Carlos the Jackal, born Illich Ramirez Sanchez in Venezuela, evolved from a radicalized youth trained in Cuba and Moscow to a notorious terrorist who personally killed 83 people and commanded 2,000 more. After training with the PLO in Jordan, he executed high-profile attacks including the 1975 OPEC hostage crisis in Vienna and a failed nuclear reactor plot in France. His career ended after an eight-year fugitive life, culminating in his 1994 extradition to France where he maintained his innocence while boasting of his revolutionary legacy, illustrating how ideological fervor often devolved into indiscriminate violence against civilians. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Tuning Out Over Syphilis00:03:14
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
I'm talking to people like Julie Kay Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
The Justice Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
Listen to Bleep with Ana Navarro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm wild.
Wild back.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful.
I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like...
Listen to Las Culturalistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
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Was this before he wrote his stories?
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Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, because I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Syphilis?
Nope, that's not how the.
Robert Evans here.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is never introduced well, despite the significant resources that we put into writing and producing it, which just shatters the whole effect of the product.
And really, it's a real shame.
It's just, I know people are tuning out right now because I said syphilis.
Nobody likes to think about syphilis.
It's a horrible illness, but you can't go back in time.
This is how we started the episode.
Naming His Kid Lenin00:15:21
And so this is how we're continuing things.
This is part two of our episode on the golden age of terrorism.
And my guests, as in part one, are my friends and colleagues in getting repeatedly assaulted by police and federal agents, Bea and Elaine.
Hello.
Hello.
So we talked about, you know, a couple of different things.
Last episode, we talked about jacking in the sky.
The highest of jackings.
The highest of jackings.
As high as you can get and still be jacking.
Until space jackings happen.
Just you wait.
I have plans.
I'm excited for that decade when it's legal to basically hijack a spaceship to go to space Cuba, which is like keeping it.
I'm excited for Space Cuba.
Space Cube is going to be a good time.
We're all going to have fun in Space Cuba.
We'll all retire to the mountains of Space Cuba, and only half of us will come back.
We talked about the Japanese Red Army too, and now we're going to talk about the highlight of the Golden Age of Terror, if you're asking my opinion on the matter.
Carlos the motherfucking jackal.
This guy, bad person, real bad man.
But goddamn, he had some style, like some panache in Carlos the Jackal.
This is a dude.
He's all new to me.
He did some terrorism.
And not like you're Osama bin Laden.
I'm going to sit in a cave.
I'm going to give people money and you're going to sit off a cherry.
Yeah, and on die out.
None of that shit.
He was a James Bond villain.
He was a, I'm going to keep a machine pistol under my coat and leap out of windows and have all sorts of gadgets and shoot up OPEC.
He was just cool as hell.
Really terrible to women, but cool as hell.
Did he cover them in gold so that none of their skin can breathe and they asphyxiate it?
He was terrible to women in a really unique way that I actually think is kind of fascinating.
Not your normal abuser.
Not looking forward to hearing.
Not really an abuser.
I mean, we'll decide if we think he's an abuser.
It's more complicated than that.
I'm just saying what Carlos is doing to win.
Covering women in gold so that their skin can't breathe and they suffocate somehow is also really unique.
Yes, that is unique, but he did not do that.
But what he did was also pretty...
Let's move on here.
They weren't self-criticism sessions.
As long as they weren't self-criticism.
They sure weren't.
Yeah, Carlos the Jackal.
Carlos was for a brief period, not a brief, for like a decade or more, the most wanted man in the world.
He was the most famous terrorist on a planet until, again, like 9-11 really fucked the curve on a lot of things.
Because now, like, you hear about his record, and it doesn't sound nearly as impressive as having a 9-11 in there.
But Carlos fucked up a lot of people.
He personally killed at least 83 people with his own hands.
Still beats Osama and Laden.
But in terms of actual people that you shot in the fucking face, yes.
And Osama bin Laden didn't dive out a lot of windows.
A significant number of them would have been his ideological allies, which does tie in with the Japanese Red Army thing.
Because, you know, the Palestinian liberation movement had to be purged of people who wanted to liberate Palestine slightly differently.
Yeah.
You got to.
Or people who were, I think it was more often people who were like, you know, working with some sort of Inner Pole or whoever.
Whatever.
So he killed personally about 83 people, and then he claims that men and women under his command killed 2,000 more.
He's still alive and in prison today.
So he still talks and shit.
So he's at almost a 9-11.
Yeah, he might have committed close to a 9-11 if you add it all together.
Now, that said, these numbers are heavily debated, and a lot of people will say that he exaggerates massively the claims of the deaths that he were tied to.
And he was a consummate liar because of the whole international terrorist thing.
So who knows?
But definitely, like, the debate between scholars and lawyers isn't like whether or not he killed a bunch of people.
It's whether or not he's got like an ocean of blood or a river of blood on his hands.
Either way, killed a shitload of folks.
So let's talk about him.
Illich Ramirez Sanchez was born on October 12th, 1949, in Michelina, Venezuela.
His Russian first name was the product of his father, Ramirez Navas, who was both a deeply committed Marxist and a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie.
So he gets Lenin's first name from his dad, the rich lawyer.
Lenin also famously.
Yeah.
Not from a campaign.
Yeah, not a poor kid at all.
Spent a lot of time on very nice trains.
So yeah, his mom, Elba, was not a Marxist, though.
She was Catholic and Catholic as all hell.
And she did not like that her son wanted to name their boy after a dead Marxist revolutionary.
But he refused to listen, telling her, the biggest man in all humanity, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, humanity before the bomb is divided into two periods, before and after Lenin, not Christ who was an ordinary run-of-the-mill man.
So that's that's like what Marxism is for his dad.
It's not like I'm interested in left-wing politics.
It's like Lenin is my, is functionally a god whom I basically worship.
So that's Ramirez Navas, Illich's dad.
And he's Illich, not Carlos at this point, because at no point is his actual name Carlos.
But that's a story for later.
So today, Venezuela is famed for being either a communist hellhole or a glorious socialist paradise, depending on what chunk of Twitter you hang out in.
But when young Illich was born, the nation's political situation was a lot more fluid.
More than 150,000 Venezuelans died in the national wars of independence, which had occurred in the early 1800s and kind of freed them from Spain.
And the success of Venezuelan revolutionaries against Spain gave them a reputation for being like the best rebels in Latin America.
So Venezuelans traveled across the whole region during the mid and late 1800s, launching like wars of independence in other countries.
So that was kind of like the, you're a Venezuelan, like our, our, one of the things we're known for is our revolutionaries.
Which is the Cuba of its day.
Yeah.
Everyone needs to export something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if you're a government, a good thing to export is young men who want to overthrow governments.
That is the thing to send out of the country.
I would put it out there that the United States exported quite a few of those, and it seems to have worked out okay for them.
Yeah, now they all have super fun painkiller hobbies.
Yep.
Yep.
So, yeah, the yeah, as often happens, liberation for Venezuela was followed by a series of brutal dictators who seized power and held it through horrible violence.
Yeah, it tends to work that way.
Ramirez Navas, Illich's father, spent his early life watching a series of four dictators rise to power and be overthrown.
While he initially enrolled at seminary, he changed his mind rather quickly and, like Stalin, declared himself an atheist while still a teenager.
He spent most of his youth hanging out on the edges of Venezuela's dissident scene, and he got into minor trouble for harboring a fugitive from justice.
The authorities declared him a communist, although he insists he did not know what the word communist meant at the time he was arrested and imprisoned for it.
I would doubt that based on his name.
No, no, he's not Illich.
This is his dad.
Sorry, I'm talking about, we're going into like why his dad is the way he is.
Yeah, that's Ramirez Navas.
I could have been a little clearer about that.
But yeah, his dad gets arrested for being a communist before he knows what communism is.
And so there's an interesting arc somewhere in there where he goes from not knowing what communism is to naming his kid after Lenin.
That's the story we're going to tell before we tell the story of the fun stuff here.
So Ramirez learns quickly, and by the time he's out of prison, the national dictator was this guy, General Juan Gomez, who was a cattle rancher with a big, terrible mustache.
And yeah, he did dictator shit.
He banned the people of Caracas from having a rotary club because he was afraid that it would turn into a hive of rebellion.
And at the point where you're keeping people from going to the Rotary Club, no chance anyone has any resentments.
No.
People are very happy.
It was illegal to organize as a communist or a socialist under General Gomez.
So yeah, Ramirez did some time in prison.
And when he got out, he had converted to Soviet-style communism.
He was like full-on at that point.
He goes to prison where they put all the communists, and he leaves prison a communist.
I'm so surprised.
Yeah.
Hey, guys, anyone want to explain to me the thing I'm in prison for being?
They told me that this is what I was, and then they put me in prison for it, and probably beat the shit out of me.
And it sounds like you guys have been all over this shit.
So what's that about?
Yeah.
Anybody got some notes?
So, yeah, he gets out and he gets involved in radical politics and he plays a small role in a successful revolution against the general, but he kind of hates everyone else all the time.
That's kind of this guy's thing.
He doesn't get along with anybody, and he doesn't, so nobody actually, like, he doesn't get to do anything in politics, and he hates the thing that they do, which is establish another dictatorship.
So he basically gives up on ever doing any work to try to make his Marxist beliefs a reality, and instead makes a bunch of money as a lawyer.
And he decides that he's going to, his son is going to become perfect revolutionary, that he's going to raise his son from childhood to be like a great Marxist revolutionary.
I went to law school so that you could overthrow the government.
Yeah, it's kind of badass, actually.
Also, pinning.
He was a better dad.
Yeah.
Pinning all of your hopes and dreams and expectations that you never achieved on your child has never ended badly for anyone.
It tends to work out well.
In this case, it ends with the guy throwing grenades inside a French shopping.
Anyway, so yeah.
So he decides that his son is going to fulfill all of his dreams of revolutionary Marxism so that he can just make money, which is an interesting thing for a Marxist to do.
Yeah.
Nobody's...
We all make compromises when we live in a world that doesn't meet our values.
So he did that.
And to make up for the fact that he was giving his kid a very bougie upbringing, he raised Illich on stories of great revolutionaries, including his grandfather, Elba.
In the biography, Jackal, author John Folean writes, The family hero was Elba's grandfather, a doctor who transformed a 60-strong band of followers into an army big enough to help overthrow the government of Caracas in 1899, only to lose power a few years later.
