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TELEPHONE RINGS

The world's most wanted terrorist, Carlos the Jackal,

has been arrested.

The French intelligence service traced him to Sudan six months ago,

where he was put under surveillance.

He was arrested yesterday and flown to Paris early this morning.

The name of Carlos the Jackal has been linked

with almost every major international terrorist attack

since the early '70s.

If Time magazine had a category

for the most infamous terrorist of the decade,

then Carlos the Jackal would definitely win first place

in the 1970s and 1980s.

Carlos the Jackal was arguably the biggest name in terrorism

until Bin Laden and, of course, Imad Mughniyeh from Hezbollah.

They were probably the top three personas at any given time,

but Carlos was before both of those.

So as Ilich Ramirez Sanchez is growing up

in this very political household, he becomes a political youth.

And so in his early teens,

he actually joins the Venezuelan Communist Youth.

It is supposedly here that he gets a first feeling

for revolutionary politics.

And allegedly he learns how to make Molotov cocktails,

how to set cars ablaze.

Skills that do come handy to him

later on in his terrorist career.

Now, he has claimed

that this is also when he first took a man's life.

I'm not entirely sure whether that's true.

Carlos was great at building a mythology around him,

and this really goes back to his teens.

Carlos moves to London with his mother and his brothers

in quite an affluent neighbourhood in Kensington.

Teachers who taught him at the time didn't have him down

as the best student of the year.

They said he was quite lazy.

They already noticed some narcissistic tendencies.

And he was, from a very early age,

a so-called snappy dresser.

His father decides that his sons need further Marxist education.

And so he sends them to

Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow.

Carlos spends two years there,

but he is quite the opposite of what a good Soviet young man should be.

He's drinking quite heavily.

He is skipping classes.

He is philandering with women.

And so basically, two years into his studies,

him and his brother are both expelled

from this very prestigious university.

Carlos came to my office

in Beirut in 1969.

My secretary let him in.

And a young man with a beard

that's not fully grown-up yet.

He had this handbag.

So I said, "Yes, how can I help you?"

He said, "I want to join the Popular Front."

I said, "OK, so you want to be a fighter?" He said, "Yes."

But Sam is initially a little bit sceptical.

He very soon realises that this guy is actually quite intelligent

and that he's got a chameleon-like nature,

which is obviously very handy

for someone who is meant to work in the shadows

as a future fighter or terrorist operative.

And, OK, from Venezuela.

I sent him to the camp

that trains volunteers

from the International Revolutionary Movement,

of which I was in charge, too.

At the end of the training,

we made some sort of manoeuvres with live ammunition,

which include mortar.

So the first mortar destroyed the kitchen.

And we gave orders that if an attack starts on the camp,

this group will go here, this group will go there, etc.

So everybody started to go according to instructions, except him.

He was still lying, smoking, with a magazine in his hand.

So I said, "Why are you still here?"

He said, "Because it's fiction.

"It's not a real attack. If it was a real attack,

"they would start with me, not with the kitchen."

I said, "OK, come on, go to the professional camp."

At the professional camp, they saw

that he's very useful

in special operation.

The English, Spanish languages, presentable.

Since then, his name was Salem at that time.

But Sam gave him a war name which turned out to be Carlos,

and later on he becomes born in battle.

1970 is an important year for the Popular Front

because in September they decide to stage basically

the biggest coordinated air-jacking in history,

or prior to 9/11.

- NEWS REPORT: - We've just driven for an hour across the open desert

to this incredibly dangerous and dramatic situation in which

the people in these two aircraft find themselves.

The people are being held here as hostage.

- Can you give us your names first? - Nigel.

I'm British and I've come from Bahrain.

The PFLP is completely responsible for the hostages.

We will treat them in the same way

their governments treat our own prisoners.

The big message here is, "Listen, we can hijack your planes.

"We can destroy your property.

"We can take hostage nationals of dozens of countries,

"if you won't do something about our cause."

It was a very violent entry to

the minds of people in the world.

But what is important to us

is that it was an entry.

What ensues after the operation is really a civil war...

..a civil war between the Palestinians in Jordan

and between the king's army.

It is an important moment in Carlos' life,

because this is where a lot of the mythology begins.

Ultimately, the guerrillas are pushed out.

After Black September,

he was sent to Wadie Haddad's Department...

..special operations.

