The Yesterday of the Jackal: Joby Warrick Meets Carlos, the World’s Original Super-Terrorist

“He’s not a trustworthy witness to his own story. Everything is ten times bigger and better than it really was — except when he was accused of crimes, in which case he can’t really remember anymore.” — Joby Warrick on Carlos the Jackal

Yesterday, WOLA’s Adam Isacson and John Walsh described how the US government has appropriated the term “narco-terrorism” to justify their Latin American killing spree. Today, we talk the real thing. Pulitzer Prize-winning Joby Warrick has a new book out about the rise and fall of Carlos the Jackal, who he calls the “original super-terrorist.”

So who was Carlos the Jackal? Originally he was named by his Venezuelan Marxist father Ilich in homage to Lenin. Then he renamed himself Carlos, borrowing from a fake passport the French police happened to find in 1975. While The Jackal came from the London Guardian after reporters spotted Frederick Forsyth’s best-seller on the bookshelf of his London safe house. Ilich (i.e. Carlos) loved it. Anything for attention. Especially from the capitalist media.

His career, as a proxy Palestinian terrorist, was equally audacious. His solo debut, at 24, was the attempted London assassination of Marks & Spencer chairman Joseph Sieff. Two years later, Carlos waltzed into OPEC headquarters in Vienna and kidnapped most of the world’s oil ministers, a terrorist heist that, Warrick reveals, was financed by Muammar Gaddafi.

Then all of Carlos’ yesterdays — and there are many, as Warrick discovers when he interviews him in his French jail. He spent twenty years on the run, mostly barely camouflaged in faded Eastern European hotels. The Mossad didn’t even consider him worth assassinating. By the eighties he had become a gun for hire who’d stopped attacking Israelis. And at 75, in his convent-turned-prison outside Paris, the world’s original super-terrorist cooks his own meals, repeats old leftist slogans, and misremembers everything except his innocence.

In spite of his pathetic fate, Carlos matters because, as Warrick notes, the Jackal model is back in fashion. Russia and Iran now hire petty crooks on Telegram for a few hundred dollars to firebomb synagogues or assassinate dissidents. Gaza’s tragic hopelessness echoes the post-1967 conditions that bred the first wave of Palestinian terror. Social media is now infested with wannabe violent influencers. The day of the Jackal, then, is not only our history but also our future.

Five Takeaways

• Interview with the Jackal. Warrick negotiated for over a year — with Carlos, then with a French government determined he not be glorified, since his gravest crimes were against French citizens — for roughly ninety minutes in March 2025, no recorder, no camera, notebook only. The prison is a converted sixteenth-century convent outside Paris where the Nazis once tortured members of the Resistance; inside it, Carlos remains the big man on campus — guards call him Carlos, not Ilich, and he keeps a large cell, cooks his own meals, and browses the internet. At 75 he is natty, polyglot, charming — and stooped, forgetful, repeating himself into what Warrick calls a fog of old memories. As a witness he is worthless: everything ten times bigger and better than it was, except the crimes, which he suddenly cannot recall.

• Ilich, Carlos, Jackal: An Accidental Brand. His ardent-Marxist father named his three sons Vladimir, Ilich, and Lenin, after the founder of the Soviet Union. “Carlos” came from a fake passport — Carlos Martinez — that French police happened to seize in 1975; the pudgy dark-glasses photo the world memorized was a passport fake he remains embarrassed by. “The Jackal” was coined by the British tabloids after reporters prowling his London safe house spotted Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal on the bookshelf. He embraced all of it: a true believer whose slogans still pour out in prison, welded to a massive ego that always placed Carlos at the center of the revolution. Had Instagram existed, Warrick agrees, he’d have used it — the pre-digital influencer, with the world’s press as his platform.

• From Five Bullets to Kidnapping OPEC. His 1970 baptism of fire in the Black September fighting hardened him past the point of return; his solo test, at 24, was the attempted assassination of Marks & Spencer chairman Joseph Sieff — an old gun, five bullets, a jam, and a bullet deflected by the victim’s teeth (“good old Milk Marketing Board,” Sieff told the BBC from his hospital bed). The masterpiece came in December 1975: a 26-year-old walks into OPEC’s Vienna headquarters mid-conference, takes the world’s oil ministers hostage, extracts a plane and a ransom, and flies them to North Africa — the most audacious terrorist act Warrick can name. The book’s scoop settles who sponsored it: not Saddam Hussein, as biographers and a 2010 docudrama claimed, but Muammar Gaddafi — the autocrat pioneering the criminal proxy with no return address.

• Twenty Years, No Capture — and a Mossad Pass. The world’s most wanted man spent two decades in comfort: Budapest his favorite hideout (good meals, nice hotels — Carlos insisted on top-flight everything), the Hungarians, East Germans, and Romanians almost proud to host their superstar guest, Assad’s Syria always available. The run ended only when the Bloc fell and the Arab states tired of him; the French and Americans finally tracked him to Khartoum in 1994. The great deflation is the Mossad: they never bothered with him. His mentor Wadi Haddad — the true operational genius — they hunted and killed; Carlos, by then a mercenary who’d stopped attacking Israelis, simply fell down the priority list. The world’s most fearsome terrorist wasn’t worth Israel’s effort.

• The Return of Violent Chaos. Warrick’s closing argument, and the reason this history is news: the Gaddafi model has been rediscovered. Russia and Iran now hire criminals — recruited on Telegram, paid a few hundred dollars in crypto — to throw grenades into synagogues, set fires, and assassinate dissidents: hundreds of incidents already, most under the radar, none traceable to Moscow or Tehran. The modern Carlos works for whoever pays; ideology has left the business entirely. Gaza’s hopelessness, meanwhile, mirrors the post-1967 despair that launched the first international terror wave — and we are not prepared. As for America’s own extrajudicial turn, from drone war to boat strikes: “There’s no precedent... it is a grave change for us as Americans. Very troubling to me.”

About the Guest

Joby Warrick is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and veteran national security correspondent for The Washington Post. His books include The Triple Agent, Red Line, and Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist (Scribner, August 18, 2026), built on newly declassified archives, secret police files, and a rare interview with Carlos himself, is out next week.