But I said, like, Venezuela was just nothing but revolutions in this period.
Unbowed, the doctor repeatedly tried to assassinate the state governor, resisting the forces sent after him in a courageous last and lone stand to give his comrades time to flee into the Andes.
Illich delighted in the tales of how the doctor, after he was caught, refused to betray his companions under torture.
So that's, that's like his, that's like his heroic grandpa.
Your grandpa got the shit tortured out of him.
Absolutely the shit.
And he never fucking snitched.
Yeah.
Which I'd be proud of that.
That's a pretty cool grandpa to have.
Overthrew the government, didn't do a great job of being the government, but nobody does.
Yeah, pretty good, pretty good grandpa.
My grandpa didn't ever throw any governments.
I know.
That's what everyone says about your grandpa.
Okay.
So Ramirez was insistent that his boy be raised atheist, and he lectured a lot about the non-existence of God, which again, caused some conflict with his deeply Catholic wife.
Another thing that caused some conflict with his deeply Catholic wife was the fact that Ramirez cheated constantly and openly, fucking around like a sex metaphor.
I can't really think of that.
I hate that.
It didn't go well.
It was not a good marriage.
One partner was like, I am a Catholic and want to be a traditional Catholic person.
And another said, I'm an atheist and I'm going to fuck whoever and I'm going to raise our son to overthrow the government.
And she said, could we talk about this?
And he said, fuck you.
I'm fucking lots of other people.
It was a bad relationship.
It really doesn't seem like a marriage when you read about it.
It kind of seems like he found someone to have his kids and then ignored her for years.
I don't know.
Marriage.
I mean, I've studied history.
This seems like most relationships.
Most marriages, really.
It wasn't a great one.
So young Illich and his brothers were expected by their father when he was like paying attention to them because he goes off and he's working a lot of the time.
Wait, wait, so he has siblings?
Yeah, he's got like a, he's got like a couple of brothers.
Yeah.
What were they raised?
Were they just like, your brother's going to be a revolutionary?
You guys better help make money to fund him.
I don't think his dad had a super clear idea in mind, but Illich seems to have been the one that he was really hanging his wishes on.
What I just want to know, though, is: was he raising them all like, you get to be a revolutionary, and if he falls, then number two steps up?
Or was it very much, this child is going to be a revolutionary, and you're a barber?
I think they're all supposed to be revolutionaries, but Illich was the one, he was his first kid.
So he was like, you're the one who's really, you got the best, the best semen.
How much of this information, like, how much children were coming out?
Yeah, more or less.
Yeah.
How much of this is coming from Illich, and how much of this is coming, like this part of it, the biographer talks to people who knew them as families.
Okay, so this is real.
Yeah.
Because I could absolutely see when he grows up to be the jackal being like, oh, yeah, my papa always told me it was time to go overthrow some governments.
Although, if this comes from his brothers who were just like, yeah, we were told to go become shoemakers.
Yeah, I don't know more about how his brothers were raised, but I don't think, like, they all got kind of the same education.
But how many thousands of people's deaths are they responsible for?
None, as far as I know.
Oh, well, slackers.
So Ramirez wrote a book for his kids that told them how they were supposed to behave because, again, he was gone being a lawyer most of the time and did not actually have the time to read them.
That is lawyery as fuck, by the way.
Here's a book I wrote for you to tell you how to behave.
No, it was called Social, Moral, and Civic Formulation.
And it was a guide to manhood written by a man who wanted his kids to become revolutionaries.
Which for that, like, included some really bad advice that makes you maybe think he didn't know what it took to be a revolutionary.
Because one of his core tenets for them was, I tell anybody the truth to his face, which is a bad thing to do if you might be trying to overthrow the government.
Are you trying to overthrow the government?
Ah, dad, saw that my book.
So, when their dad was out of town, which was a lot of the time, Illich and his brothers were like real mamas boys because his mom wasn't a giant piece of shit.
Yeah, he was raised kind of like when he was able to kind of like relax and play and stuff when he was with his mom.
When he was with his dad, like all of the boys were expected to behave like soldiers.
And you can kind of see him.
He was kind of raised like John Connor.
Only like in this, I guess.
Only his mom was like, Yeah.
Yeah, not ignoring him because she was falsely imprisoned in a mental asylum, but fucking a mistress and making shitloads of money.
Raised Like John Connor00:14:52
Right.
Yeah.
Slightly different from John Connor.
Sarah Connor comes off better in that comparison.
She sure does.
Yeah.
Probably better at pull-ups, too.
Yeah, I was going to say better upper body strength.
Absolutely.
So other kids bullied Illich for his weight, calling him El Gordo or Fatso.
Whenever he was mocked, Illich would burst into tears and scream back, the whole world will hear of me, which is not a thing that kids who go on to not shoot lots of people.
I was going to say, having, you know, never listened to your podcast before, I imagine that the fat kid who we're talking about in the middle of the Golden Age of Terrorism episode, who screams that the whole world will know his name, goes on to not carry that resentment in his heart for the rest of his life.
He gets some therapy, he finds someone nice, he settles down.
And that's the end of the episode.
Yeah.
Cool.
So, anyway.
Yeah, continuing on.
So, fortunately, since he got bullied a lot, his direct contact with his peers was limited.
Ramirez's wealth meant that he was able to hire expensive communist teachers for Illich and his brothers.
I'm also just sorry, I'm just going to put it out there real quick.
I was bullied a lot in junior high and high school.
I think a lot of people were.
We sure were.
I think all of us here were.
Did you not.
I don't think I'm responsible for the deaths of any thousands of people.
Well, that's so fucking special.
You got some time.
I don't know what Elaine's been up to.
So, yeah, so he gets special communist teachers hired by his dad to train him.
And he takes.
Because his dad's so rich.
Because his dad's so rich in communists.
So these communist teachers give him private lessons at home where he learns history and mathematics and biology through a Marxist lens in the palatial comfort of his family mansion, which is an interesting way to learn Marxism.
So capitalism is bad because it's hard to explain when you think about it.
See how shitty life is for these people outside of our mansion?
That's why this system's a problem.
I'm going to go make more money and abandon your mother again for several weeks.
Remember, you got to stop this.
I tried.
You know, in the last episode, we talked a little bit about good house cleaning beginning at home.
Yeah.
So, uh, yeah, this kept him very isolated.
He later recalled somewhat mournfully, we studied at home.
We had a private instructor.
That's not normal.
Which it's not.
His communist education would have indicated to him that that was not normal.
It is weird to be instructed in communism alone.
In a palatial mansion.
Yes.
So Ramirez was insistent that his son would be trained to be a great revolutionary.
And it turns out that raising a kid that way doesn't make them very personable.
As one friend later recalled, when there was a game to be organized, Illich was always the one who would do it.
He was the leader.
He would decide, but not in an authoritarian manner.
He was the most organized, the one who took the initiative and made the rules.
This same friend noted that Illich's favorite game was hide and seek.
Illich liked to play at goodies and baddies with plastic weapons.
In our group, he was the strongest and most aggressive.
So, you know, he was full of ideas on how to hurt living things.
He taught his friends how to coat the tips of their toy arrows with metal in order to kill birds.
He was full of ideas in how to hurt living things.
Yeah.
This guy doesn't go on to be an assassin or a terrorist or anything, does he?
Kind of both.
Pretty good at both after some missteps.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're not learning to have friends and you live alone and you live with just your siblings in a palatial mansion, like you spend a lot of time thinking about how to kill birds.
And that's why we shouldn't have mansions.
In 1961, when Illich was 12, his parents finally divorced.
Ramirez later explained, this is his dad, I got divorced because in my house I thought I was the only one who did anything right.
Oddly enough, his parents continued to live together, largely because Ramirez needed his ex-wife's unpaid labor to handle child-rearing.
And he was the only one who did anything right.
And also, a great communist.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yeah.
I'm going to quote next from the biography, Jackal.
In 1962, just as she had lost the battle over her children's first names, so Elba failed to stop her husband from sending Illich to the sprawling Fermin Toro Lycee in Caracas, which was a nursery to budding radicals at the time when the capital streets often resounded with violent left-wing demonstrations.
The more enterprising students skipped classes to march in protest at the liberal government's ban on the Communist Party.
The school was renowned.
All the revolutionaries had studied there, Illich recalled.
It was my father's decision.
As for my mother, she was hardly enthusiastic about the choice.
Did my father choose the school on purpose to annoy my mother?
By his own testimony, it was in January 1964, when he was 14, that Illich defied authority for the first time.
He joined an organization banned by the authorities, the Venezuelan Communist Youth.
That's where I made my debut in the revolutionary movement.
I was one of those in charge of the organization at a Lycee in Caracas.
In 1965 to 1966, that young Flock counted some 200 members, and Illich claims that he helped to organize anti-government street marches, which scared the president.
The protest also taught Illich how to make Molotov cocktails and set cars on fire.
Well, visits to the shanty towns on the outskirts of Hrak, as he later claimed, revealed to him the plight of the poor.
Wait, wait, so it's like your debutante ball, but instead you like come out, organize a march for the first time, and everyone presents you with instructions on bomb making and a fancy tour of all of the slums that you're probably semi-responsible for because of the types of labor that your dad does.
Now, that's exactly how this guy, a liar, described his birth as a communist or his birth as a revolutionary.
So we're into this is a liar and terrorist.
The liar and terrorist says, by the time I was 17, I was learning how to light cars on fire.
Which I got to say, also.
Which maybe?
Sure, maybe.
Also, there was a problem.
That sounds like teenagers in Portland today.
It does sound like, well, not cars.
That was the police.
True.
Every car was the police.
I also, I got to say, like, I've heard a lot of absurd grifters talk about things that they think will sound very impressive.
Yes.
And things like trained to make Molotov cocktails.
Kind of one of those things.
Because Molotov cocktails, famously not that hard to make.
I was trained in how to make grease fires in that time.
I burnt my friend's kitchen.
Anyway, when Illich was 15 in 1966, his father sent him off to Cuba to complete the education his weird private communism tutors had begun.
And this is like one of those...
Weird private communism tutors.
Yeah, people talk a lot about, and they should, and we should talk more.
We talk about them a bit in the Border Patrol, how there's all those like sketchy U.S. academies where we would like take cops from other countries and train them in how to like murder dissidents.
School of the Americas shit.
Yeah, yeah, that kind of shit.
And how terrible it is and how many governments and millions of people's deaths can be traced to things that started there.