AKA, the hijackings, the assassinations, the bombings.

When someone is sent to Wadie Haddad department,

that's it, the door is closed.

We are still victorious because we are still holding our guns.

We feel that the resistance

of our masses is growing day after day.

I think you'll believe me that before ten years, few sectors

of public world opinion knew about our cause.

He sort of takes up his old life - on the surface, anyway.

He goes to parties, he hangs out with his siblings,

but in the background, he's also working on something else.

Shortly after Christmas in 1973,

Carlos decides to strike for the first time.

He chooses Joseph Edward Sieff, chairman of Marks and Spencer's,

a very famous British retail company,

but he's also the vice chairman of the British Zionist Federation.

We have warned Sieff in 1969

when we attacked Marks & Spencer in London...

..but Sieff continued his support to Israel,

donating millions of Sterlings.

And so on the 30th of December 1973,

Carlos walks to Edward Sieff's house

in north-west London in St John's Wood.

GUNSHOT

SIRENS

CAMERA SHUTTERS

What are your memories of what actually happened?

Nothing.

Happened in a... In a flash.

Edward Sieff does not die after the first shot,

and when Carlos tries to deliver the second shot, his gun jams.

Now, apparently it was your teeth

and the strength of them which actually saved you.

The bullet went in just by your nostril there, but was...

- God help the marketing board. - LAUGHTER

Despite the fact that he gets out without being caught,

this is quite a disappointing baptism into terrorism.

Do you think this attack will have any effect on the people

who support Zionism in Britain and in the Western world as a whole?

Not at all. Not at all.

I kept the arms for him. He took the pistol with such tenderness.

And I say, "Oh, it is funny.

"You look at this pistol as if it was a woman or something.

- "It is ridiculous." - He told me. - "Oh, don't laugh,

"because you know what happened when you are involved

"in this kind of business and you have the wrong arm,

"you're going to be in trouble." And I say, "Why?"

And he told me, "When I shot Sieff, the pistol was jammed."

Only a couple of weeks after the attempt on Sieff's life,

Carlos tries to throw a grenade

into a branch of an Israeli bank based in London.

As he tries to hurl the grenade into the building,

it actually bounces off of the door

and goes in a completely different direction.

- NEWS REPORT: - The explosion caused a small hole in the floor,

a window was blown out,

and light fittings and part of the ceiling was damaged.

So, frankly, his second attempt at terror

is also quite unsuccessful.

Police were quickly on the scene,

examining the road outside for clues,

but at least on this occasion the police have

an accurate description of the attacker.

He was seen by passers-by, builders in the neighbourhood.

- We're now looking for him. - What is the description?

He's six feet tall, er...

..European, dark glasses and a light mac. Raincoat.

Carlos turns up with one of his colleagues,

Johannes Weinrich, a member of the German Revolutionary Cells.

And these two basically get out of a car close to Orly airport,

take out an RPG-7,

and try to shoot this into

an El Al flight that's just about to take off.

EXPLOSION

- NEWS REPORT: - The attackers shattered the windscreen of their car

with the recoil of the bazooka.

- NEWS REPORT: - Security here at Orly Airport

was thought to be invulnerable.

There's been no terror of note until today.

MACHINE GUNFIRE

Although Carlos' first attempts at terror are not successful,

his colleagues, or those who really sent him

to perpetrate these attacks, did get one thing right.

And that is that when you want to send

an operative to carry out these daring attacks,

you want someone who is somewhere on the narcissist scale,

slightly psychopathic,

happy to go into dangerous situations,

not necessarily knowing what the outcome will be.

The French police, the British police,

they're obviously very concerned.

They don't know who this person

going around attacking Jewish or Israeli targets is.

He would leave ammunition, he would leave weapons,

even target lists, in homes of his friends and ex-girlfriends.

And this happened with one of his ex-girlfriends who was living

in London at the time.

Her boyfriend called the media and said, you know,

"I think that this assailant you're all looking for,

"I think he left some stuff in our flat."

And so a Guardian journalist actually comes to the flat,

and as they're opening the belongings of Carlos,

where he notices a famous book,

which just came out a couple of years ago called

The Day Of The Jackal, and it's a famous novel about an assassin.

He starts calling him Carlos the Jackal.

And from that point on, the media adopt this name.

