When I first entered the counterterrorism world in 1997 as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, a sea change was underway in the field. Historically, terrorists were animated by the desire, in expert Brian Jenkins’ words, to have “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” In the latter half of the 20th century, hijackings rarely resulted in mass casualties; there were targeted assassinations and horrific killings—the 1972 Munich Olympics come to mind—but, at least in the terrorists’ minds, they were carried out for a specific goal, such as Palestinian statehood. The most famous of these old-school terrorists was Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born killer who became the improbable face of Palestinian resistance and whose reign of terror captivated the world throughout the 1970s.
But by 2000, when I was serving on the National Commission on Terrorism, a bipartisan congressional panel tracking the looming threat of al Qaeda, we were warning of a different mindset, one that would come to rattle U.S. domestic security: Terrorists now wanted a lot of people dead and a lot of people watching. A new mastermind, Osama bin Laden, had replaced Carlos as the global icon of terrorism. The 9/11 attacks that he orchestrated the following year would go on to transform U.S. homeland security, domestic surveillance, and the nature of global terrorism beyond recognition.
When I first entered the counterterrorism world in 1997 as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, a sea change was underway in the field. Historically, terrorists were animated by the desire, in expert Brian Jenkins’ words, to have “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” In the latter half of the 20th century, hijackings rarely resulted in mass casualties; there were targeted assassinations and horrific killings—the 1972 Munich Olympics come to mind—but, at least in the terrorists’ minds, they were carried out for a specific goal, such as Palestinian statehood. The most famous of these old-school terrorists was Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born killer who became the improbable face of Palestinian resistance and whose reign of terror captivated the world throughout the 1970s.
The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist, Joby Warrick, Scribner, 384 pp., $30, August 2026
But by 2000, when I was serving on the National Commission on Terrorism, a bipartisan congressional panel tracking the looming threat of al Qaeda, we were warning of a different mindset, one that would come to rattle U.S. domestic security: Terrorists now wanted a lot of people dead and a lot of people watching. A new mastermind, Osama bin Laden, had replaced Carlos as the global icon of terrorism. The 9/11 attacks that he orchestrated the following year would go on to transform U.S. homeland security, domestic surveillance, and the nature of global terrorism beyond recognition.
Joby Warrick’s new book, The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist, has been released at the very moment when Americans will be reflecting on bin Laden and what these 25 years have wrought. Although Carlos may not at first seem to be relevant to the post-9/11 world, this account of his life forces us to reconsider. Warrick, a veteran Washington Post reporter, not only offers a detailed and engaging prelude to the era that bred bin Laden but also reminds us how Carlos’s legacy still resonates in the performative tactics of so many terrorist threats today.
Police investigate a car explosion set by Carlos in the Rue Marbeuf in Paris on April 22, 1982, in front of the offices of the Lebanese pro-Iranian publication Al-Watan al-Arabi.Joel Robinemichel Clement/Getty Images
By the time we finally meet Carlos, whose real name is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, Warrick has teased his interview with the infamous killer for most of the book. The moment itself is masterfully told: Instead of a formidable figure or sinister criminal, the Carlos that Warrick encounters is not particularly interesting. He’s a man in his 70s who is spending the rest of his life in a French jail, boasting to Warrick that he “should have killed a few more people.” He reminisces of the good old times, when he was famous and lethal, and still harbors resentment toward those who betrayed him and facilitated his capture. Most of all, he seems worried that he will be forgotten.
This is not the man the world witnessed decades ago. For those who missed the Jackal’s reign of terror, there was nothing quite like it. Between 1973 and 1985, he was effectively a celebrity terrorist, a man who garnered global rock star status with his carefully manicured image, known for his black beret and dark sunglasses. Journalists profiled him extensively. As Warrick wrote, “Carlos intuitively understood [that] fame has its own intrinsic weight” and would “ride his fame like a rocket.” “I am the famous Carlos! You know who I am,” he told the huddling group of OPEC negotiators during an audacious kidnapping at a 1975 conference in Vienna. By then, they almost certainly did.
The name we know Sánchez by is reflective of his cultivated persona. “Carlos” was simply the nickname a terror cell recruiting officer gave him. But I had always assumed that The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel about a professional assassin who attempts to kill the French president, was based on Carlos. It turns out that one of many tabloids that covered Carlos referred to him as “the Jackal” after a copy of the novel was found at his safehouse in London. Carlos adopted it as his own because it was good branding.
Carlos may have turned to the Palestinian cause for a similar reason. Aside from his Marxist father, there was little in his upbringing that would naturally tie him to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He seemed to find the resistance group as an escape hatch after his expulsion from college. But once accepted into the group, his audacity, boldness, and charm catapulted him into the senior leadership. He planned and executed the 1973 assassination attempt on Jewish businessman Joseph Sieff in London, a 1974 grenade attack in Paris, and the 1975 rocket attacks on El Al planes at France’s Orly Airport. After Sieff survived and the El Al planes were not destroyed, Carlos needed a win. By the end of 1975, he led the audacious OPEC raid that resulted in three dead and around 60 hostages flown to Algeria and Libya.