They're just unspeakable things that are tremendous, tremendous evil.
There were equivalents of that stuff, though, in the USSR during the Civil War or during the Cold War and whatever.
And the kind of Cuban equivalent to the School of the Americas was Camp Montanzas.
And yeah, it was like, yeah, where you trained people to go to other countries to like foment revolution and stuff.
And so Illich goes there and he learns how to like commit acts of sabotage and start revolutionary cells and do all that good stuff.
Or he doesn't, and that's all a lie.
Sure.
Because the CIA, when this guy becomes a big deal, really wants to tie him more to the USSR than he was already tied.
And so they lied about it.
But then later, one of the CIA guys was like, there's actually no evidence this happened.
But also it might have happened.
So who the fuck knows?
And also probably Illich is not going to be like, no, no, no, I was not trained in an Illinois.
My life is less cool than you think.
Yeah, he's not that kind of dude.
So who knows?
Yeah.
So his family sent him to London later that year, which does kind of make you think maybe he didn't go to elite communist guerrilla school because that does seem like it would take some time.
Maybe it just took the semester.
It was like a crash course.
Yeah, like a mini-mester, like a month and a half.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, you take a five-week course over the summer.
You could learn a lot about overthrowing the government in five weeks.
Took it through mail.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Correspondence course.
Sure.
Yeah.
There's options.
So his dad sends the family to London.
And his main reason for this is because he wants his kids to learn English and he wants them to experience a new culture.
So again, his Marxist dad takes him out of communism fighting school and sends him to London to hang out in nightclubs flirting with European women.
Because again, Ramirez Navos, incredible Marxist.
I mean, like, just an amazing person.
On the other hand, I don't feel like that's a bad call.
Yeah.
I'm not saying it's a bad call.
If you can, in one summer, do communism fighting, overthrowing the government school, and hanging out in nightclubs in London, do both of those.
Honestly, if it was a correspondence course, maybe he did both at the same time.
I think it's hard to do a bomb-making correspondence course.
He could outline the bomb on the back of the society label.
When you send your final project in the mail, you get in trouble.
That's my impression.
I mean, you know, you have a wonderful career until it's cut cruelly short by the FBI for some reason.
Are we talking about Kazinsky?
We're talking about Teddy.
Yeah.
So, yeah, Ramirez got his son admitted to a fancy British boy's school, which is basically the opposite of having private communism tutors.
Is it though?
Kind of.
I think the opposite of having private communism tutors is something that doesn't involve huge amounts of money.
Okay, yeah, fair enough.
He was not popular among his teachers and was generally seen as being a lazy smartass.
One teacher recalled he was a snide little blighter.
He was quite convinced he was God's gift to everyone.
He was podgy and pasty, but was always incredibly elegantly and expensively dressed.
He was a cheat and would avoid doing work whenever he could.
So, yeah, he was also, though, really smart and he did great on his exams.
So he kept, stayed in school.
1968 was, of course, one of the more revolutionary years in modern memory.
Kind of not all that different from this year, except for the internet and all of the additional guns and all of the additional fascism and all of the additional environmental degradation.
But anyway, very revolutionary year.
A lot of cool protests and movements and shit going on all over the damn world.
And in that year, Illich and his dad were in Paris because, again, his shit was going down in Paris.
Some shit was going down in Paris and they saw none of it because his dad was like, this seems scary.
Let's go to Moscow.
Oh, shit.
Okay.
Hold on, communism dad.
Communism lawyer dad.
You're going to take your kid out of communism fighting school and bring him to fucking hang out in nightclubs and then you're going to go to Paris in 1968.
Yeah, when all of the students rebel against the state.
There is nothing to learn here, kid who I have exposed to the nightclubs of London and communism fighting school.
Actually, if you are a communist in the idea of like statist communism, you know, the situationists don't really scratch your edge, do they?
But also, as a child of the 90s, when like everything from the 60s was very, very like interesting and kind of cool again, and they were making all of the documentaries about the Beatles and everything else, like 1968, very weirdly, like as a middle schooler, was the one thing that I read about like all like stuff in the U.S. and France.
And how like, wow, if I could have gone back in time to one place.
And so hearing that and just like.
Yeah, no.
His dad is like, no, we're not going to take it.
I'm not rolling you with the sore bone.
This shit's like scary.
Let's go to Moscow.
I mean, how do you see in Guidaboard?
Which Moscow, notably in 1968, one of the places where absolutely fuck all was happening.
Yeah, not a goddamn thing.
Whereas they're pulling up fucking paving stones, throwing them at cops in Paris, and also making funny comics about it.
Like, they also didn't go to Hungary.
None of these things, yeah, that does happen.
So Patrice Lumumba University is where the Soviet Union is where he goes.
Like, that's the college he goes to.
And Patrice Lumumba, if you remember our episode about the Congo, he was the democratically elected socialist leader of the Congo who was very quickly murdered for the pro-U.S. dictator who looted the country for like 40 years.
Which I got to say, you know, this is in Moscow.
Yeah.
Kudos to Moscow for naming a university after Patrice Lumumba.
Yeah.
Sure, that was pretty much where any engagement with, you know, progressive socialist politics from the Congo stopped.
But yeah, you know, it was a stab.
So, yeah, that's where the Soviet Union sent its foreign exchange students.
And communists from outside of Russia would go there to like learn Marxism so they could bring their nations of origin better in step with the USSR or like lead revolutions that were.
So anyway, Illich did terribly here because again, he's been raised to be a revolutionary.
And the one thing that they hate in the Soviet Union is a revolutionary.
When you're outside the Soviet Union, they might like you, but not inside.
Kronstadt was a love story.
So the fundamental problem is that Illich had been raised from birth to like, yeah, fight the state.
And yeah, that doesn't send him overworld.
This is actually the year that he moves to Moscow is the year that the Soviet Union sent tanks into Czechoslovakia to brutally suppress a popular uprising.
Famously, which is where we get tankies.
I was going to say, yeah.
That's people who think that everything the Soviet Union did was cool as a cucumber, so they have to justify crushing people with tanks.
Yeah, they're like the people who were they're like they're like most Americans.
But for communism.
But for communism.
Like half of Americans.
Sorry.
So revolutionaries were still occasionally useful to the USSR, but mainly like in terms of fighting this whole Cold War thing.
So Illich gets here and like he has a lot of trouble immediately.
The people at the school don't like him.
The government doesn't like him.
But he does have a couple of friends.
And one of his friends is a guy named Privilov who years later described 19-year-old Illich this way.
Illich was not at all the typical student sent by his country's communist party.
Nothing to do with the good little soldier of Mao who labored in the fields every summer.
He was a handsome young man, although his cheeks looked swollen, and he was a great bon vivur.
Trouble With Communism Tutors00:14:59
I don't know.
I don't know French.
In the biography Jackal, John Fulane goes on to write, flush with cash sent by his parents, Illich could afford to spend lavishly on whiskey and champagne in the special stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies, and which were off-limits to most people.
A lot of folks didn't know the USSR had those.
Oh, elite stores that only rich people could buy stuff at?
In the Marxist.
In the Marxist utopia.
They really got it right.
More Russian than the Russians.
The privileged student and his friends would throw glasses over their shoulders, not only empty glasses, but bottles as well.
The university authorities, frustrated in their attempts to oppose discipline on Illich, reasoned that his freedom of action would be drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him were reduced.
But when they asked Ramirez Navas to be less generous, the father, piqued, retorted that his son had never wanted for anything.
Great communists.
Unbelievably good communists here.
Like, think a child's behavior would be improved if he wasn't so entitled and constantly flush with cash.
Yeah.
And the rebuttal is, but I have always given my child everything he wants.
Yes, that's the criticism here.
The other decision being made is the USSR saying, it's a shame that this kid is getting drunk and misbehaving so much because of all the money he has, but we can't stop selling him expensive liquor.
A lot of fun calls being made.
He doesn't, you know, go quietly along with what the government wants at Patrice Lumumba University.
This is the birth of actually luxury communism.
Yeah.
Yeah, just for him, though.
Yes.
I think that's called capitalism.
So like Liberty University here in the United States, Patrice Lumumba College had a vice squad, which searched students at night to try to stop them from having fun things, took away their liquor and whatever.
I think Patrice Lumumba would not be down with that.
I don't think he would.
I think Patrice Lumumba would start some shit over that.
I think Patrice Lumumba would overthrow the administration of Patrice Lumumba University.
I think he might.
That was kind of his deal.
So continuing my reading from Jackal, quote, one night the patrol entered Illich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and glasses on the table, but he was apparently alone.
The squad opened the cupboard door and a girl who was completely drunk fell out.
She was naked and was clutching her clothes in her hands.
They asked her what she was doing there and she answered, I feel pity for the oppressed.
She was obviously a prostitute.
Another time and with another girl, Illich didn't bother to hide her in the cupboard.
He threw her out of the window.
You know, there's better ways to hide your date.
This one was fully dressed and landed in two meters of snow a floor or two below.
She got up unhurt and shouted abuse at him.
That is something you can do when there's that much snow.
A big is also throw some people out of some windows is all I'm saying.
I would yell abuse at people who threw me out of windows.
And that's why we're friends.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We have compatible attitudes towards defenestration.
Naked lady falls out of a cupboard and they're like, what the fuck are you doing here?
And her defense is, I feel sympathy with the oppressed.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, that's a great cover story.
That's a great cover story.
Yeah, she's a revolutionary.
I mean, this cupboard almost passed out drunk for reasons.
So this was kind of, as a young man, Illich was great at attracting women because he was very good looking, very charming.
I mean, he's Venezuelan, right?
He was what you might call a user, though.
And the only deep relationship he ever had was with a young Cuban woman he bonded with while in Moscow.
She was older than him, with a marriage under her belt already.
And so she was like kind of more experienced than him, which was not common for his relationships.
Years later, Illich would admit that her greater life experience was an anomaly in his love life.
Quote, I like girls very much, but I like to be in control.
With Sonia, I wasn't a ruler.
We were one.
Sonia taught him how to smoke cigars.
And Illich got her pregnant.
They broke up shortly before or after that, and she flew back to Havana to give birth.
And it's very clear, unclear what happened to them.
But this is actually, oddly enough, not a deadbeat dad story on Illich's part.
She went back home pregnant, cut off all contact with him, and had their kid.
He wrote her letters repeatedly, just begging to know the kid's name, and she never responded.