- NEWS REPORT: - Carlos Martinez was living with his mother

and two brothers here in Kensington. His real name,

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a 25-year-old Venezuelan.

He lived in one of the flats in this block

up till February of this year.

Did the police take anything away from the flat?

Only some mail, which was up there.

- About four letters. - Addressed to him?

Addressed to Ramirez.

The French police put a surveillance team on Michel Moukharbal.

And as they're surveilling him through the streets of Paris,

they see that he's meeting a tall, bulky man

who doesn't look too French,

doesn't look too Middle Eastern, he could be, kind of, from anywhere.

So they arrest and question Moukharbal.

They interrogate him for days, and they ask him,

"Who is this man you met?

"Is he in any way connected to the attacks we've been seeing?"

And although Michel is kind of reluctant to say more,

he says, "You know what? This guy is my contact here.

"I'm not entirely sure what his story is or where he lives,

"but I know where his girlfriend lives.

"So how about we go to the Latin Quarter,

"to the small flat, and find out if she knows a little bit more?"

There's three of them, plus Michel, the informer,

and they go to a small flat on Rue Toullier.

It's a stone's throw away from Notre Dame,

so it's a very central location.

First one to go up is one of the policemen,

and he finds a little party under way, actually.

There's drinks, there's Latin American music playing,

and he finds a slightly jumpy Latin American man,

and although he asks him a couple of times

whether he knows Michel Moukharbal,

this jumpy Latin American man just denies everything,

even when he's shown a photograph of himself.

He says, "That's not me. Come on. This person doesn't look like me."

And so the rest of the policemen bring the informer upstairs.

And he's quite exhausted, actually, after days of interrogation.

And he points at Carlos, and he says,

"That's the man I was meeting the other day."

GUNFIRE

GUNSHOT

Two of the policemen are shot dead on the spot.

So is the informer. And one of the policemen is severely wounded

and taken to the hospital.

It took him three bullets. Three bullets to kill the three.

GUNSHOTS

Tak, tak, tak.

Calm. Cool.

Good shot.

Ten out of ten, in both hands.

And he took a rose,

gave it to the Frenchwoman and told her, "We have an appointment.

"I'll let you know about it later."

On to the airport and flew out.

- NEWS REPORT: - It's in surroundings like these

that Carlos seems to feel most at home.

It's a real urban jungle,

providing perfect cover for a ruthless killer.

Carlos himself is known to be fluent in several languages,

as well as to be a master of disguise, but sooner

or later, it's hoped he'll make a very serious mistake,

which will give the police

a chance of rounding up more of the European terrorist network.

- NEWS REPORT: - A spokesman for the meeting said that the price pause

would give the Western world a chance to show

their good intentions.

Another demand here was for action against

what some delegates described

as the excessive profits of the oil companies.

It was a Sunday. It was a very snowy day.

We were just doing our normal jobs,

as we were doing that during the week.

And, uh, around 12 plus, minus, that, um,

attack had happened.

And, suddenly, there was a shooting.

GUNFIRE AND SCREAMING

I was with three men in a room and a woman voice was screaming,

"Get out, otherwise I shoot!"

I was just paralysed, standing behind the door,

then pushed to the conference room,

where all the ministers and delegates

and my colleagues already had been laying on the floor.

We were around 60 to 70 people.

I was 26 years old as Carlos is also 26.

We did not know what's going on here.

What do they want? We just knew we were,

of course, in danger. Already, three people were killed.

SIRENS

- NEWS REPORT: - The terrorists warned the police outside

that they had mined the building with grenades

and explosives as they went in.

Anyone who appeared in the corridors was shot at.

Of course, I was full of fears.

And as I was crying, Carlos asked me for my name.

He asked me if I'm Austrian citizen.

And then he said,

"You're too beautiful to die. You may go home."

They gave us a bus to the airport.

We wanted a bigger bus and they gave us smaller bus.

We couldn't take all the hostages, so we took the main ones.

The first phase basically went according to plan.

The second phase was the problem.

The ultimate goal here was to kill the Saudi oil minister,

as well as the Iranian minister

in front of the eyes of the whole world.

He wanted to show the Saudis and the Iranians that they should

really be more concerned with the Palestinian cause,

and not with their relations with the West and with Israel.

You say that you were not informed before of the OPEC attack.

Yet, immediately afterwards,

you allowed the man who led the guerrilla group,

a man called Carlos Sanchez, to come to Libya.

