The story of the world's first super-terrorist

**Dave Davies** (0:00)
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. For decades now, we've become accustomed to living with the threat of terrorist attacks. We're scanned by magnetometers and wait through security lines at airports, concerts, and ball games. Our guest today, veteran national security correspondent, Joby Warrick, has a new book that takes us back to the early days of modern terrorism in the 1970s, when hijacking airplanes was relatively easy, and airlines and governments would often simply give in to terrorist demands.
Warrick's book focuses on a man who in his day was the world's most famous terrorist, a man of many aliases who came to be known as Carlos the Jackal. While leaving a trail of victims across Europe and the Middle East, he managed to enjoy the lifestyle of a wealthy playboy, wearing designer clothes, frequenting nightclubs and luxury hotels, and having multiple affairs with women. Tabloid journalists were fascinated, and Carlos became such a cult figure that during one hijacking, a British pilot asked for his autograph. He would also inspire fictionalized villains in novels and films, including Robert Ludlum's Born Identity series and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six.
Last year, Joby Warrick spoke with a now elderly Carlos at the French prison where he's lived for decades. Joby Warrick spent three decades at the Washington Post. He was last on Fresh Air to talk about his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Black Flags, The Rise of ISIS. His new book is The Jackal, The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super Terrorist. Joby Warrick, welcome back to Fresh Air.

**Joby Warrick** (1:39)
It's so great to be back. Thanks, Dave.

**Dave Davies** (1:41)
You know, you've been writing about contemporary national security issues for a long time.
You did that great book on the origins of ISIS. What made you want to go back and cover this figure from an earlier era?

**Joby Warrick** (1:54)
I think maybe it has something to do with my age, and I'm in my sixties now. So I can remember a time before al-Qaeda, before 9-11, when terrorism meant something else. Al-Qaeda redefined terrorism for our generation, but there was this earlier wave that you described, a time when any flight anywhere in the world could potentially be hijacked by people demanding all kinds of things. And this was an era that in many ways kind of created templates for the terrorism that we came to know later on, but it also had many incredibly fascinating individuals and characters on both the terrorism side, but also on the law enforcement side, people who spent their careers chasing these guys. It was a very different era, and I thought it was instructive really to get back into that and remind people what happened before and how in some ways it set a precedent for what we came to know later as modern terrorism.

**Dave Davies** (2:45)
Now this guy, Carlos, he would have a long career of terrorism in Europe and the Middle East, really at a pretty young age, at like college age. But he actually came from South America. Tell us something about his background.

**Joby Warrick** (2:58)
This is really extraordinary because you have someone who became essentially the face of the Palestinian militant movement at that time. He wasn't a Palestinian at all. He was from Venezuela. He was the son of a devout Marxist. His father kind of brought up his kids in an environment where they worshiped Lenin. The man actually named three of his kids after Lenin using various names, including Ilyich, which became the real name of the man who became Carlos the Jackal. But from that early age, he saw himself as having a destiny, as being someone who was going to be a swashbuckling international revolutionary.

**Dave Davies** (3:35)
So he leaves college and he heads to the Middle East to join a Palestinian resistance group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. No longer exists, right? This was a Marxist, very radical Palestinian group.
And he came to work with a leader there, Wadi Haddad. This is an interesting moment in the Palestinian movement. This is 1970 or so, right? Just three years after the 1967 war, at which Israel defeated its Arab adversaries, expanded its territory, and the Palestinian movement was really new. Most of the world didn't really know about it. Give us a sense of what this group did, and what the ambitions of this leader, Wadi Haddad, were.

**Joby Warrick** (4:18)
So, it can be easy for us to imagine what that moment was like, because there are similarities now, I think, of the conditions we see in the Middle East. What you had is a moment when Israel had defeated a coalition of Arab armies, it had seized control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and it just seemed unstoppable. There was no pathway toward a Palestinian state, nobody was even talking about it at the time. There was a large, massive dislocation of millions of Palestinian citizens.