And we have no idea, like, what went down between them.
Like, presumably, there is a story there that we don't know, especially given the kind of man that he turned into.
But like, it's a very sad story based on the details we have, which is that, like, she left and he never learned his kid's name.
But you have to assume he did something horrible because he's Carlos the Jackal.
Possibly.
Or else it was just a total power move.
Like, you're kind of a user, a little bit of a dick.
I'm going to have this one thing over you that you will never control for the rest of your life.
Yeah.
And also, somebody who has explicitly said, I like to be in control of everybody I'm in relationships with.
This is the person he couldn't do that to, which means she was hard as fuck.
Yeah.
And also, he's going to have feelings about it forever.
Yeah, no, I think it fucked him up for forever.
But, you know, whatever.
In 1970, Patrice Lumumba University expelled Illich and 13 other members of the Venezuelan communist youth for anti-Soviet provocation and indiscipline.
Now, there's rumors that this is also untrue and that he was a secret KGB agent from this point forward and that they just faked kicking him out of the school.
And that might be true.
Like, it's a fucking KGB.
Who knows?
But as cover goes, hey, you went to Cuban communism fighting school and then you went to Patrice Lumumba.
Here's how to bring communism to your country university.
And we kicked you out so you can be a secret KGB agent.
That's right up there with, we're not trying to kidnap the prime minister.
We're just building bombs in the mountains.
I think the thing that we're all learning about the 60s and 70s is that you could get away with a lot.
I mean, historically, if they really hadn't liked him that much and he had gone to Cuban Revolutionary School, they could have just called him a Trotskyist.
Yeah.
They could have just dispected.
He had been in Cuba.
We are talking in the late 60s, early 70s.
So, like, there's not as much of that going on.
The Fourth International was in 1964.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know.
You probably know more about what he was likely to, like, I don't know.
They didn't do anything to him.
He just gets kicked out of the country.
Which probably just means his dad was a real rich communist.
Yeah.
And they were like, you're kind of a spoiled dick communist kid.
And he wasn't like a Soviet citizen, right?
Like, he hadn't done anything other than be a drunk asshole.
And so in the style of communist college administrations for time immemorial, they said, you're a drunk asshole and you're kind of fucking up all of our shit.
So we just want you to go to a different school now.
Well, they just wanted him out of the USSR.
Or he left the USSR to go fight in Lebanon and then they wouldn't let him back in.
Again, who knows?
Kind of some debate around this.
But whatever happens, or whatever happened, the kind of thing that happens next is that Illich winds up in Lebanon because while he was at Patrice Lumumba University, he did meet some real revolutionaries, a bunch of young Palestinian dudes who were affiliated with the Popular Front.
So the Popular Front, a little bit of brief history, the early 1970s, pretty rough time to be a Palestinian liberation activist.
Not that there's ever been a good time to be a Palestinian.
It hasn't been great.
Kind of always been a hard gig.
But the six-day war had happened in June of 1967, and it had ended with every Arab military force arrayed against Israel being like, you know, it didn't go well for everybody else.
Palestine lost like a lot of Palestine.
And the failure, the total, massive failure of traditional military tactics on behalf of all of the Arab forces led to an increasing embrace in irregular warfare.
So this is like the period where a lot of, all right, we're going to go, we're going to do some, we're going to do some guerrilla shit now.
You know, the Fedayeen and stuff like become more of a deal after this.
So a lot of the, most of the groups kind of fighting and advocating politically for Palestinian liberation at this time kind of were under the broad umbrella of the PLO or the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
And their charter stated armed struggle is the only way to free Palestine.
It embraced commando action to further this end.
And the Popular Front was one of the organizations under the PLO.
It was explicitly Marxist and militant.
And yeah, one of its leaders summed up its purpose when he observed to kill a Jew far from the battlefield has more effect than killing hundreds of Jews in battle.
So that's kind of the idea, right?
So Illich goes to Beirut, which was a place, you know, where you're going to be if you're a Palestinian freedom fighter, because it's kind of the safest place where a bunch of them are gathering.
One, it's like right there.
It's very close.
You know, the whole of all of the area, whenever people talk about conflicts in the Middle East, it's like driving from Jersey to Connecticut in a lot of cases.
Well, like, one of the things about the Golan Heights, which is one of the disputed territories, certainly in this period, it's the Golan Heights, which means you can see into Israel.
You're standing on a hill and you can see a lot of what's downhill from you.
It's just one of those, the lesson you continuously get as an American reading about the rest of the world is it's tiny.
Yeah.
Unless you're reading about Africa, in which case it's so much bigger than you have any like it's incomprehensibly large.
So Illich traveled to Beirut, which was, you know, yeah, a cool place.
Still a cool, well, kind of a bummer at the moment, but that's not Beirut's fault.
He fell in with the popular front and he found himself drawn to a movement where political theory and rigid social organization took a back seat to shooting people repeatedly in the face, which he was great at.
Oh, he was so ready to be in the shooting people repeatedly in the face.
I mean, if you were raised with theory and theory and theory, being a rich kid with theory, for someone to just say, fuck theory, you want to shoot people?
Yeah, it's like are you ready to go shoot people?
God damn, do we finally get to shoot people?
Yeah.
And, you know, a lot of these folks, these Palestinian fighters, were kind of the sort of people who saw like they wanted the destruction of Israel and the liberation of Palestine, but most of them would have seen that as like the first step on a journey towards like toppling all of the regimes of the Middle East and like bringing Marxism.
Like it was a pretty common.
That's why the Japanese Red Army like got along with these dudes.
Well, it's also why the PLO had kind of a hard time because like they were they got used as a pawn by other governments in the region.
I mean and to some extent still do, but that like uncomfortable that uncomfortable tendency of like, and then we want to overthrow all these other governments.
Like governments don't like it when you say you want to overthrow all the governments.
Yeah, that's why anarchists are only popular sometimes.
The Popular Front operated a bunch of training camps out in the Jordanian desert.
And Jordan was like, you can keep your revolutionaries here in Jordan.
We're cool with that.
But people pointed that way.
Yeah, they weren't wild about it.
But, you know, Illich was pretty wild about learning how to do cool stuff.
Like they had like airplanes out there that you would like do training in to like how to get into gunfights on airplanes.
And he thought that was cool as shit.
Yeah, it seemed like an idea.
Did you do practice hijackings?
I think you probably did a lot of practice jacking.
I think a lot of people were jacking it in the Jordanian desert back in those days.
So yeah, and his initial plan, like he didn't really want to fight for Palestinian liberation a whole bunch.
He wanted to learn from them and then take a bunch of other Venezuelans who were doing the same thing and go back home to Venezuela and do some revolutions in Venezuela.
Yeah.
And when he joined in 1970, the PLO recruiting officer who inducted him gave Illich the nickname Carlos.
And the only reason for this was that he came from South America.
And that was the only Spanish name that his recruiter really knew.
So he was like, you're Carlos because you come from Latin America.
Right.
And that's why he's Carlos from here on out.
That's how we give nicknames now.
That's how we give nicknames.
It's like everybody you've ever met who has a nickname like, you know, Texas or like, yeah.
So he goes to this training camp in the desert with like 90 other guys and a lot of them are French in Belgium or other Europeans.
And they all start learning like a bunch of there's like a mix of like political lectures and also courses on like how to handle guns and make bombs and stuff.
One popular test of like how brave the trainees were was you'd make them stand in the open air about a meter away from a plastic bomb that detonated.
Something not wildly different from like the distraction devices the police throw at us like the flashbang grenades.
The stingers.
Yeah.
So you have to like stand and not and try not to flinch when that thing explodes nearby.
That's what we do on a Saturday.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah, that's what we do and like a lot of Tuesdays too.
That's why I don't let you take videos that often.
Ah, fair.
Yeah.
So yeah, it's, yeah, he does really well at this.
Carlos is just like seen as like, oh, you're not scared of things exploding near you and you're good at shooting people.
We should fast track you to go do cool stuff.
I think we're halfway there.
Yeah.
We don't flinch when things explode.
Carlos himself didn't really like it much.
He thought there was too much propaganda and not enough learning how to shoot people right in their faces.
It seems like after an entire lifetime of being raised by private communism tutors and sent to special communism indoctrination school, he's kind of good on the communist indoctrination.
He does know some communism.
He's like, cool, I got it, but when do we get to shoot stuff?
You know, though, who is knowledgeable about communism?
I was going to say indoctrination, but people will indoctrinate you in communism.
You want to get indoctrinated.
Products and services.
It is Raytheon.
Raytheon loves communism, but you know what they love more than communism?
Shooting people right in the face.
You know, the best thing about Raytheon is that.
They're responsible for, and it only took 20 years of a global war on terror and launching thousands of missiles at weddings and schools and school buses and villages filled with women and children before Raytheon, the humanitarians that they are, had the brilliant idea of, what if we made a missile that was just full of knives and shot it only at cars of people we're pretty sure are bad.
And that's the best idea anyone's ever had in the entire war on terror.
And I'm not joking about that.
That's where we are.
That's the best idea.
That's the best idea of the whole war.
Yep.
And they are sponsoring this podcast, as are these other people and their products.
Financial Literacy Month00:03:39
And I'm so excited.
And services.
They're all Raytheon subsidiaries.
So excited.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
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All right, we're back.
Oh, what a good time to be a human.
I feel optimistic about the future.
Let's talk about the past, where things were also great.
So in early 1970, the king of Jordan, again, you know, he's letting all these Palestinian freedom fighters and such hang out in Jordan.
But he's not like, he's not jazzed about it because again, he's a king and these people are trying to overthrow governments.
And even if you don't like the government they're trying to overthrow, if you're a king and there's a bunch of people trying to overthrow a government all hanging out near you, you're probably like, got to keep an eye on them.
Just out of curiosity, how do Marxists feel about monarchies?
Not wild about it.
Oh, yeah.
So it's a rocky situation.
And there's like fights between his soldiers and them.
Like it's not, it's not the smoothest situation in the world.
And yeah, it got rockier that September when the Popular Front attempted to hijack four airliners bound for New York at the same time.
And to their credit, they succeeded in taking two planes, which is not bad for hijacking.
Familiar.
No.
Hijacking four planes.
Yeah, but they just did the boring shit with it.
Yeah, they got like 360 captives and they actually flew them to an abandoned airfield in the Jordanian desert and like stamped their passports with like liberated like like free territory or something like that.