No, he didn't come here.

Where he is now?

Carlos decided not to kill the two key targets here.

He decided to set them free.

It isn't clear how much money it was in the end,

but it was a huge ransom money.

Some estimates say it was like $15 million.

And for that, all of the hostages were finally released.

And Carlos and his accomplices are allowed to basically sneak out.

What was your reaction when you first learned

that Carlos was involved in this attack?

I felt I'm about to die.

I knew that I was a target.

He's a very ambitious man.

I think he wants so...

..so many things,

but definitely he wants to be a hero.

BASSSAM ABU SHARIF:

When he came back, some of

the Special Forces leaders

wanted him to be executed.

But they refused. And he told them that,

"OK, you got the money? Go."

Following OPEC, he starts the second era of his terrorist career,

which is basically devoted to money.

From early '76, he was a gun for hire,

and a businessman of terrorism.

And he liked that people were afraid of him.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Carlos is setting up his new organisation.

And so he needs an infrastructure.

He needs people who can help hide his weapons.

He needs people who can give him documents, he also needs operatives.

As it seems, Carlos was very charismatic, or is very charismatic.

He was charming lots of women.

He was also charming quite a number of young women into his organisation

and turned them into terrorists.

GUNSHOTS

GUNSHOT

Magdalena is not just some regular member of the group.

She was first the girlfriend of Johannes Weinrich,

the right-hand man of Carlos the Jackal,

and it was essentially Weinrich

who introduced Magdalena Kopp to Carlos.

And very, very shortly after she was introduced to him,

he basically seduced her

and...they became a couple.

TYRES SCREECH

INTERVIEWER:

CARLOS: Yes, yes.

Magdalena Kopp told me that at the beginning he was very charming.

I mean, we have the file from the East German Stasi.

The document says how they went to bed together the first time.

He spoke about Marxism, Leninism.

And five minutes later, he took her to the bed.

That might have made the dynamic within any other trio quite awkward.

But from what we know of Weinrich being more submissive,

let this one slide.

And him, Magdalena Kopp, and Carlos the Jackal became

quite a powerful trio who used to travel together

and work together in the late 1970s and '80s.

- NEWS REPORT: - The city of Munich lies in a cat's cradle of

wires and masts and antennae,

which makes it the radio capital of Europe,

or rather, the radio propaganda capital.

This radio station here doesn't beam its signal

at the people of western Germany,

but people living behind the Iron Curtain.

Radio Free Europe was really

a bastion of resistance against the Soviet bloc.

This was a US-funded institution.

It was frankly funded by the CIA up until the '60s,

broadcasting news into these Communist countries

and news that was very critical of these regimes.

So they ordered Carlos to blow up the building.

The mighty CIA was looking after him.

They were already very much in the counterterrorism business.

What made Carlos a formidable target for us was his invisibility,

he was a guy who was literally a ghost.

The Jackal is the wrong name for him.

He should be called the Ghost.

He had the ability to disguise himself. He had the ability

to get different identifications so he could travel.

Magdalena Kopp was sent to Paris

to blow up Al-Watan Al-Arabi office in Paris.

That's an Arab newspaper.

Magdalena was joined by Bruno Breguet,

another collaborator of Carlos.

So they came to Paris,

and when they prepared the attack on that newspaper,

they parked the car

in a parking garage

and somebody became suspicious.

He looked at them and some policemen came

and they started to shoot at the policemen.

SIREN

They did not kill him, but they ran away

and they were caught outside the parking garage.

There is a trial,

and ultimately each one of them gets about four or five years in prison.

These are not long-term sentences, but anyway, they are sentences

that very much upset Carlos the Jackal.

Carlos decides to do something that's

quite unprecedented in the history of international terrorism.

He decides to write a letter to the French government,

and he basically informs them that these people

who have been arrested are fighting the good fight,

and he demands that they are released. And he makes sure

that the French government knows who this letter is from.

It is from Carlos,

and he also prints his fingerprint on the letters.

But the French don't give in.

SIRENS

EXPLOSION

SIRENS

- NEWS REPORT: - A series of attacks in France left 11 dead

and more than 200 injured.

They go on for years and years.

This is not something that happens over a couple of weeks.

But the French don't blink.

This persistence really ticks Carlos off.

It really makes him angry.