A photograph of Carlos in his signature style taken in the summer of 1974 and used in his fake Peruvian passport.Getty Images/AFP
His philosophy, if he had one at all, was always somewhat muddled. As Warrick recounts, Carlos purported to hate the West and its excesses in theory, but loved its hotels, cars, and jewelry. He eventually became a convert, but for much of his life he was not much of an adherent to Islam. He was fond of partying, alcohol, and women. He was fearless about killing—French authorities wanted him for the death of over a dozen French citizens, including multiple counterintelligence officers—but he was also frequently not very good at it: He led a lot of missions that were aborted or botched, and he was overly confident in his planning and in his belief that leaders such as Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi, who armed the OPEC attack but turned on Carlos when he sought refuge, were reliable.
By 1979, Carlos was reduced to a man for hire by those who wanted him to knock off competitors or individuals who slighted them. Among his most notorious clients was Romania’s communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, who hired Carlos to assassinate Romanian dissidents throughout Europe and bomb Radio Free Europe’s Romanian broadcast studio in Munich.
Warrick’s sweeping and engaging biography of Carlos is as much a history of the man as it is of the era. Carlos’s travels take the reader from Baghdad to Beirut to Belgrade and serve as a window into major flashpoints in the Middle East. Qaddafi, Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasar Arafat, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein all play prominent roles. Even a young bin Laden makes a cameo appearance. In the mid-1970s, Carlos had briefly targeted the wealthy bin Laden family, surveilling them while they were on vacation in Lebanon’s Chouf mountains as potential kidnapping victims who could be held for a large ransom. Carlos followed the family to a resort but eventually abandoned the effort to focus on the PFLP’s OPEC attack. A reader is hard-pressed not to wonder about the trajectory of history had such a kidnapping occurred.
Shortly after the OPEC raid, Carlos’s mentor, Wadi Haddad, banished him from the PFLP for disobeying orders. In the years that followed, he was abandoned by leaders of the Palestinian cause, state sponsors such as Libya who had protected and armed him, and his own friends. It was one of his own, a Swiss militant named Bruno Bréguet, who served as a CIA informant and provided details that helped lead to Carlos’s ultimate capture in Khartoum in 1994. By then, he was too hot, too disobedient, too undisciplined; the magazine profiles and careless lifestyle had caught up with him. The moment itself was anticlimactic: Instead of a dramatic shoot-out, he was detained while groggy from sedation after an operation to minimize pain in his groin.
When Carlos was finally caught, it was as if one era was over and another, more horrific one began. It is fitting that his reign ended in Sudan. (“To describe the country’s political climate as permissive for terrorists would be to understate the case,” Warrick writes.) Sudan would also give bin Laden a safe haven until he was expelled in 1996 and forced to move al Qaeda’s operations to Afghanistan.
Carlos seen through a police car window in Paris on Dec. 20, 1996.
Yet Carlos’s influence was never truly supplanted. Indeed, there is something disconcertingly familiar about the book, which makes it hard to shake a haunting feeling that we are playing the same record over and over.
Carlos’s most lasting legacy was in treating violence as a performative act, a show with no plot. After all, by the time of his capture, he was nothing more than a paid mercenary. The Palestinian cause receded and was ultimately irrelevant to his actions. As Warrick recently wrote in the New York Times, Carlos’s “brand” of the terrorist-for-hire continues today with countries such as Russia and Iran paying criminal networks to do their global bidding by attacking political enemies in the West, getting what they want with plausible deniability.
But Carlos’s love of the limelight also resonates today. In the age of social media, the filming and streaming of violence and death are ubiquitous. Lone wolves write manifestos as if they, too, are famous, worthy of attention, and motivated by a higher cause. When a healthcare executive is murdered, his killer becomes a kind of superstar. In the multiple assassination attempts on U.S. President Donald Trump, the alleged shooters didn’t even seem to have a clear political allegiance. Violence is performed for an audience, the spectacle, the symbolism. And while terror groups remain—including al Qaeda and groups with ties to it, such as Boko Haram—a lot of terrorist violence today is carried out by those who are just courting infamy.
As Carlos realized his growing isolation after he was kicked out of the PFLP in 1975, he hoped to create a new terrorist group. His friend, upon hearing of Carlos’s plans, later remarked, “I knew it would never work. … [T]he man before me was no mastermind. He was an executioner.”
Although Carlos failed at the one thing he wanted the most—for all of us to still care just how famous he was—the world that he unleashed continues to thrive in this era of branding, even if not under his banner. Bin Laden is dead, and the terror threat we face today is often more dispersed, random, and ideologically incoherent than in the al Qaeda founder’s time. There are plenty of executioners and no masterminds. A lot of people are watching, but for what purpose?
