollars from East Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Even so, the East Germans were cautious souls compared to the Bulgarians who never seemed to hesitate to facilitate the KGB’s wildest dreams. Western intelligence services still regard them as the chief suspects behind the attempt in 1981 to assassinate Pope John Paul II, the turbulent Pole and outspoken supporter of Lech Walesa who personified the two great engines of Polish identity and rebellion: nationalism and catholicism. In March 2004 Bulgaria became a member of NATO and is expected to join the European Union by 2007. But unlike most of the other Soviet satellites it took much longer to shrug off its totalitarian past. Even now some of the surviving files of the Bulgaria secret services have probably not been released.

Unlike most of their old allies in the Warsaw Pact the Russians have undergone reform not revolution and some of its Cold War secrets are still closely guarded. The KGB may have metamorphosed into the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Counter-Intelligence Service but they are much the same people. Some of them are surprisingly liberal, or at least pragmatic, and it has even been suggested that they were very much behind the upheavals in Eastern Europe because they knew the game was up and there must be change. This may be so. Nonetheless, they are professionals and see little profit in mea culpa revelations.

In the seventies and the eighties the favourite Soviet riposte to any accusations that they might know more than they cared to admit about terrorism in Western Europe was that these came from tired Cold War warriors who wished to ruin the newly established detente between East and West. And it did make people cautious. What self respecting liberal wanted to be tarred with the same brush as the actor President Ronald Reagan and his talk of the “Evil Empire”?

When Carlos shot three the unarmed French security service agents in Paris in the summer of 1975 and then slipped through a huge police dragnet the Interior Minister at the time, a right winger called Michel Poniatowski, expelled from their Paris embassy three Cuban diplomats. They were alleged to have met Carlos several times in their true role as members of Castro’s intelligence service and played a large part in spiriting the Venezuelan out of Paris. At a press conference held to announce their expulsions Poniatowski made several off-the-record remarks to reporters that it was well known, of course, that the KGB always ran the Cuban service.

The Soviet reply was not long in coming. “An ordinary act of gangsterism is being presented by Poniatowski as an international conspiracy,” declared Moscow Radio’s French language service. “At a time when peaceful coexistence between the East and West is becoming the norm...there are still men in France who would like to put a brake on this progress and return to the cold war period.”

Poniatowski, of aristocratic Polish descent, was certainly a hawk . Once out of office he talked quite openly about the need to assassinate Carlos and his kind. But the Moscow Radio commentary was outrageous. These were the first agents of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire to be killed in the line of duty since the Algerian war. This was no “ordinary act of gangsterism”. Poniatowski had good grounds for thinking that whoever had arranged Carlos’ departure from Paris it was not Thomas Cook.

Fifteen years later this kind of support was no longer there. The Jackal had become an irrelevant throwback undone by the ending of the Cold War, his dens unearthed as Eastern Europe’s brittle police states disintegrated and even Russia’s old allies in the Middle East were reluctantly coming to terms with a world where there was only one super power.

When even Damascus was no longer willing to give him sanctuary Carlos managed to negotiate a new bolt hole in Khartoum though what services he was supposed to provide is unclear. It hardly mattered. His drinking and womanising soon horrified his Islamic fundamentalist hosts who in any case were poor and susceptible to French bribes. They waited until he was convalescing from an operation on his testicles - his spermatic column was blocked and the young Lebanese dancer he was living with wished to have children. Snatched from his bed, he was delivered bound, gagged and tranquillised to the waiting aircraft of a French commando team, and the procrastinations of the French legal system. Three years later, having harangued the Palais de Justice on the perils of, “American neo-barbarism and the McDonaldisation of humanity”, Carlos was found guilty of murdering the DST agents and escorted off the premises with a cry of, “Viva La Revolucion!”

Not long afterwards it was announced that he had gone on hunger strike as a protest about being kept in solitary confinement but, promised that this was only a temporary measure, soon gave it up. “The famous Carlos” was now 46. Always a gregarious soul, during his three years as a remand prisoner awaiting trial, when he was only allowed contact with his lawyers, the Venezuelan could sometimes be heard screaming through his cell’s barred window: “It’s me, Carlos. I’m Carlos.” To which various luminaries of the Gallic underworld lodged nearby would reply, “Carlos who?”

Colin Smith, Nicosia, 2005