It was really weird.
I like that as the choice.
Yeah, it's very, yeah.
They uh weird weird performance art beats the 9-11.
Not quite perform.
So whenever when they started the hijacking, the dudes in charge on each plane would tell the passengers, look, I'm sorry.
We have just hijacked you to a desert in Jordan.
This is a country in the Middle East next to Israel and Syria.
We're fighting a just war, a war for the liberation of our country from Israeli occupation.
You relax tonight.
There is food and drink here for you.
So this was the guys that got captured, which is like nice.
That's a good thing.
I'm getting started.
Yeah.
Like that way better than a 9-11.
I do.
Yeah.
Very, very fitting for the region.
And also like kind of funny that like you kidnap a bunch of Americans and you're like, okay, the first thing we got to do is let them know like they need to know.
Like, is this part of Africa?
No, but it's, yeah.
Close.
Three hours later.
All right.
So everybody clear on your Mongols invade.
Now, this is really when.
No, no, no.
It's the Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean.
It's where pizza comes from, okay?
We're near the pizza place.
Yeah, so they have a very nice kidnapping.
Which most, as a rule, you read every time when you start reading through a bunch of stories of plane hijackings, most people on the planes talk very highly about the hijackers.
Which again might seem like a good tactic.
If you can hijack a plane and everybody on the plane is like, you know, that didn't seem so bad.
That guy who threatened our lives with a bomb was quite pleasant.
What a nice and exciting detour.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You'll never guess, Marcia, what happened when we were traveling.
Yeah, most people would love to be hijacked as long as it was this kind of hijacking where you get to spend some time.
You get your passport stamp.
On the next slide, I took another picture.
Yeah.
And this is where the nice young PLO man gave me some taboola and showed me the bomb around his neck.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yeah.
So the Popular Front eventually succeeded in trading the passengers for seven of their arrested comrades.
And yeah, it was a big old success.
And for a while, it was probably the most impressive airplane-related act of terrorism in history until some assholes, you know.
I would say that by some standards, still more successful.
I like it a lot better than 9-11.
You know, all those people, they seem like they had a pretty okay time.
Seems like it went all right.
I would say the people flying the planes, the people hijacking the planes, and the people riding on the planes all felt better about it afterwards.
Yep, I would say so.
A lot of people had stories they told for the rest of their lives, which they got to have.
So, yeah, it was not the worst act of terrorism in history.
You could say that for sure.
But it was a big old deal at the time, and it put the king of Jordan in a pretty rough situation.
And he eventually was like, I'm expelling y'all from Jordan, which led to a horrific war in Jordan between the Palestinians.
It's called Black September and the Jordanian military.
And the Palestinians were, again, as is pretty usual in the long saga of Palestinian liberation, fucked from the jump.
But they fought tenaciously.
Eventually, though, casualties were so high that Carlos, the young Venezuelan recruit, was sent into battle.
He described it as a sheer massacre, thousands of dead.
I fought until 1971.
I was on the front line in the mountains.
The enemy was trying to force us down the banks of the River Jordan.
His commanding officer noted that he was nerveless under fire and could take life without blinking.
By the end of the whole disastrous conflict, more than 3,000 Palestinian fighters were dead.
And Carlos, who had once been planning to return to Venezuela, was utterly committed to their cause.
Nor more did he talk about going home.
Instead, he went back to his old stomping grounds in London, this time as an agent for the Popular Front.
This is when the James Bond shit starts.
Yeah.
So a life of wealth and travel had prepared him pretty well for his next job, which was pretending to be a socialite so he could make a list of high-profile pro-Israel targets to kidnap and murder in London.
Which, if you cut out some of the stuff we were just covering here, there's a way to spin this where he is, in fact, a socialite.
Yeah.
Yeah, kind of.
Yeah.
I can't wait till he meets Roger Moore.
Yeah.
I've been waiting for two episodes now for this.
So Carlos became a fixture in certain London social circles using his easy charm and a facility with languages to build connections.
He was most successful when it came to wooing young women, which he did constantly.
Now, to say that Carlos used women would be putting it lightly.
His most common move was to flirt with a girl until she fell for him and then ask him to hold a bag of his things in her attic whenever he went out of town on business.
The bags would contain machine pistols, usually, and large amounts of explosives like gelignite and yeah, dynamite.
I mean, I would rather, if some dude left some shit at my house, I would rather it was that than like a bunch of his spare underpants.
Just going to put it out there.
Right.
Or his guitar that he doesn't really know how to play.
He is that guy.
But with bags of, he has an endless supply of machines.
He knows how to play those machine businesses.
Yeah, we will learn very soon.
Very good at them.
And again, though, there's consequences for the women that he does this to.
At least one of his women did a year in jail when she found weaponry that he'd stashed there and reported it to journalists before the police.
Yeah.
He also endangered these women due to the fact that he left bombs in their houses that were always stored improperly.
So like people would like become aware of the arms caches he'd left because the stink of rotting dynamite would start to overwhelm their so he was not didn't really give a shit about these people.
Yeah, that's that's on another level above and beyond like maybe you got a yeast infection and now your couch has scabies.
Yeah.
Like this guy left some decaying dynamite in my attic.
Yeah.
I mean I got a fucking cat from an ex-girlfriend once, which is a lot better, I think, than an illegal arms cache.
I don't know.
I mean, some deals.
It depends on the battle.
I have my own flavor of toxic relationships that I prefer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, he's not, he's not, he's not, this is what he does with relationships.
You know, it's not going to help you hijack a plane, Robert.
A cat.
I mean, it might.
It would if it could.
I have some cats that you should meet.
Later on in life, musing on the nature of his relationship to women, Carlos said this.
I love women.
I mean, the good life, but not only sex.
In the end, I love friendship a great deal.
I haven't lived many love stories in my life.
At the same time, I can fall in love easily, like any old school boy.
I can love several women at the same time.
He also stated in another interview, to succeed in missions, you must have the support of girls.
You must strike up friendships with these apparently inoffensive creatures because they are very useful in supplying havens and warding off suspicion.
So I like to hang one around my neck and it keeps the vampires away.
So there's part of that that seems like, okay, so you're kind of a slut.
You're kind of a slut, and that's okay.
That's a fine thing to be.
It's the part where you leave decaying dynamite in their attics.
That's the thing that I don't like.
You just want ladies to be treated like people.
I mean...
And not arms caches.
Or totemic objects to ward off evil.
I'm fine with being a totemic object to ward off evil.
I don't know how to be around.
But if you start leaving decaying dynamite around the house, you might have to have a talk.
Yeah, it's more that he hid it from them and they never knew that it was there in the first place.
Wow.
Which is another level of problematic.
Yeah.
It's like a special Valentine's Day treat.
So there were some women that he seemed to have more real relationships with generally so he could trust them to like actually know that he was leaving weapons at their house or he could trust them to act as a safe house once he started committing all the crimes that he was going to be committing.
Now, depending on who you ask, the whole crimes thing may have started right away as soon as he got back to Europe in 1972 with Carlos providing critical support to help hijack a Lufthansa jet and carry out the abduction of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games.
Yep, there it is.
Now, Munich was like, that's like the 9-11 of kidnappings, really the brass ring of murdering people at the Olympics.
It was, you know, a big deal.
And there's zero evidence that he had anything to do with it.
Right.
This was a thing he started claiming later because, again, very famous act of terrorism.
And if you're a famous terrorist and there's a famous terrorism, it's, you know, you don't want people to not think you had anything to do with it.
Yeah.
And then the next thing you know, people are like, oh, were you in that band?
And you were like, yeah, we played a show together or whatever.
Yeah, he's like the Ringo of Munich, where he didn't actually do anything, but he takes credit.
Ringo did Octopus's Garden.
No, we're not talking about Ringo today.
Carlos had his first mission on the brain.
He was on 30 times.
We're talking about Carlos the Jackal today, not Ringo.
All right.
An equally bad man.
He's also a famous terrorist.
So Carlos had his first real act of terrorism that he committed on December 30th, 1973, when he tried to murder one of the men he'd been stalking for months, Joseph CF, vice president of the British Zionist Foundation.
He successfully broke into CF's house and shot him once, but then his revolver malfunctioned.
And most books say it jammed, which I don't know.
I expect it may have been an ammunition problem or something.
That's exactly what happened.
Tried to take out Sir Topham Hatt.
I mean, famously, Ringo's attempt on Sir Topham Hatt was foiled when his revolver jammed.
And that's why George Carlin took over the series.
I don't, okay.
So, yeah, Carlos tries to shoot this guy to death, and it doesn't work, and Carlos leaves.
And CF's badly injured, but, you know, he makes it.
So it was a little bit of a shit show as far as acts of terrorism go, but it was like his first try, and he got away.
So that's what George Carlin knew.
You got to keep your powder dry.
Yeah, that's what Bernie...
Another Bernie Sanders joke.
Also, Bernie Sanders.
When he killed Robert F. Kennedy.
Another, a month later, fucking Carlos tried again.
And this time, instead of trying to shoot.
Yeah, no, no, a different.
He doesn't even go after a guy this time.
He goes after an Israeli bank, the Hapwalim Bank in London.
And in Carlos's mind, it made a good target for the two 200-gram plastic explosive charges he built after storing materials in some nice lady's house.
He later recalled, I threw them through the main door towards the tills, but one of them landed in front of an employee before sliding over the parquet floor and exploding.
He wasn't killed because he pulled back in time.
That said, the bomb destroyed the entire facade of the bank.
The operation created a big stir in the media, although there were no victims.
Okay, so again, this is one of those.
He just threw a bomb through a door.
But he's not going to walk in, be all suave, like put it somewhere extra good.
Like just throw it new to this.
He's new to this.
He's new to this.
He's trying.
Practice makes perfect babe.
And characteristically, when he says that there were no victims, he's not quite accurate.
Because he actually injured a 19-year-old woman with shrapnel, but he just doesn't like to talk about that.
That was a woman.
Yeah, we've already established that.
Hurting women doesn't seem to bother him.
It does not bother.
And their feelings, their attics full of explosives, or their bodies in bank explosions.
I don't think a lot of other people's feelings matter to Carlos.
But yeah, so I will say, though, it is weird reading about him because by the standards of modern terrorists, all of the terrorists in this period sucked at it.
Well, they avoid murdering as many people as they could.
I suppose it's not fair to call that sucking at it.
No, I would prefer terrorists who are more targeted in their violence, although not always, but still not like, we're not like ISIS-y, right?
Yeah.
Like, terrorism is a different matter today a little bit.
So to quote from a summary of Carlos's life by researcher Mitchell Barth, soon after, he set off car bomb attacks of three French newspapers accused of pro-Israeli leanings.
Cars full of explosives were left outside the offices of, I'm not even going to try to read those names, three French newspapers.
The bombs were set to explode at 2 a.m., and Carlos later claimed that the hour was selected to limit human casualties.
In addition, he advised the papers of the attack.
At the appointed time, three of the four bombs exploded, causing massive damage.
There were no casualties.
The only paper to escape damage did so when the vehicle bomb left in front of it failed to detonate.
So three out of four, not bad.
Fucks up three newspapers that are like pro-Israel.
Passing grades.
He does like the thing he's trying to do.
You know, he's getting better at terrorism, right?
Like, this is his montage where he's like, he's like, he's like running up the steps of the rue de something or other and like learning how to plant bombs in random places.
I mean, there's a little bit too of it.
It's very much a targeted like, I could blow you up, but I'm not.
I'm just blowing up these vehicles with no one in them.
No Casualties From Bombs00:02:08
Yeah.
Right now.
And I'm going to, you know, fuck your building up a bit.
Yeah.
So, you know, by this point, he was getting seasoned at attempting terrorism, but his identity was still unknown.
So he got to still be like a playboy, like living around Europe, acting as a fixer for the popular front and allied left-wing groups.
So he's also kind of a Batman villain.
Yeah, he is.
People would tell him that he would like, well, he's kind of like Q for the popular front in this period.
Yeah.
Because like other terrorists will come in.
They'll say, like, we need this.
And he'll like open up.
He had closets full of weaponry and grenades and explode, like all sorts of cool shit.
So period-wise, keeping the bond theme, did he have a cat?
I don't think so.
I don't think he has anything.
I don't think this guy.
I can't imagine him taking care of a cat.
He's moving around a lot, too.
And he's really good at getting weaponry, like particularly just fucking sacks of these machine pistols.
He loves machine pistols.
A lot of VZ52s and a lot of scorpions.
And he gets a shitload of hand grenades too.
And again, you know, puts them in the houses of women that he likes.
And in some cases, when he trusted the women, he was very open about what he was doing, as this passage from the book Jackal makes clear.
Nidia was the girlfriend to whom Carlos felt closest, and he turned to her for help as he slowly built up a stock of arms for operations in Europe.
One evening in July 1974, he called Nydia from Paris and asked her to join him as soon as possible.
She flew over and Carlos handed her a heavy black suitcase.
All her boyfriend told her was, keep this with you until I come and join you, or until somebody calls your flat and gives you a precise date, the date of my birthday.
According to Nydia, who took the suitcase back with her to London, it was only sometimes later that she found out what it contained.
Look, my love, this beauty is a Czech pistol, a high-speed M52 automatic.
It's marvelous, Carlos told her as he guided her through the suitcase's contents with childish delight when they met again.
Carlos brought the barrel to his mouth and blew on it with a tender gesture, as if it had been a first kiss of love.
Then he seized a grenade and put it in my hands, showing me how I should remove the primer and throw it.
Forget that you are a woman, he added with a certain arrogance.
Don't close your eyes.
That's nice.
I've had better dates.
Blaming Teammate For Fiasco00:07:46
Yeah.
Yeah.
Forget that you're a woman because surely a woman could not handle the complex operation of pulling a pin out of a grenade and throwing it at a thing.
Yeah.
Real feminist icon, Carlos.
Carlos, the jackal.
Yeah, I know y'all were really hoping that he was going to wind up being a real gender equality crusader, but instead, he's a terrorist.
He's an entitled rich boy who was raised by the best Marxist in the world.
Pedophilist mom and a shitty lawyer dad.
So now is about the time in late summer 1974 that some old friends of ours come back into the story.
The Japanese Red Army.
Oh, yeah.
And this is non-murdering all their friends, non-trapped in North Korea, like the people who are committing tons of terrorism and really good at it.
Be fucking scary as hell, Japanese men.
Yeah, yeah.
So one of their members, their leader, actually, had been arrested by French Border Patrol, bearing a suitcase with three fake passports and $10,000 in counterfeit bills.
And that may sound like he was like being kind of lazy, but again, everyone just flew with whatever illegal things they wanted to fly with and nobody took any precautions back then.
So he wasn't out of the norm here.
So he gets caught, though, in this case, for some reason, and gets put in prison.
He probably knew the words, the Cuban national.
Yeah, he started playing it and he started singing.
So yeah, they want him out and their plan to get their boss out is to carry out a daring attack on the French embassy in The Hague and occupy the entire French embassy and take everyone inside of it prisoner and then ransom them out for their captured boss and a plane.
I mean, which is cool as hell.
And it's like a diehard plot.
Yeah.
Straight up a diehard.
And also, all of the diehard plots and everything else make a lot more sense given what you were talking about with the 60s and early 70s because it seems like governments would have been like, okay, yeah, that seems fair.
Okay.
Good on you.
Yeah.
All right.
I have to imagine at this point that it was in like a Bruce Willis movie that the phrase, we don't negotiate with terrorists was uttered for the first time because it certainly was not uttered at any point.
Everyone negotiates immediately with terrorists.
Not even negotiates, just fucking gives them what they want.
Yeah.
Now, so, yeah, they, uh, they, Carlos and his boss with the Popular Front, his, like, contact with the actual, like, organization is a, is a dude named Mukarbal, who's a Lebanese guy.
Um, and they provide the Japanese Red Army with all the guns and grenades they need, and the Japanese Red Army takes control of the embassy and kidnaps the ambassador.
Um, and here's how Michelle Barth summarizes what happens next.
The JRA commandos held the French ambassador, as well as 10 other members in the French embassy hostage in order to force the release of their leader.
While these negotiations persisted, Carlos, in conjunction with these attacks, devised a plan that he hoped would force the release of the terrorists.
On a busy Sunday afternoon, he entered a trendy cafe in Paris, and he made his way to the first floor balcony and threw a fragmentation grenade down into the crowd that milled around the boutiques on the ground floor.
Carlos left just before the blast scattered hundreds of lethal fragments through the crowd, killing two and injuring 34 innocent shoppers.
The French government caved to the JPA demands two days later, providing both the release of the organization's leader as well as a jet that would fly them to safety.
So that's a terrible act of terrorism.
Also makes him a big deal because it works.
Terrible fucking game.
And they were like, here's a jet and we're letting this dude go.
And all of his friends who occupied it, like who conquered our embassy and held it in that way.
Yes.
That's a lot of people.
It's a different era.
I mean, it's a very different period of time.
So yeah, he's famous now.
Like, now, not famous in terms of like his identity is still a secret, but like within the world of people who are like, you know, terrorists and stuff or freedom fighters, whatever you want to call them, he's like a big deal now.
This is like a big fucking operation.
Now, the problem, though, with getting famous is that tasting your first dose of fame makes you want it more.
And Carlos set for his next attack a spectacular goal.
There were some LL airplanes on the runway at Orly Airport near Paris.
And instead of hijacking them, he wanted to blow them up because he had acquired a sack full of rocket-propelled grenades.
Now, so their plan was just to like shoot taxiing LL aircraft and blow them up while they were on the runway filled with hundreds of American tourists, which was quite a plan.
And also it's getting a little bit more into like modern terrorism.
Yeah, that seems like some modern.
He was talking about killing like 170 people, right?
Yeah, that's actually quite a bit different than all of his previous actions because I think one thing that's been getting me over a lot of this is There's all sorts of wars going on, and we're in a period in time when everyone kind of low-level thought that they could die via nukes any minute, but at the same time, the idea that you killed more than like four people in a single action for anything is like,
oh my gosh, the loss of life is incredible.
It is weird.
There's probably a lot of reasons for it that we're not going to delve into now because it's kind of a bummer to think about.
So, yeah, I'm going to read a quote from the book Jackal talking about how this attack went.
Because it's a fun, it's a fun story.
Oh, good.
The LL plane was 130 meters away when Weinrich, who was his partner on this, who was a German guy who was like, I think the son of Nazis and stuff and like became a left-wing activist.
Anyway, I think that's the guy that that is.
So he and Weinrich have like this truck full of rocket-propelled grenades.
So yeah, the LL plane was 130 meters away while within the weapon's maximum range at 300 meters.
But the missile soared wide of the nose of the plane.
Without waiting to see the rocket's final impact, Weinrich hurriedly consulted Carlos before reloading and taking aim a second time.
The first rocket hit a parked car and then smashed into an empty workshop where the black boxes recording flight data were manufactured.
It failed to explode.
A moment later, the radio in the cockpit of the LL jet crackled with an urgent order from the control tower for all planes on the tarmac to come to an immediate halt.
The Israeli captain, a former fighter pilot with combat experience, had no intention of obeying the order, which would have offered his attackers an easy target.
He accelerated sharply and made straight for the runway.
In his haste to fire a second rocket, Weinrich failed to brace himself for the recoil, which punched him backwards, and the bazooka's steel tube shattered their car's windshield.
The rocket pierced the fuselage of a parked and virtually empty Yugoslav plane before exiting on the other side.
Flying metal slightly injured a steward, a policeman, and a baggage handler, but the rocket, like the first, failed to explode and burrowed its way into empty kitchens.
The only damage caused was a few broken plates.
Weinrich and Carlos jumped into the car and sped away, leaving behind a Soviet-made automatic pistol on the edge of the road.
Outside a cemetery a few miles away, they abandoned the car and paused only long enough to throw a cover over the launcher.
A third unused rocket, two grenades, and another Soviet-made pistol lying on the back seat before switching to another rental car.
Carlos blamed his teammate for the fiasco.
Weinrich, he explained, was courageous and experienced, but at the last second, he broke down.
Shortly afterwards, someone called the Reuters news agency in Paris to claim responsibility for the attack.
The message ended with the promise, next time we'll hit our target.
Most Wanted Man On Earth00:07:53
So every comedy made during the 80s makes a lot more sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're not great at it.
Like, once it gets to using the big weapons.
Yeah, like sad tuba throughout this entire scene.
And just like the casualness with which they're leaving rocket launchers and machine pistols behind as they're like, well, I guess we're fucked.
Right, well, and because I was definitely picturing these two guys as like suave 80s villain motherfuckers up until you described all that.
And now I'm picturing them as like, you know, like Kerry Ewis and like John Cleese just like flying backwards into the windshields of their cars because they're not properly braced.
And two rockets in a row that don't blow up.
Yeah, they're not, it doesn't go well.
They're just littering their trail with fucking machine pistols like red crumbs.
Dan Aykride is in this movie.
Dan Aykrid is definitely he's the security guard who is like comically unaware of what's going on yet somehow still manages to foil the plot.
So yeah, they promise to come back and not to miss in the future, but they don't keep this promise.
They do try again like a week later with a bunch of Palestinian guerrillas to like help them.
But this is also a cock up from the start.
Carlos and his boss, like, they get spotted immediately and, like, wind up, like, the guerrillas all wind up in a running gun battle with French Cancer terrorism police and take a bunch of hostages and like get an airplane to fly them safely back home.
Um, meanwhile, Carlos and his partner, like, drive away.
Did they successfully get the airplane?
Yeah, okay, nobody to blow up planes on the tarmac.
And then instead, they hijack a plane because that's the fallback.
Because that's the fallback.
Because everyone can hijack a plane.
Yeah, because it's really easy.
Why didn't they just hijack the planes to begin with?
Because they wanted to kill people, but they're bad at it.
But you know how you could kill people?
Never mind.
No one thought.
Never mind.
People did eventually have that idea, and it didn't, it wasn't great.
It was the worst.
Yeah.
So on June 27th, 1965, Carlos's boss with the Popular Front, Michelle Mucarbel, was captured and interrogated by French intelligence.
He apparently turned and like, you know, did you know, did the, he snitched and he led the cops to Carlos's safe house, which was, of course, the house that his girlfriend lived at and was currently holding a party.
So everything about this is baffling because these three French intelligence agents have this Palestinian PLO guy who they know is a big terrorist and has just committed big terrorism.
And they're going to meet his partner at a party.
But it's the start of the weekend and it's like a holiday weekend.
And they all have guns, but they all check them in at work because they don't want to deal with like going back to the office later to drop their guns off afterwards.
So nice to go with guns.
I mean, it is France in the 70s.
Yeah.
Like there's the chance that the party was going to be really good.
And maybe they would find him.
And then there was going to be a convoy of cars heading to an orgy afterwards.
And you start drinking while they're talking to Carlos.
Of course they do.
So they start drinking while they're talking to Carlos, but then one of them brings Mucarbal into the room.
And Carlos realizes instantly, like, oh, shit, he fucking, he fucking turned on me.
And while all the cops.
Because up until then, they just thought Carlos just thought they were having a nice conversation.
He thought, oh, these two cops want to ask me some questions.
I can get out of this because I'm a charming motherfucker.
And we're all at a party.
And we're all at a party and like they seem chill.
Like, I think I can get out of this.
Then they bring in his business partner.
And Carlos did not leave his gun at home.
And he immediately pulls a CZ52 automatic pistol.
He shoots Mukarbel in the throat and he shoots two out of three cops dead just immediately.
Wounds the other, I think, and then fucking books it and makes it away with like as like the whole country of France turning on to like chase him.
He makes it all the way back to fucking Beirut without his face even getting like exposed.
He's very good at some parts of being a terrorist.
When he gets famous, like running away, very famous.
Shooting a bunch of people in the face.
So yeah, he gets away.
And like things are rough at first in Lebanon because people are like, you shot one of our heroes in the face.
But then he's like, that guy was a snitch.
And then they're like, all right.
So things are good after that.
Yeah, international authorities do eventually put two and two together.
And Carlos's name, you know, suddenly is all over the world news.
And like right around this time, by coincidence, a big heat wave hits London.
And one of the packages of high explosives that he just left in an ex-girlfriend's flat started to smell weird.
And they opened it and found a list of local Jews, a machine pistol, a silencer, and a bunch of bomb makers.
He's a, he's, it's a whole anti-Israeli thing.
Like, yeah, you're going to run into some uncomfortable shit sometimes.
I understand that we shouldn't expect, you know, fine distinctions between these people are Jewish and the state of Israel has policies I don't like from a guy who can't be boss.
He is a terrorist.
He is a terrorist.
He did just shoot his friend in the face.
He just shot his friend right in the, and he shot his friend in the face a second after seeing him and realizing what had happened.
Like there's a zero, like there's a lot of people.
I think that might be this girlfriend and like her boyfriend at the time find all this stuff.
And instead of calling the cops, because they're both like far left activists, they call the Guardian.
And the reporter who goes over to their house to do the story notices a copy of Frederick Forsyth's book, The Day of the Jackal.
And if you remember from our episodes about Guinea and the coups there, Frederick Forsyth was the guy who like wrote that book about how to do a coup that then people uses to do it.
So they find a copy of Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal on the bookshelf.
The reporter does.
And this is like while he's getting ready to write this story and it gives him the idea for Carlos's nickname.
He starts calling him Carlos the Jackal.
So that's at this point forward.
And this is Carlos the Jackal.
So Carlos, and this is the same attic where there's a bunch of...
There's a bunch of guns and decaying dynamite and a local.
Jellignite, I think I might have.
Local Jesus.
Yeah.
It's not...
Look, man, he's a terrorist.
That's what he was.
I wasn't standing Carlos the Jackal up until this point, but like, buddy.
He's one of those guys who there's moments in his life because it's so outrageous, like the kind of like the way everything worked in the 70s and the kind of terrorist he is where you're like, oh my God, that's so cool.
And then you remember like, oh, and this is also a guy who dropped a grenade into a crowd of strangers.
Like, I need to cool it a little.
Yeah.
And he was.
I'm going to guess that list was not for giving people nice notes about how he wasn't like keeping track of.
Yeah.
No, he was, it was not stuff.
But yeah, it was for his earlier job trying to kill a bunch of random, you know, people who supported Israel.
So yeah, now from this point forward, Carlos is, you know, the most wanted man on earth.
This is when he becomes like the most like wanted person by international law enforcement on the planet for a while.
But you know what also is the most wanted thing by international law enforcement?
The manufactured demands of capitalism.
I was going to say the products and services that support this podcast, but they are one and the same.
Yeah.
Luxury Communist Run00:03:12
Here we go.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
Hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen.
She says, I have some cookies and milk.
There's this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
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We're back.
We're talking about Carlos the Jackal, C to the J.
And as the summer of 1975 turned into fall, he was sitting in Beirut.
He just had a whole big string of cool successes and some failures related to rocket launching.
Super cool successes.
Yeah.
He killed people with the grenades and then got a jet.
The 70s for quite a decade.
And that time he shot his friend in the face.
Instantly.
Instantly, immediately.
So he's sitting in Beirut and he's planning his most ambitious attack yet, an assault on OPEC headquarters in Vienna.
And OPEC are the guys who run, you know, oil.
They produce it and export it, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, that's OPEC.
So on December 21st, he led a six-person team that raided the annual OPEC leadership meeting and took more than 60 people hostage, including most of the people running OPEC.
Oh my God.
Wow.
Three people were killed, including a Libyan delegate in the opening stages of the attack.
Now, once also this is one of those things where he's now there will be some consequences for him now in Libya.
It's one thing to be PLO and be fucking with Israel and everybody's like, yeah.
You really want Qaddafi on your side if you're a PLO guy in this period.
You just fucked with a whole bunch of people who might have been down with your ship.
They might have let you hide in their country.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's oh, it didn't, it's not perfect.
You know, you raid OPEC.
You're gonna...
Gonna crack some eggs.
Not that that's the only part of a plan where several people die that's not perfect, but you know.
Yeah.
So yeah.
They take over OPEC and take a bunch of people hostage.
And once their hostages are secure, Carlos and his comrades make the same familiar demand for a plane and money that every other group of terrorists does.
But they add something new to this.
They demand that Austrian authorities read a letter about the Palestinian cause on their radio and TV networks every two hours.
If Austria doesn't, Carlos promises to execute a hostage every 15 minutes.
I just love how much of this terrorism has boiled down to, we got some pamphlets for you.
You gotta read this letter.
We're gonna like, yo, there's like libraries.
And like, can you imagine this sort of shit couldn't happen in the era of YouTube?
Yeah, people.
Because YouTube's just there.
You could just like...
And you know what?
Back when things were done this way, a lot of people had interesting plane experiences.
And now we have tons of fascists.
So you're saying YouTube did 9-11?
I am saying that we should go back to a hijacking-based economy.
Like things were in the 70s and ban the internet.
Ban the internet, make hijacking legal.
It'll fix a lot of problems.
That's all I'm going to say.
No notes.
There's nothing wrong with that plan.
Yeah.
So Austria is like, I guess we're going to broadcast a bunch of pro-Palestinian stuff because you have all of OPEC captured.
So we don't really have a lot of options here.
So they give him a plane and it flies to Algiers.
Well, that's the baseline.
You got to, no matter what happens, you get a plane.
You get a plane like terrorism.
One second.
Let's get you 737.
Come on now.
What do you have?
What, a bottle of hairspray?
That's fine.
That's okay.
We'll call it that.
Bug spray.
Bug spray.
You're getting a Cessna.
So, yeah, they fly to Algiers where Carlos frees 30 non-Arab hostages in exchange for refueling the jet, which then flies to Tripoli.
Now, Tripoli isn't wild to have them there because of the Libyan they killed.
Weird.
And a number of other reasons.
Minor details.
They didn't ask.
Qaddafi was a big asking guy.
Do authoritarian dictators like it when you maybe get permission from them to do things?
He's not psyched.
So Carlos is like, okay, well, could you at least give us a plane that can go further so that we can get away with all these hostages we still have?
And Qaddafi's like, no, you killed my guy.
Like, fuck you.
I'm Muamar Qaddafi.
I'm not famous for being reasonable.
So, you know, eventually, though, in exchange for releasing all the Libyan hostages and five other delegates, the plane was refueled and returned to Algiers, where Carlos agreed to release everybody else in exchange for political asylum and a huge pile of cash, which was provided by either Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Now, this cash was supposed to go to the movement, but Carlos took a bunch of it, which got him kicked out at the Popular Front.
So, you know, this is kind of the end of that part of his career.
Which also, you got to respect.
It's like a 401k.
Well, yeah.
You got to respect a terrorist organization that's like, okay, that time that you had a list of Jews you were going to kill, that's fine.
All those times you left decaying dynamite in those ladies' attics, that's fine.
That time you just threw some grenades off of a balcony into a random crowd of strangers.
Totally fine.
The time you totally fucked up trying to shoot down those jets.
Also, totally fine.
But you kept a bunch of money that we were going to use to keep doing those things.
And that's where we draw the line.
Yeah, that's kind of where things go here.
So, yeah, Carlos, you know, he winds up kind of on the run for a while.
He flees to the Balkans, where he's detained by the Yugoslavian government and then sent to Iraq for some reason.
It's never been clear to me.
I mean, it's out of the Balkans.
It's out of the Balkans.
It's out of Yugoslavia.
Yeah, that's what they say in the tourism brochures for Baghdad.
Not the Balkans.
Yep.
Well, and he's successfully pissed off quite a few other countries at this point.
You're getting kicked out of the Balkans.
Yeah.
So he wound up kind of wriggling out of this and setting up shots in Aden, where he tried to form his own terrorist group made of Syrian, Lebanese, and German rebels.
And he winds up getting the attention of the East German government and their secret police, the Stasi, who offer him an office and a safe house in East Berlin.
Wait, wait, whoa, The Stasi is like...
Yeah, they hire him now.
Yeah, they're like, you're pretty good at this terrorism thing.
Come on, live in Berlin.
Also, here's this house and here's this apartment that we've prepped for you.
Don't worry.
Don't bother opening up the walls.
We're only the Stasi.
Yeah, we're just weird.
We don't even know how to record things.
That's what everyone says about the Stasi.
Also, the Stasi, famous lovers of guys who want to overthrow government.
I don't think it really is.
He does wind up in Prague pretty soon.
Yeah.
I mean, considering who they are and who he is, they know about it before he did.
And he spent some time as like a semi-legitimate agent of the, you know, of the USSR and of East Germany and like kind of just like global, you know, all of that stuff.
He lives in Prague.
He gets a 75-person support staff, a car, and the right to carry a handgun anywhere he wants, which is a fun thing to get to have, to get to do in Prague in the 70s.
Yeah.
This was not a great, actually, freedom for them to give him because he drank very heavily and would lock himself out of his hotel room and then wave a handgun around, wildly screaming at everyone around him.
I bet that got one of his staff of 75 to come in, come to help out.
I was going to say that's probably a good way to get people to let you into your apartment.
I mean, I could page my secretary or I could scream wildly and wave a handgun.
Which one do you think is going to get a quicker response?
So he keeps running his terrorist group.
Obviously.
They do some cool stuff.
In 1982, they carry out an attack on a French nuclear reactor.
It didn't work out, but...
Famous good targets for terrorism.
Yeah, he's a nuclear reactor.
Look, he's doing the bomb thing.
You've got to go out.
As someone that really loves 70s Roger Moore Bond movies, I'm really impressed by how well this all lines up.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
That's part of why those movies got made is because Carlos the Jackal was doing this shit.
And now he goes to the moon.
And now he goes, he went to the moon in the 70s, too.
And it was great.
No notes.
So, yeah, he tries to carry, his group carries out an attack on a nuclear reactor.
It doesn't work.
He's married at the time, and his wife gets arrested.
And Carlos demanded her release from France, which is kind of a bold move.
Which it sounds like we're just going to move on past this, but you say it doesn't work, which I assume means they didn't blow up a nuclear reactor in Central.
They did not do that.
And also, his wife is just a footnote.
Yeah.
Okay.
He got married at some point.
He got married at some point.
We're fucking page 22 here.
There's going to be some skimming.
Throw a duffel bag full of decaying dynamite in somebody's attic.
There's a special connection that's different than all the other duffel bags you've thrown in all the other attics.
I'm just going to put out there, though, that once you marry someone, it makes it harder to hide duffel bags of bombs in other people's attics.
I don't know.
That really depends on the nature of the relationship.
I was going to say, based on the jackal's dead, I would say that being married is not an impediment to throwing your whatever in anywhere you want.
So, yeah, he demands his wife's release of France after trying to blow up their nuclear reactor.
And France shockingly is like...
We were not going to be doing that.
Really?
And so Carlos the Jackal bombs their cultural center in Beirut.
And then he bombs a train in France that was supposed to be occupied by Jacques Chirac, who was the president of France at the time.
Recently.
Well, he asked for something and they didn't give it to him.
And so he bombed a train in a cultural center.
And this is also now an interesting turn, though, because at this point, he's like, specifically, I was going to blow up a nuclear plant, and now you arrested my wife.
I think they were just trying to steal stuff from the plant.
Oh, okay.
Well, whatever.
But now it's personal.
Yeah.
Like, you arrested my wife, and now I'm on a series of terrorisms to get my wife released.
Is it personal?
Or was he actually planning on blowing those things up anyway?
And he's just using it as justification.
Because if it really is about his wife, it might be one of the only terroristic things that he's done.
So he blows this train up that the president of France is supposed to be on, and he kills five passengers.
He injures 30.
The next year, he bombs two more French trains as payback for a French bombing of Lebanese training camps.
Okay, so he's moved on from his whole wife thing.
And for like, yeah, for more than a decade, Carlos the Jackal, you know, was like the most famous terrorist on earth.
He inspired movies and a lot of villains and now forgotten TV action dramas.
But yeah, in Prague, his drinking and his whoring and his increasingly unfocused attacks on civilian targets started to get like on the nerves of the powers that be.
And in 1986, Czech security forces told him that French intelligence had sent a hit squad after him.
He fled Prague and went on the start of an eight-year-long flight from Western justice.
So he is completely unbacked and he makes it eight years.
He's very good at running from the law.
Yeah.
It's also, that might be the longest stretch that he didn't blow something up.
It is.
This is like Ethan Hunt in fucking medicine.
There's a reason he's famous.
But he wasn't bad at the bad guy.
So he winds up in Syria where he lived in the mansion of a Mexican millionaire for, again, reasons I don't know how to explain to you.
And kind of retired for a while.
France was content to give up on catching him.
But in 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
That didn't work out great.
And, you know, once he was licking his wounds and angry at America, he reached out to famed terrorist Carlos the Jackal and was like, what if you did some terrorism on America?
And Carlos, I don't think, really got around to it, but Syria was, you know, got kind of nervous about that whole deal and was like, we don't really want to piss off the United States right now because we were watching.
So you can't be in Syria anymore.
So by the end of it, the only country in the world willing to shelter Carlos the Jackal was Sudan.
And Carlos immediately didn't.
If you're down to Sudan, that's your...
Yeah, that's your last place.
And he wore his welcome out there basically instantly because again.
Oh, you got kicked out of Sudan.
Yeah, all of the drinking and whoring and then like a pretty fundamental.
Yeah, he just couldn't stop drinking and whoring.
So Sudan gives him up and extradites him to Sudan extradites him to France.
God damn.
He really pissed off Sudan.
Shit.
In August of 1994.
Oh.
1994.
Had a good run!
He had a good ass run!
But that also explains why there's very few communist countries that he couldn't back to.
Yeah, well, yeah.
That was a pretty fucking good run.
Pretty fucking good run of being the most wanted man in the world.
And this began, there was, of course, a series of trials for his many crimes that like, the last of them, I think, just finished up.
Like, he was in court recently.
He's still alive.
He still gives interviews sometimes.
In court, he's regularly defended his innocence when talking about specific crimes while bragging about his involvement in general ones.
He told a French court recently, no one has executed more people than me in the Palestinian resistance.
Hell of a thing to brag about.
Hell of a thing to brag about.
He also bragged in court, I have been a professional revolutionary since I was a teenager, which is a little bit of an exaggeration, but not all that much.
Insofar as being trained by private tutors makes you a professional.
Also, in the way of like in age, he is profoundly a boomer at this point.
And his teenagerhood versus his 30s are all very far away from him.
And it doesn't really matter.
He was a professional revolutionary as a teenager in the same way that the current president was a businessman as a teenager.
Yeah.
His dad gave him a whole bunch of shit he didn't have to work for.
But unlike the current president, he did become a self-made man.
He sure did.
And he did it by shooting people right in their faces.
And making bombs.
And making bombs and running from the police for like decades.
Self-Made By Making Bombs00:04:27
Yeah.
So, you know, in the end, I'd like to read a quote from him that he gave to a journalist that sums up at least how he likes to portray his philosophy on life.
I like good food.
I like to drink and I like good cigars.
I like to sleep in a comfortable bed, which has just been made.
I like to wear good shoes.
I like to play cards, poker, and blackjack.
I also like parties and dances.
But I'm against possessions.
What I possess belongs to others as much as to me.
So that's his, that's, that's how he describes himself.
I'm just going to put it out there that it's.
Sounds like a luxury communist.
A whole bunch of explosives behind you.
The things you possess will belong to you and other people equally as much.
These are their explosives too.
And after they go off, no one has anything.
Yeah.
Look, like.
This apartment that you own is also very soon going to be in lots of other people's apartments.
This is how we spread Marxism.
Oh.
Carefully.
Carlos.
Yeah.
So he's a, this is a fun story.
He's a fun guy.
Yeah.
Fun guy.
I like this, honestly.
I like this one more than the one where all of those Japanese college students murdered each other on the mountain.
So yeah, that's the story of Carlos the Jackal.
Everybody learned something good?
It sure did.
I learned that everybody gets a plane.
Everybody gets a plane.
Everybody gets a plane.
That's the first time you're going to be able to do it.
No matter how badly your terrorism goes, you get planes.
No matter what happens, you get a plane.
Were you trying to blow up some planes unsuccessfully?
Let's give you a plane to make you feel better.
Well, they did shoot a bunch of cops, too.
Well, okay.
Again, let's give you a plane to make you feel better.
Yeah.
It was a cool era of terrorism.
Sure was.
Easily my favorite.
So yeah.
You got any pluggables to plug?
We're on Twitter and Instagram.
And Medium at 45th Absurdist.
You can find things that we write and pictures that we take and random things that we post on all of those.
And, you know, if you find yourself in the streets of Portland getting repeatedly tear gassed and shot by impact munitions by law enforcement, come say hi.
Yeah.
We'll say, you should not be here.
There's tear gas or something along those lines.
And you'll say, what?
Because it'll sound like that.
Yeah.
It'll be a good time for everybody.
All right.
Godspeed.
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Telling You He Was A Spy00:01:00
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm wild back to the way.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, but listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Was this before he wrote his stories?
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