It is clear that these guys have no limits,

that they're basically willing to work for anyone,

and they're willing to perpetrate any attack.

And the East Germans, the Czechoslovaks,

the Bulgarians, are actually quite afraid of him,

and they gradually start looking

for ways to push Carlos off of their territory.

And finally they expelled the Carlos people one by one,

told them, "Don't come back, ever."

And that was when his time in the Eastern Europe was over.

Then there was only Damascus left.

The deal seems to be that he is meant to stay away from terrorism,

while he is being supported

and basically harboured by the Syrians.

Carlos was a party animal.

Magdalena told me when he was retired in Damascus,

he went to Baghdad to meet his friends, to play cards,

or to drink some whisky with them and to talk about,

"Remember how it was in the old days?

At the time in Damascus,

one of the highlights was the Irish pub in the Sheraton.

That's where they liked to go.

Weinrich and Carlos spent evenings there at the Irish pub.

They were joining parties in private homes.

They tried not to be recognised as terrorists,

so they had parties with people who had never heard of them.

Magdalena told me she should have

stopped the relationship much before,

and at a certain period,

there was no opportunity for her to get away.

One week before the Berlin Wall was downed,

that was the last time I saw him.

He wanted me to join his organisation.

It is arguably one of the most miserable place to live.

It's filthy. The poverty is endemic. But what made it

the worst was how corrupt the Bashir administration there was.

They were really running a hotel for terrorists.

The fees that they charged, they spent millions of dollars.

Carlos paid a hefty stipend for...

..for being protected and being kept in there.

And same thing with Imad Mughniyeh. If you had money and you were

a radical terrorist from any walk of life,

you were welcome in Khartoum.

So pictures of the house in Sudan and it didn't look so luxurious.

It was already at the end of his career.

His standard and his living conditions

went down at that time.

When Carlos moves to Sudan, he for a while thinks he's safe.

What is happening in the background is actually quite

the opposite of safety and peace.

He made a phone call to a fellow terrorist,

asking him to come and be his bodyguard.

Carlos, um, geolocated himself. I mean, they...

Because they were tracking the phone,

they were able to know that he was in Khartoum.

The Israelis are the ones that did the intercept

and immediately passed us the information.

Billy Waugh was the ideal guy for tracking down Carlos the Jackal.

He did, like, five or six tours in Vietnam.

He was a very aggressive individual.

And I will make it very clear -

Billy did not want to turn him over to anybody.

Billy wanted to kill him himself.

Khartoum was so miserable

that there was only two or three nice hotels to go eat at,

to go drink at. So that helped us narrow it down.

And one of the hits was

when they were able to identify his bodyguard,

and Billy got his trusty camera out

and started taking photographs of him as he came out.

And we had him under surveillance when the French approached

the local government to say, "We're coming to take this guy."

CROWD CHANTING

He was quite vain,

and therefore he decided

to get liposuction to slim himself down.

He was an alcoholic,

he was a heavy drinker and a heavy smoker. He was way overweight.

He fell asleep and during that time the French came,

put him in a body bag, closed it,

and were heading to the airport with him.

Allegedly, it is in this very sensitive moment

when the French captors decide to play a bit of a trick on Carlos,

and according to some sources, they talk in Hebrew just to scare

the living hell out of Carlos and making him think that they are

the Mossad and that he is taken back to Israel,

much like Adolf Eichmann was in 1960.

HE LAUGHS

After 20 years' pursuit, the Jackal is surrendered by his protectors.

The countries which sheltered him had enough of the man

whose name became a byword for terrorism.

He certainly had become an embarrassment to

the Syrian government, and I think that's why they expelled him.

- NEWS REPORT: - Before the jury left the Paris courtroom,

Carlos addressed them with a speech which lasted for hours.

- NEWS REPORT: - Carlos saw this trial as an opportunity

to parade his talents to the world. In the end, though, he came across

as a pathetically self-centred figure,

totally out of touch with a changed world.

With luck, it's with this image rather than with that of

the mythological super-terrorist that from now on,

he'll be remembered.

Ultimately, you can see that he just wants to be loved.

He wants to be loved by the Syrians, by the Iraqis, by the East Germans.

And if he's not getting their support,

you can see how fragile he is and how quickly he crumbles

when he feels that not everyone supports his mission

and admires him the way he wants to be admired.

INTERVIEWER: