Part Two: Carlos The Jackal, The Most Wanted Man on Earth

In part two, we discuss Carlos the Jackal, the most wanted terrorist on the planet.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M hm, sis, No, that's not how the Robert Evans here.
This is behind the bastards of podcast that is never
introduced well despite the significant resources that we put into
too writing and producing it, um, which just shatters the
whole the whole effect of the product. And really, um,

(00:23):
it's a real shame. UM. So 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, 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

(00:46):
part one, are my friends and uh colleagues in getting
repeatedly assaulted by police and federal agents being a lane. Hello.
So uh, we talked about, you know, a couple of
different things. Last episode. We talked about jacking and this
guy the highest of jack the highest of jackings, um

(01:06):
as high as you can get and still be jacking
until space jackings happened. Just to 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,
I'm excited for Space Cube. Is gonna be a good time.

(01:27):
We're all gonna 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 if
you're asking my opinion on the matter, Carlos the motherfucking
jackal This guy, bad person, real bad man. Um, goddamn.

(01:54):
He had some style like some pinash in. Carlos the Jackal. Um.
This was a dude all new to me. He did
some terrorism and not like not like your Samabin law
and I'm gonna get people money and you're gonna be
yeah and on day out like not none of that ship.
He was like a he was like he was a
James Bond villain. He was a I'm going to keep

(02:14):
a machine pistol under my coat and leap out of
windows and have all sorts of gadgets and shoot up
opec He was. He was. He was just cool as hell. Um.
Really terrible to women, but cool as hell. Did you
cover them in gold so that none of their breathing
the axpixiated. He was terrible to women in a really
unique way that I actually think is kind of fascinating.

(02:34):
Not really abuse. I mean, we'll decide if you think
he's an abuser. It's more complicated than 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 it was also pretty Let's move on here.

(02:57):
They weren't self critics, yes, weren't. So 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. Um, he was the most famous terrorist on
a planet until again, like nine eleven really fucked the
curve on a lot of things. Because now, like you

(03:18):
hear about his record and it doesn't sound nearly as
impressive as as having a nine eleven in there. But
Carlos fucked up a lot of people. He personally killed
at least eighty three people with his own hands. Um,
still beat but in terms of actual people that you
shot in the fucking face, yes, And then the SI
in Lundon didn't dive out a lot of windows. A

(03:38):
significant number of them would have been his ideological allies,
which just tie in with the Japanese Red Army thing,
because you know, the Palestinian liberation movement had to be
purged of people who want to deliberate Palestines slightly differently
to um or people who I think it was more
often people who were like, you know, working with some
sort of Interpol or whoever whatever. Um. So he killed

(04:00):
personally about eighty three people, and then he claims that
men and women under his command killed two thousand more. Um.
He's still alive and in prison today, so like he
still talks he almost nine eleven, Yeah, he's he might
he might have committed close to a nine eleven if
he added all together. UM. 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

(04:23):
he were tied to, and he was a consummate liar
because of the whole international terrorist thing. So like who knows, um,
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 river of blood on his hands. Either way,
killed a shipload of folks, So let's talk about him.

(04:44):
Ill Ramirez Sanchez was born on August on October twelfth
nine 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. Um.
So he's he gets Lennon's first name from his dad,
the rich lawyer um who Lennon also famously Yeah a

(05:10):
poor kid. Yeah, not a poor kid at all. Um,
spent a lot of time on very nice trains. Uh
So yeah. His His mom, Elba, was not a Marxist,
though she was Catholic and Catholic as all hell um,
and she did not like that her son wanted to
name their boy after a dead Marxist revolutionary UM, but
he refused to listen, telling her the biggest man in

(05:33):
all humanity, Vladimir Ilich v alias Lennon. Humanity before the
bomb is divided into two periods, before and after Lenin
not Christ who was an ordinary run of the Millman.
So that's that's like what Marxism is for his dad.
It's not like it's not like I'm interested in left
wing politics. It's like lenin is my is a functionally
a god who my basic worship. So that's Ramirez Navice

(05:58):
uh Ilich his dad UM and he's Illaged, 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, um, you know, either a
communist tellhole or a glorious socialist paradise, depending on like
what chunk of Twitter you hang out in. Um. But
when young Illach was born, the nation's political situation was
a lot more fluid. More than a hundred and fifty

(06:20):
thousand of Venezuelans died in the National Wars of Independence,
which had occurred in the early eighteen hundreds. UM 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 eighteen
hundreds launching like wars of independence in other countries. So

(06:41):
that was kind of like the you're of Venezuelan like
are are. 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, they're called And if
you're a government, a good thing to export is young
men who went to for throw governments. That is the

(07:02):
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. Um so yeah the uh yeah, As
often happens, liberation for Venezuela was followed by a series
of brutal dictators who seized power and held it through

(07:23):
horrible violence. Yeah, it tends to work that way. Ramirez
novice Ilich'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 Ennezuela's dissident scene, and he got into minor

(07:45):
trouble for harboring a fugitive from justice. The authorities declared
him a communist, although he insists he did not know
what the word communists meant at the time he was
arrested and imprisoned for it. I would doubt that based
on his name. No, No, he's not Illage. This is
his dad. Sorry I'm talking about I'm we're going into
like why his dad he is? Yeah, that's Ramirez Novice.

(08:05):
I could have been a little clear 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 as the story
we're gonna tell before we tell the story of the Yeah,
had some fun stuff here. So Ramirez learns quickly and
by the time he's out of prison. The national dictator

(08:28):
was this guy, General Juan Gomez, who was a cattle
rancher with a big, terrible mustache. Um and yeah, he
did dictator ship. He banned the people of Caracas from
having a rotary club because he was afraid that it
would turn into a hive of rebellion. Um And at
the point where you're keeping people from going to the
rotary club, no chance anyone has any resentments. No, people

(08:52):
are very happy. Um. It was illegal to organize as
a communist or a socialist under General Gomez. Uh So, yeah,
Ramires 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 communists. I'm so surprised. Yeah, hey, guys, anyone want

(09:14):
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 ship out of me. And it sounds like
you guys have been all over this ship. So what's
that about? If anybody gets some notes? So um, Yeah,
he gets out and he gets involved in radical politics
and he plays a small role in a successful revolution

(09:35):
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 established another dictatorship. Um.
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. Um.

(09:58):
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, Like also
was a better dad. Yeah. Pinning all of your hopes
and dreams and expectations that you never achieved on your

(10:20):
child has never ended badly for anyone. It tends to
work out well. In this case, it ends with the
guy throwing grenades instead of French shopping. So anyway, um
so yeah, so he decides that his son is going
to fulfill all of his dreams of revolutionary Marxism um
so that he can just make money, um, which is
an interesting thing for a Marxist to do. Yeah, nobody's

(10:44):
we all make compromises when we live in a world
that doesn't meet our values. Uh so he did, uh
did that? Um? And to make up for the fact
that he was giving his kid a very bougie upbringing,
he raised illig on stories of great revolutionaries, including his grandfather.
Back in the biography Jackal, author John Folean writes, the

(11:04):
family hero was Elba's grandfather, a doctor who transformed a
sixties strong band of followers into an army big enough
to help overthrow the government of Caracas in only to
lose power a few years later. What I said, like
Venezuela was just nothing but revolutions in this period um unbowed.
The doctor repeatedly tried to assassinate the state governor, resisting
the forces sent after him in a courageous last and

(11:24):
loan stand to give his comrades time to flee into
the andes illag delighted in the tales of how the doctor,
after he was caught, refused to betray his his companions
under torture. So that's that's like his Uh, that's like
his his heroic grandpa, Your grandpa. Yeah, God, absolutely the
ship and he never talked, Yeah, which I'd be proud of.

(11:45):
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. Uh 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 Ramiers was insistent
that his boy be raised atheist, and he lectured a
lot about the non existence of God, would again cast

(12:05):
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 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

(12:28):
going to funk whoever, and I'm going to raise our
son to overthrow the government. And she said could we
talk about this? And other people he was it was
a bad relationship marriage. 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. I mean I

(12:52):
have studied history. This seems like most most marriages. It
wasn't a great one. So young Illage 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, so he has siblings,
he's got like, 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

(13:13):
money to his dad. I don't think his dad had
a super clear like idea in mind, but Illag 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 the number two
steps up? Or was it very much this child is

(13:33):
going to be a revolutionary. I think they're all supposed
to be revolutionaries. But Illach was the one. He was
his first kid, so he was like, you're the one
who's really you got the best best? How much of
this coming more or less? How much of this is
coming from from Illage, and how much of this is coming.

(13:54):
Like this part of it, the biographer talks to people
who knew them as families. This is real because I
could absolutely see, yeah, when he grows up to be
the jackal, being like 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 I don't

(14:17):
know more about how his brothers were raised, but I
don't think like like they all got kind of the
same education. But how many thousands of people's desk are
they responsible for? None as far as 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 that is, lawyer is fun.

(14:39):
By the way, I wrote for you know. It was
called Social, Moral, and Civic Formulation. Was a guide to
manhood written by a man who wanted his kids kids
to become revolutionaries. Um, which for that like included some
really bad advice that makes you maybe think he didn't
know what it took to be a revolution arry because

(15:00):
one of his core tenants 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's are you trying to overthrow the government? So
when their dad was out of town, which was a

(15:20):
lot of the time, the Illig and his brothers were
like real moms boys because his mom wasn't a giant
piece of shit. Um. Yeah, he was raised kind of
like 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. Um. And you

(15:42):
can kind of see him. He was kind of raised
like John Connor, um, only like in this I guess
was like yeah, yeah, not ignoring him because she was
falsely imprisoned in a mental asylum, but fucking a mistress
and making shiploads of money. Slightly different from John Conner,

(16:02):
Sarah Connor comes off better in that comparison. She sure does,
probably better at pull ups, better upper body strength. Absolutely so.
Other kids bullied Illitch for his weight, calling him El
Gordo or fat. So whenever he was mocked, ill would
burst into tears and scream back, the whole world we're here,
the whole world will hear of me, which is not

(16:23):
a thing that kids who go on to not shoot
lots of people 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

(16:43):
his life. He gets some therapy, he finds someone nice down,
and that's the end of the episode. So anyway, yeah,
continuing on. Uh So, Fortunately, since he got bullied a lot,
his direct contact with his peers was limited. Ramires as well,
meant that he was able to hire expensive Communist teachers
for Illage and his brothers. I'm also just sorry. I'm

(17:05):
just gonna put out there real quick. I was bullied
a lot in junior high, in 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,
special he got some time. I don't know what a
LANs been up to so uh yeah. So he gets

(17:27):
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 and communist. So these communist teachers give
him private lessons at home, where he learns history and
mathematics and biology through a Marxist lens and the palatial
comfort of his family mansion. Um, which is an interesting

(17:47):
way to learn Marxism. Capitalism is bad because it's hard
to explain when you think about But see how shitty
life is for these people outside of our mansion. That's
why this get this systems a problem. I'm gonna go
make more money and abandon your mother again for several weeks. Remember,
you gotta stop this. I tried, you know. In the

(18:13):
last episode we talked a little bit about good house
cleaning beginning at home. Yeah yeah, 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, Um, which is not his communist education would

(18:33):
have indicated to him that that was not normal. It
is weird to be instructed in communism alone. Yes, So
Ramirez was insistent that his son had, you know, 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

(18:55):
a game to be organized, which was always the one
who would do it. He was the leader, He would decide,
but not a rotarian manner. He was the most organized,
the one who took the initiative and made the rules.
The same friend noted that Ilich's favorite game was hide
and seek, liked to play at goodies and batties with
plastic weapons. In our group, he was the strongest and
most aggressive, so you know, uh. He was full of

(19:15):
ideas and 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 and how to hurt living things. This guy
doesn't go on to be an assassin or a terrorist
or anything. Doesn't kind of both pretty good at both steps. Yeah,

(19:36):
I mean, to have friends and you live alone, and
you live with just your siblings and a palatial non mansion,
like you spend a lot of time thinking about how
to kill Bert's and that's why we shouldn't have mentioned
in When I was twelve, 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

(19:57):
who did anything right. Um. Oddly enough, his parents continued
to live together, largely because Ramirez needed his ex wife's
unpaid labor to high handle child rearing. He was the
only one who did anything right and also a great communist. Yeah, yeah,

(20:17):
I'm gonna quote next from the biography Jackal. In nineteen
sixty two, just as she had lost the battle over
her children's first names, so Elba failed to stop her
husband from sending Illige to the sprawling ferment toorro Lyce
in Caracas, which was a nursery to bunding budding radicals
At the time when the capitol streets often resounded with
violent left wing demonstrations, The more enterprising students skipped classes
to Martian protest at the liberal government's ban on the

(20:39):
Communist Party. The school wasn't renowned. All the revolutionaries had
studied their electric halt. 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
nineteen sixty four, when he was fourteen that ellectified authority
for the first time. He joined an organization banned by
the authorities, then the Venezuelan Communist Youth. That's where I

(21:02):
made my debut in the revolutionary movement. I was one
of those in charge of the organization at in Caracas
in n nineteen sixty six. That young flock counted some
two hundred members, and Elich claims that he helped to
organize anti government street marches which scared the president. The
protest also taught how to make Molotov cocktails and set
cars on fire. Well. Visits to the shanty towns on
the outskirts of Gracas, he later claimed, revealed to him

(21:23):
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,
this is that's exactly how this guy a liar described

(21:47):
his birth as a communist, or his birth as the
liar and terrorists says. By the time I was seventeen,
I was learning how to light cars on which I
gotta say, maybe like or maybe there was that sounds
like teenagers in Portland today it does. It does sound like, well,
not cars. That was the police car on fire? Was

(22:10):
the police I also, I gotta say, like, I've heard
a lot of absurd drifters 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

(22:33):
was trained and how to make grease fires in that time,
I burnt my friends kitchen anyway, fifteen, in nineteen sixty six,
his father sent him off to Cuba to complete the education.
His weird private communism tutors had begun it. And and
this is like one of those private communism. Yeah, people
talk a lot about and they should and we should
talk more. We talk about him a bit in the
border patrol. How there's all those like sketchy u s

(22:55):
academies where we would like take cops from other countries
and train them and how to like murder, dissidence and
cool being America. Yeah, yeah, that kind of ship and
how terful it is and how many governments and millions
of people's deaths can be traced to things that started there.
Just un really tremendous, tremendous evil. Um. There were equivalents
of that stuff though in the U. S. SR. During

(23:16):
the Civil War or during the Cold War and whatever.
And the kind of Cuban equivalent to the School of
the America's was Camp Montana Montanzas, uh, and yeah, it
was like, yeah, where you you trained people to go
to other countries to like foment revolution and stuff. Um.
And so Illage goes there and he learns how to
like commit acts of sabotage and start revolutionary cells and

(23:37):
do all that good stuff, or he doesn't. And that's
all a lie because the CIA, when this guy becomes
a big deal, really wants to tie him more to
the U. S s R. 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
that's happened, but also it might have happened, So who
the funk knows? And also probably illage is not gonna

(23:59):
be like no, no, no, I was not trained. My
life is less cool than you think. Yeah, he's not
that kind of dude, So who knows. Um. 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. Took the did like a semester.

(24:21):
It was like course, like a minimester, like a month
and a half. Yeah, I mean, you know, you take
a five week course over the summer and you can
learn a lot about overthrowing the government in five weeks. Yeah, yeah,
correspondence course. Sure, there's options. So his his dad sends
the family to London, and his main reason for this
is because he wants his kids to learn English and

(24:41):
he wants him to experience a new culture. So again,
his Marxist dad takes him at a communism fighting school
and sends him to London to hang out in nightclubs
flirting with European women. Because again, Ramirez Novice incredible Marxist,
I mean just an amazing On the other hand, I
don't feel like that's a bad. Yeah, I'm not. I'm
not saying it's a bad If you can in one

(25:03):
summer do communism fighting in the government school and hanging
out in night gloves in London, do both of those
it correspondence course. Maybe he did both at the same time.
It's hard to do a bomb making correspondence course. You
could like outline the bomb on the back of the society.
When you send your final project in the mail, you
get in trouble. That's my impression. I mean, you know,

(25:26):
you have a wonderful career until it's cut cruelly short
by the FBI for some reason. Are we talking We're
talking about Teddy Um. So, yeah, Ramirez got his son
admitted to a fancy British boys school, which is basically
the opposite of having private communism tutors. Um is it

(25:47):
the 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 poggy
and pasty, but was always incredibly elegantly and expensively dressed.

(26:08):
He was a cheat and would avoid doing work whenever
he could. Um. So yeah. He was also though, really
smart and he did great on his exams, so he
kept stayed in school. Uh. Nineteen sixty eight was of
course one of the more revolutionary years in modern memory. Um.
Kind of not all that different from this year except
for the Internet and all of the additional guns, um,

(26:28):
and all of the additional fascism and all of the
additional environmental degradation. But anyway, very revolutionary year. A lot
of protests and movements and ship going on all over
the damn world. Uh. And in that year, Illige and
his dad were in Paris because again his yeah, it
was going down in Paris, and they saw none of
it because his dad was like, this seems scary. Let's

(26:49):
go to Moscow. Okay, hold on, communism, dad, communism lawyer, Dad,
You're gonna 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 nine. There
is nothing to learn here, kid, who I have exposed

(27:11):
to the nightclubs of London and communism fighting. Actually, if
you are a communist in the idea of like status communism, yeah,
the situation is don't really scratch. But also as as
a child of the nineties, when like everything from the

(27:33):
sixties 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 very weirdly, like as a
middle schooler, was the one thing that I read about
like all like stuff like wow, if I could have

(27:54):
gone back in time to one place, and so hearing that, yeah,
his dad is like, now we're not gonna take it.
You know where I'm not rolling you at the Sorbon
and this ship is like scary, Let's go to Moscow.
I mean, have you seen bard which Moscow notably in
one of the places where absolutely funk all was happening,
not a goddamn thing, whereas they're pulling up fucking paving

(28:16):
stones throwing them at cops in Paris and also making
funny comics about it, like they didn't go hungry, none
of these things. We yeah, that does happen. So Patris
Lamumbo university is where the Soviet Union is where he goes, Like,
that's the college he goes to. Patrice Lammbo. If you
remember our episode about the Congo, he was the democratically

(28:37):
elected socialist leader of the Congo who was very quickly
murdered for the pro Us dictator who looted the country
for like forty years, which I gotta say, you know
this is this is in Moscow. Yeah, kudos kudos Tom
for naming a university after Patris Lamumba. I'm sure that

(28:57):
that was pretty much where any engagement with you know,
progressive socialist politics from the Congo stopped. But yeah, yeah,
you know it was a stab um. 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 and of
origin better in step with the uss are or like

(29:19):
revolutions that were So anyway, Illege did terribly here um
because again he's been raised to be a revolutionary and
the one thing that they hate in the Soviet Union
is a revolutionary. Yeah, when you're outside the Soviet Union,
they might like you, but not inside, not a story. Yeah.
So the fundamental problem is that I had been raised

(29:40):
from birth to like, yeah, fight the state. Um, And
yeah that doesn't that doesn't send him over world. This
is actually the year that he moves to Moscow is
the year that the Soviet Union sent tanks to the
Czechoslovakia to brutally suppress a popular uprising. Um. Famously just
where that's people who think that everything the Soviet Union
did was cool as a cucumber. So they have to

(30:01):
justify crushing people with tanks. Um. They're yeah, they're like
they're like the people who were They're like, they're like
most Americans, um, but for communism, like half of them. Maryan. Sorry,
so revolutionaries were still occasionally useful to the U. S SR.
But mainly like in terms of you know, fighting this

(30:23):
whole Cold War thing. Um. So one of uh, what
Illage gets here and like he has a lot of
trouble immediately. Um, the people at the school don't like him,
the government doesn't like him. Um. But he does have
a couple of friends. And one of his friends is
a guy named Privlov, who years later described nineteen year
old Illage this way. Illach was not at all the
typical students sent by his country's communist party. Nothing to

(30:44):
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 vivour. I don't know, I don't know French. Uh.
In the biography Jackal John Fullane goes on to write,
flush with cash sent by his parents, Illag could afford
to spend lavishly on whiskey and champage, and the special
stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies and which
were off limits to most people. A lot of folks

(31:05):
don't know. The USSR had those stars that only rich
people could buy stuff in the Marxist in the Marxist utemp,
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 Illage, reason that his freedom of action would be

(31:26):
drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him
were reduced. But when they asked Rameris naves to be
less generous. The father, piqued, retorted that his son had
never wanted for anything. Great communists, unbelievably good communists. Seriously,
everyone child's behavior would be improved if he wasn't so
entitled and constantly flush with cash. And the rebuttal is,

(31:48):
but I have always given my child everything he wants. Yes.
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

(32:10):
he doesn't go quietly along with what the government wants.
At Patrice University, this is the birth of actually luxury communism. Yeah, yeah,
just for him though, I think that's called so like
like Liberty University here in the United States, Patrice Lambo

(32:33):
College had a vice squad which searched at night to
try to stop them from having fun things, took away
their liquor and whatever. Would not be down with that.
I don't think he would. I think Patrice Lammbo would
start some ship over that. I the administration universe. I
think he might. That was kind of his deal. Um. So,

(32:54):
continuing my reading from jackal quote. One night, the patrol
entered Ilich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and
glass is on the table, but he was apparently alone.
The squad opened the coupboard 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, Illach didn't bother to hide her

(33:16):
in the cupboard. He threw her out of the window.
There's better ways to hide your date. This one was
fully dressed and landed in two meters of snow a
flora two below. She got up, unhurt and shouted abuse
at him. There's something you can do when there's that much.
I think it's also I did throw some people out
of some windows, is all I would yell abuse windows.

(33:38):
And that's why we're friends. Yeah, yeah, well we we
have compatible attitudes towards definistration. Naked lady falls out of
cupboard and they're like, what the funk are you doing here?
And heard defence is I feel sympathy with the oppressed. Yeah,
I mean, honestly, that's a great cover story. That's a
great story. Yeah, she's a revolutionary. I need this covered.

(34:01):
Almost passed that drunk for reasons. So this was kind
of as a young man, was great at attracting women
because he was very good looking, very charming, and he's Venezuelan, right. Um.
He was what you might call a user though, um.
And the only deep relationship he ever had was with
a young Cuban woman he bonded with while in Moscow.

(34:23):
She was older than him, with a marriage under her
belt already h and so she was like kind of
more experienced than him, which was not common for his relationships.
Years later, Ilich would admit that her greater life experience
was anomaly in his love life. Quote, I like girls
very much, but I like to be in control. With Sonja,
I wasn't a ruler. We were one Sonia talking how

(34:43):
to smoke cigars, and Illige got her pregnant. They broke
up shortly before after that, and she flew back to
Havana to give birth. And it's very clear, unclear what
happened to them. Um, But this is actually, oddly enough,
not a deadbeat dad story. On Ilich's part. She went
back home pregnant, cut off all contact with him, and
had their kid. He wrote her letters repeatedly, just begging

(35:04):
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

(35:25):
or else. It was just a total power move, like
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 too, which means

(35:46):
she was hard as fuck. Yeah. And also he's going
to have feelings about it forever. Yeah. No, I think
it sucked him up for forever, but you know whatever. Uh.
In nineteenth Patrice Lamumba University expelled uh and thirteen other
members of the Venezuelan Communist Youth for anti Soviet provocation
and in discipline. UH. Now there's rumors that this is

(36:07):
also untrue, and that he was a secret KGB agent
for from this point forward, and that they just faked
kicking him out of the school. And that might be like,
it's it's fun KGB, who knows, But as cover goes, Hey,
you went to Cuban Communism Fighting School and then you
went to Patrice Slam here's how to bring communism to

(36:27):
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 mountain. I think the thing
that we're all learning about the sixties and seventies is
that you could get away with a lot. I mean historically,

(36:49):
if they really hadn't liked him that much and he
had gone to Cuban Revolutionary School, they could have just
called him a Trotsky. Yeah, we're we are talking he
had been in Cuba. We are talking the late sixties,
early seventies, So like there's not as much of that
going on, like the Fourth International was in n Yeah,

(37:13):
I don't know, I don't know. You know, you probably
know more about what he was likely to just like
I don't know. They didn't do anything to him, Like
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.

(37:36):
And so in the style of communists college administrations for
time and Memorial, they said, you're a drunk asshole and
you're kind of sucking up all of our ship. So
we just want you to go to a different school. Now, Well,
they just wanted him out of the U s s R.
Um or he left the USSR to go fighting Lebanon
and then they wouldn't let him back in again. Who knows.

(37:56):
Uh kind of some debate around this um. But whatever
happens or whatever happened, the kind of thing that happens
next is that uh I winds up in uh Clebanon
because while he was at Patrice La Mumbia University. He
did meet some real revolutionaries, a bunch of young Palestinian
dudes who were affiliated with the Popular Front. So the

(38:18):
Popular Front a little bit of brief history. Uh, the
early nineteen seventies pretty rough time to be a Palestinian
liberation activist. Not that there's ever been a good time
to be a Palestins kind of always been a hard, hard,
hard gig. But the Six Day War had happened in
June of nineteen sixty seven, and it had ended with
every Arab military force or rate against Israel being like,

(38:39):
you know, it didn't go well for everybody else. Palestine lost, um,
like like a lot of Palestine UM. And the failure,
the total, massive failure of traditional military tactics on behalf
of all of the Arab forces UM led to an
increasing embrace in irregular warfare. So this is like the
period where a lot of UM, all right, we're gonna go,

(39:00):
we're gonna do some we're gonna do some grilla ship now, um,
you know, the fed Ayeen and stuff like become more
of a deal after this. So a lot of the
most of the group's kind of fighting and advocating politically
for Palestinian liberation at this time kind of we're under
the broad umbrella of the p l O or the
Palestinian Liberation Organization, and their charter stated armed struggle is

(39:20):
the only way to free Palestine. It embraced commando action
to further this end. Uh. And the Popular Front was
one of the organizations under the PLO. It was explicitly
Marxist and militant um and Yeah, one of its like
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. That's kind of the idea, right, Um.

(39:44):
So Illach goes to Beirut, which was a place you
know where you're gonna be if you're a Palestinian freedom fighter, um,
because it's kind of the safest place where a bunch
of them are gathering. Uh, And it's 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,
Like one of the things about the Goal on Heights Yea,

(40:07):
which is one of the disputed territories, certainly in this period,
it's the goal on heights, which means you can see
into Israel, like, you know, 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, unless you're reading about Africa, in which

(40:29):
case it's so much bigger than you have any like,
it's incomprehensibly large. So ill it's traveled to Beirut, which was,
you know, yeah, a cool place. Uh still cool. Well,
kind of a bummer at the moment, but that's not
their roots fault. Um. 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

(40:51):
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
a theory and theory and theory, being a rich kid
with theory, for someone to just say, funck theory, want
to shoot people people? Yeah, And you know a lot

(41:13):
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 calm That's why the Japanese Red Army
like got along with these dudes. So it's also why
the p l O had kind of a hard time

(41:34):
because like, yeah, 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,

(41:55):
that's why anarchists are only popular sometimes. The pop their
front operated a bunch of training camps out in the
Jordanian desert um, and Jordan was like, you can keep
your revolutionaries here in Jordan's We're cool with that, um.
But as that way, yeah, they weren't wild about it, um.
But you know, Illage was pretty wild about learning how

(42:17):
to do cool stuff, like they had like airplanes out
there that you would like do training into, like how
to get into gunfights on airplanes. And he thought that
was did you 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. Um so yeah. And his initial plan like

(42:37):
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, uh, and go back home to Venezuela and
do some revolutions in um. Yeah. And when he joined
in nineteen seventy, the PLO recruiting officer who inducted him
give Illage the nickname Carlos. And the only reason for

(42:58):
this was that he came from South amera Rica and
that was the only Spanish name that his recruiter really knew. Um.
So he was like, you're Carlos because you come from
Latin America. And that's why he's Carlos from here on out.
That's how we give nicknames. Now, that's how we give
name It's like everybody you've ever met who has a nickname,
like you know, Texas or yeah. Yeah. So he goes

(43:20):
to this training camp in the desert with like ninety
other guys and a lot of them are fringe in
Belgium or other Europeans, and they all start learning, uh,
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, which you would make
them stand in the open air about a meter away

(43:41):
from a plastic bomb that detonated something not wildly different
from like the distraction devices the polls giving us, like
the flash bang renames. Yeah, um, so you have to
like stand and not and try not to flinch when
that thing explodes New Saturday. Yeah yeah we do it
and like a lot of Tuesdays flames. That's I don't
want to take videos that often. Yeah, so um yeah,

(44:05):
it's it's it's uh yeah, he does really well with 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. Um, we should fast track you to go
do cool stuff there. Yeah, exploded. Carlos himself didn't really
like it much. He thought there was too much propaganda

(44:26):
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 in Doctor Nation school, he's kind of good on
the communist in doctrine. He does know some Communism and
he's like, cool, I got it. But when do we
get to shoot stuff? You know, though, who is knowledgeable

(44:49):
about communism? Be I was going to say in Doctor
Nation that you know, in doctrinate you in communism, you
want to get indoctrinate products services. It is Raytheon 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

(45:12):
took twenty years of a global war on terror and
launching thousands of missiles at weddings and schools and school
buses and villages full 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 shotted only at cars of people were

(45:32):
pretty sure 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. And they
are sponsoring this podcast, as are these other people and
their products, and I'm so they're all raytheon subsidiaries. So exciting.

(46:02):
All right, we're back. Ah, 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 nineteen seventy, the King of Jordan's again, you know,
he's letting all these Palestinian freedom fighters and such hang
out in Jordan's but he's not like he's not jazzed
about it, because again he's a king, and these people

(46:24):
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 probably like,
I gotta keep an eye on them, just at a curiosity.
How do Marxists feel about monarchies, not wild about it. Yeah,
so it's it's a it's a rocky situation and there's
like fights between his soldiers and them, like it's not

(46:47):
it's not the smoothest situation in the world. Um and
yeah it got rocky. Or that September when in the
Popular Front attempted to hijack four airliners bound for New
York at the same time. Um. And to their credit,
they succeeded in taking two planes, which is not bad
for four planes. Yeah, but they just did the boring

(47:09):
ship with Yeah. They they've got like three D sixty
captives and they actually they flew them to an abandoned
airfield in the Jordanian desert and like stamped their passports
with like liberated like like like free territory or something
like that. It was really weird. Um, I like that
as a choice. Yeah, yeah, they weird. Performance are yeah,

(47:33):
not quite performance. 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's 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 relaxed tonight. There is food and drink here for you.
So this was the guys that got captured, which is

(47:54):
like nice get started. Yeah, like that way better than
I do. Very very fitting for the region. Uh and
also like, uh kind of funny that, like you kidnap
a bunch of Americans and you're like, okay, the first
thing we gotta do is let them know, like they
don't know, they need to know, like is this part

(48:15):
of Africa? No? But yeah, three hours later, alright, so
everybody clear under the Mongols in Vadue. Now this is
really when it's the Mediterranean, the mediterrane It's where pizza

(48:36):
comes from. Okay, we're near the pizza place. Uh. Yeah,
So they have a very nice kidnapping um, which most
is 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,

(48:57):
which seems like a good tactic if you can hijack
the plane and everybody on the plane is like, you know,
that didn't seem so bad. That guy who's that guy
who threatened our lives with the bomb was quite pleasant.
What a nice and exciting detour. Yeah, um, yeah, you'll
never guess, Marcia, what happened when we worked, when we

(49:17):
were traveling. Yeah, most people like would love to be hijacked.
As long as it was this kind of hijack. We
get to spend some times. Stamp on the next slide.
I took another picture. Yeah, and this is where the
nice young pl O man gave me some tabula and
showed me the bomb around his neck. Yeah. Yeah, So
the Popular Front eventually succeeded in trading the passengers for

(49:40):
seven of their arrested comrades. Um and yeah, it was
a big whole 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 you know, all those people, they seem
like they had a pretty okage. It seems like it

(50:02):
went all right. I would say the people flying the planes,
the people hijacking the plans, and the people riding on
the planes all felt better about it afterwards. I would
I would say so. A lot of people had stories
they told for the rest of their lives which they
got to have. UM. So yeah, it was. It wasn't
It was not the worst act terrorism history, you could

(50:23):
say that for sure, UM. But it was a big
old deal at the time, and it put the King
of Jordan in a pretty rough situation. UH. And he
eventually was like, I'm expelling y'all from Jordan's UM, which
led to a horrific war UH in Jordans between the
Palestinians called Black September and the Jordanian military UM. And
the Palestinians were again, as is pretty usual in the

(50:46):
long saga of Palestinian liberation, fucked from the jump UM.
But they fought tenaciously UM. Eventually, though, casualties were so
high that Carlos, the young Venezuelan recruit was sent into battle. UM.
He described it as a sheer massa thousands of dead.
I fought until nineteen seventy one. I was on the
front line in the mountains. The enemy was trying to
force us down the banks of the river Jordan's. His

(51:08):
commanding officer noted that he was nerveless under fire and
could take life without blinking. By the end of the
whole DISASTERUS conflict, more than three thousand Palestinian fighters were dead,
and Carlos, who had once been planning to return to Venezuela,
was utterly committed to their cause. No more did he
talk about going home. Instead, he went back to his
old stomping grounds in London, this time as an agent

(51:28):
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 we could make
a list of high profile pro Israel targets to kidnap
and murder in London, which there if you cut out
some of the stuff we were just covering here, there's
a way to spend this where he is in fact

(51:49):
a socialite. Yeah, yeah, kinda, uh 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
the 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

(52:10):
be putting it lightly. His most common move was to
flirt with a girl until she fell for him and
then asked 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 jelly n gelic, knight and uh yeah, dynamite.
I mean, I would rather if some dude left some

(52:30):
ship at my house. I would rather it was that
than like a bunch of his spare underpant's just gonna
put it out there. Don't really know how to play.
He is that guy, but with bags of he has
an endless supply of Yeah, he's he's we will learn
very soon, very good at them, um so. And again

(52:53):
though there's consequences for the women that he does this too.
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. Um yeah. He
also endangered these women due to the fact that he
left bombs in their houses that were always stored im properly,
so like people would like become aware of the arms

(53:14):
caches he'd left because the stink of rotting dynamite would
start to overwhelm there. So he was not didn't really
give a ship about these people. Yeah, that's that's not
another level above and beyond, Like maybe you got a
yeast infection and now your couch has gave you. Yeah,
like this guy left some decaying dynamite and my attic. Yeah,

(53:35):
I mean I got a fucking cat from an ex
girlfriend once, which is a lot better, I think than
an illegal arms cash. I don't know. I mean I
had 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 relationship. You know, it's not going to help

(53:55):
you hijack the plane. Robert a cat. I mean it might,
it would if it could. So I have some cats
that you should need 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

(54:16):
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 supportive girls. You
must strike up friendships with these apparently inoffensive creatures because
they are very useful in supplying havens and warding off suspicion.
So so I like to hang one around my neck
and it keeps the vampires away. So there's there's part

(54:38):
of that that seems like, okay, so you're kind of
a slut, and and that's okay, that's a fine thing
to be. It's the part where you leave decaying dynamite
and their attics. That's the thing that I don't like.
You know. You just want ladies to be treated like people,
I mean, and not and not arms, caches or me

(55:00):
objects to ward off evil. I'm fine with being a
tetemic object to ward off evil. I don't feel like,
you know, but if you start leaving to Kaine Dynamiter
around the house, he might have to have a talk. Yeah,
it's more that he hit it from them and they
never knew that it was there in the first place,
which is another level. Yeah, it's like a special Valentine,

(55:23):
they 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 living
weapons at their house, or he could trust them to
act as a safe house once he started committing all
the primes, and 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

(55:43):
to Europe in nineteen seventy two, with Carlos providing critical
support to help hijack a Lofton's a jet and carry
out the abduction of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. Now,
Munich was like it was like the nine eleven of kidnapping,
really the brass ring of mur during people at the Olympics. Um,
it was it was it was, you know, a big deal, um,

(56:05):
and there's a zero evidence that he had anything to
do with it. Um. This was the thing he started
claiming later because again, very famous act of terrorism, and
if you're if you're a famous terrorist and there's a
famous terrorism, it's you know, you don't you don't want
people to not think you had anything to do with it. Yeah,

(56:25):
and then the next thing you know, people are like, oh,
were you in that band and you were like, um, yeah, 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 his garden. No,
we're not talking about Ringo today. Carlos had his first mission.

(56:49):
We're talking about Carlos the Jackal today, not Ringo and
equally terrorists. So Carlos had his first real act of
terrorism that he committed on December thirtieth, nineteen seventy three,
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

(57:11):
shot him once, but then his revolver malfunctioned and most
books say it jammed, which I don't. I it's hard
to get him that it may have been an ammunition problem.
Exactly what happened to take out I mean, famously, Ringo's
attempt uncer top him hat and was foiled when his
revolver jammed. And that's why George Carlin took over the series.

(57:35):
I don't. Okay. Um, so yeah, Carlos tries to shoot
this guy to death and it doesn't work, and Carlos
leaves uh and CFS badly injured, but you know, he
makes it. So it was a little bit of a
ship 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 gotta keep your
powder dry. That's what Bernie another Bernie Sanders. So when

(57:58):
he killed Robert F. Kennedy and another a month later, Uh,
fucking Carlos tried again. Uh in this time instead of
trying to shoot Yeah, no, no different that he doesn't
even go after a guy. This time, he goes after
a an Israeli bank, the Halfwall Limb Bank in London. Uh.
And in Carlos's mind and made a good target for
the two hundred grand plastic explosive charges he built after

(58:21):
storing materials in some nice ladies 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

(58:42):
he just threw a bomb through a door like a bank.
But he's not gonna like walk in Biell swave, like
put it somewhere extra good, like just just he's new
to this. He's new to this. He's trying um practice
makes perfectly and characteristically when he says that there were

(59:04):
no victims, he's not quite accurate because he actually injured
a nineteen year old woman with shrapnel. Um. But he
just doesn't like to talk about Yeah, we've already established
that hurting women doesn't seem to bother him in their feelings,
their addicts full of explosives, or their bodies in bank explosions.

(59:24):
I don't think a lot of other people's feelings matter
to Carlos Um. But yeah, so I will say, though,
it is weird reading about him because, like by the
standards of modern terrorists, all of the terrorists in this
period avoid 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

(59:47):
more targeted in their violence, although not always but still
not like We're not not like isis right, Like terrorism
is a different matter today a little bit so, to
quote from a maray of Carlos's life by researcher Mitchell Barth, Uh,
soon after he set off car bomb attacks of three
French newspapers accused of pro Israeli leanings, cars full of

(01:00:09):
explosives were left outside the offices of um I'm not
even gonna try to read those names, three French newspapers.
The bombs were set to explode at two am, 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, uh did so when the vehicle bomb

(01:00:30):
left in front of it failed to detonate. So three
out of four not bad. Fox up three newspapers that
are like pro Israel. 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 of the
rude is something or other and like learning how to
plant bombs in random places. I mean there's a little

(01:00:51):
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. Yeah
right now, and I'm gonna you know, Sun your building
up a bit. 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,

(01:01:11):
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. He would
people would tell him that he would like, well, he was.
He's kind of like que for the Popular Front in
this period 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

(01:01:32):
like all sorts of cool ship. So period wise, keeping
the Bond theme, did he have a cat? I don't.
I don't think so, I don't think. I can't imagine
him taking care of a cat. He's moving around a
lot too. Um. And he's really good at getting weaponry,
like particularly just fucking sacks of these machine pistols. He

(01:01:52):
loves machine pistols. Um. A lot of easy fifty twos
and a lot of scorpions um. And he gets a
shipload of hand grenades too, and again you know, puts
him in the houses of women that he likes. Um.
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
girl friend to whom Carlos felt closest, and he turned

(01:02:13):
to her for help as he slowly built up a
stock of arms for operations in Europe. One evening in
July nineteen seventy four, 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 state the date
of my birthday. According to Nydia, who took the suitcase,

(01:02:34):
back with her to London. It was only sometimes later
that she found out what it contained. Look, my love,
this beauty is a check pistol, a high speed in
fifty two automatic. It's marvelous, Carlos told her as he
guided her through the suitcase's contents with childish gleet 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,

(01:02:55):
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 I've had better dudes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Forget that you're a woman, because surely a woman could

(01:03:19):
not handle the complex operation of pulling a pin out
of a grenade and throwing it out a thing. Real
feminist icon, Carlos just the jackal. Yeah, I know you.
You you all were really hoping that he was going
to wind up being being a real gender gender equality

(01:03:42):
but instead he's a terrorist. Who is He's He's an
entitled rich boy who was raised by the best Marxist
and a shitty lawyer dad. So now is about the
time in late summer nineteen seventy four, the small friends
of ours come back into the story. The Japanese Red Arm. Yeah,

(01:04:06):
now this is and this is and this is non
no non murdering all their friends non trapped in North
Korea like the people who are committing tons of terrorism
and really good at it, the fucking scary as hell. Yeah. Yeah,
So one of their members, their leader, actually had been
arrested by French border patrol bearing a suit case with

(01:04:26):
three fake passports and ten thousand dollars 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 he wasn't out of
the norm here. Um. So he gets caught though in
this case for some reason, um, and gets put in prison.

(01:04:46):
He probably knew the words national Yeah, he started playing
it and he started saying so yeah he uh, they
want him out, um, and they plan their Their plan
to get their boss out is to carry out a
daring attack on the French embassy in the Hague um
and like occupy the entire French embassy and take everyone
inside of a prisoner and then ransom them out for

(01:05:09):
their captured boss and a plane. I mean, which is
cool as Hell's like a hard plot, and also all
of the die hard plots and everything else make a
lot more sense given what you were talking about with
the sixties and early seventies, because it seems like governments
would have been like okay, yeah, it seems fair good, okay, good, yeah, alright,

(01:05:31):
it's some 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. Everyone negotiates immediately
with terrorists, negotiates, gives them the one yeah now, so yeah,

(01:05:53):
they they Carlos and his boss with a popular Front
is like contact with the actual like organization is a
is a dude named him Carbal who's an 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.

(01:06:15):
The j R commandos held the French ambassador, as well
as ten 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 forced
floor balcony and threw a fragmentation grenade down into the

(01:06:35):
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 thirty four
or thirty four innocent shoppers. The French government cave to
the jp A 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

(01:06:56):
act of terrorism. Also makes him a big deal because
it worked like fucking game. He threw a grenade and
they were like, here's a jet and we're letting this
stud and all of his friends who occupied, like who
conquered our embassy? And he yes, different era, it's I

(01:07:18):
mean it's a very different period of time. Um, so yeah,
he's famous now. Like now, he's 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 ever you wanna call him,
he's like a big deal. Now he's like a big
fucking operation. Uh. Now, The problem though with getting famous

(01:07:38):
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 LLL 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 LLL aircraft and

(01:08:00):
load them up, um 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 that seems like he was talking about killing like
a hundred and seventy 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,

(01:08:23):
and we're in a period of time when everyone kind
of low level thought that they could die any minute.
But at the same time, the idea that you were
that you killed more than like four people in a
single action for anything is like, oh my gosh, loss

(01:08:44):
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, uh yeah, I'm going to read a
quote from the book Jackal talking about how this attack
went because it's it's a fun it's a fun story.
The Allal plane was a hundred thirty meters away when

(01:09:05):
wine Rich, 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,
iybe that's the guy that that is. So he's with
he's he He and wine Rich have like this truck
full of rocket propelled grenades. UM so yeah. The l
plane was unders away while within the weapon's maximum range
at three, but the missile sword wide of the nose

(01:09:26):
of the plane. Without waiting to see the rocket's final impact,
wine Rich hurriedly consulted Carlos before reloading and taking aim
as 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 and the cockpit of the
Allal jet crackled with an urgent order from the control
tower for all planes on the tarmac to come to

(01:09:47):
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, and his
haste to fire a second rocket, wine Rich to brace
himself for the recoil, which punched him backwards, and the
Bazuka steel tube shattered their car's windshield. The rocket pierced
the fuselage of a parked in virtually empty Yugoslav plane

(01:10:10):
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 damaged cause was a few
broken plates. Wine Rich 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

(01:10:30):
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. Wine Rich, she explained,
was courageous and experience, but 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

(01:10:52):
the promise, next time, we'll hit our target. So every
comedy made during the eighties makes a lot more sense. Yeah, yeah,
this is They're not great at it, like one Us. Yeah,
like Sad Tuba. Throughout it's just like the casualness with

(01:11:12):
which they're leaving rocket launchers and machine pistols behind is
they're like, well, I guess we're fucked right. Well, And
because I was really picturing these two guys as like
suave eighties villain motherfucker's up until you described all that,
and now I'm picturing them as like, you know, like

(01:11:33):
Kerry Elwis and like John Clice, just like flying backwards
into the windshields in their cars because they're not properly
raised and two rockets in a row that don't blow up,
and yeah they're not. It doesn't go well. They're just
littering their trail with pistols like Red Cromes dan akright

(01:11:53):
is in this movie, dan Acred 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 promised to come back and not to miss in
the future, but they don't keep this promise. Uh. They
try again like a week later with a bunch of
Palestinian guerrillas to help them, but this is also a

(01:12:16):
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 candor terrorism police and take a bunch of hostages
and like get an airplane to fly them safely back home. Meanwhile,
Carlos and his partner like drive away, did they successfully
get the okay to blow up planes on the tur back?

(01:12:39):
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
plane to begin because they wanted to kill people, but
they're bad at it, but you know how you could
kill people people? Did eventually have that idea and it

(01:13:01):
didn't It wasn't great. Yeah. So on June Nive, Carlos
is boss with a popular front Michelle Mukarbal, was captured
and interrogated by French intelligence. He apparently turned and like
you know, did you know did the he snitched? Uh?
And he led the cops to Carlos's safe house, which was,
of course the house that his girlfriend lived at and

(01:13:23):
was currently holding a party. So everything about this is
baffling because these three French intelligence agents have this Palestinian
uh like p l O 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

(01:13:43):
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. With guns is France in
the seventies. Yeah, Like there's the chance that the party

(01:14:03):
was going to be really good and maybe he wouldn't
find him, and then there was gonna be a convoy
of cars heading to an orgy afterwards, and were they
started drinking while they're talking to Carlos. So they start
drinking while they're talking to Carlos, but then one of
them brings Mukarbo into the room, and Carlos realizes instantly like,
oh shit, he fucking he fucking turned on me. And

(01:14:25):
while until then they just thought Carlos just thought they
were having a nice conversation, thought, oh, these two cops,
when I 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 CZ fifty two automatic pistol. He

(01:14:47):
shoots Mukarbo in the throat, and he shoots two out
of three cops dead. Um just immediately um wounds the
other I think, uh, and then fucking books it um
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 during the He's he's

(01:15:09):
very good at some parts of being a terrorists, like
running away, very shooting a bunch of people in the face. Um,
so yeah he gets away, uh, And like things are
rough at first and 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. Um yeah.

(01:15:34):
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

(01:15:57):
he's he's a whole auntie is ay thing like, yeah,
you're gonna run into sometimes. I understand that we shouldn't expect,
you know, find the stations between these people are Jewish,
and yes, the State of Israel policies I don't like
from a guy who he is terrorist just shot his

(01:16:20):
friend right in 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 yeah, so uh. They
this this girlfriend and like her boyfriend at the time,
find all this stuff. Um, And instead of calling the
cops because they're both like far left activists, they called

(01:16:42):
the guardian UM and the reporter who goes over to
their house to do the story notices a copy of
Frederick fourth Sithes book The Day of the Jackal and
if you remember from our episodes about the about Guinea
and the coup's there, Frederick forsythe was the guy who
wrote that book about how to do a coup that
then people uses the like to do. So they find
a copy of Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal on

(01:17:03):
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 nickname, he starts calling him
Carlos the Jackal. So that's this point forward and this
is carlome jack So Carlos and this is the same
attic where there's a bunch of there's a bunch of
guns and decaying dynamite and gelic night local. Yeah it's

(01:17:29):
not Look, man, I wasn't standing Carlos the Jackal until
this point, but like 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
seventies and the kind of terrorists he is where you're like,
oh my god, that's so cool, and then you remember, like, oh,

(01:17:51):
and this is also a guy who dropped a grenade
into a crowd of strangers like I need to I
need to cool it a little. Yeah. Yeah, and he was.
I'm gonna guess that list was not for giving people
nice notes about how No he wasn't like keeping track
of Yeah, no he was. It was not stuff. Yeah,

(01:18:12):
it was for his earlier job trying to kill a
bunch of random you know, people who supported his reel. Um.
So yeah, now, from this point forward, Carlos is, you know,
the most wanted man on earth. This is when he
becomes like the the most like wanted person by international
law enforcement on the part for a while. Um, but

(01:18:32):
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. Here we go,

(01:18:55):
We're back. We're talking about Carlos the jackal uh seat
of the j Uh. And as the summer of nineteen
turned into fall, he was sitting in Beirut. He just
had a whole big string of cool successes and some
failures related to rocket launcher. Cool successes. Yeah, he killed
people with a grenade and they got a jet. The

(01:19:21):
seventies were quite a decade at 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 OPEQUE headquarters in Vienna and opecer the
guys who run you know, oil um, they produced it

(01:19:43):
and explored it. Yea, yeah, that's opec UM. So on
December twenty one, he led a six person team that
raided the annual OPEC leadership meeting and took more than
sixty people hostage, including most of the people running OPEC.
Three people were killed in doing a libbyan delegate and
the opening stages of the attack now once yeah, which

(01:20:04):
also this is one of those things where he's now
there will be some consequences for Yeah, it's one thing
to be p l O and be with Israel and
everybody's like, you really want Kadafi on your side if
you're all in this period, Yeah, you just fact with
a whole bunch of people who might have been down
with you. You might have let you hide in their country. Yeah, yeah,

(01:20:27):
it's so, it didn't it's not perfect. You know, you're
ray to OPEC, You're gonna going to crack them. That's
the only part of a plan where several people die.
It's not perfect, but you know, yeah, so um yeah.
They they take over opec uh and take a bunch
of people hostage, and once their hostages are secure, Carlos
and his comrades make the same familiar demand for a

(01:20:49):
plane in 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 fifteen minutes. I
just love how much of this terrorism has boiled down to.
We got some pamphlets for you. You gotta read this letter.

(01:21:12):
We're gonna like, Yo, there's like libraries and like, can
you imagine this sort of ship couldn't happen in the
era of YouTube. Yeah, because YouTube is 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
so you're saying YouTube didn't I do it. I I

(01:21:35):
am saying that we should go back to a hijacking
based economy like things were in the Seube and ban
the internet, ban the internet, make hijacking legal. It'll fix
a lot of problems. That's all I'm gonna say. There's
nothing wrong with that plan. Yeah. So Austria is like,

(01:21:56):
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. Um.
So they give him a plane, uh, and it flies
to out Years. Well, that's the baseline. You gotta no
matter what happens, you get a plane. You get a plane,
like we're having a terrorism one second. Let me, let's

(01:22:16):
get you seven thirty seven. Come on, now, what do
you have? What a bottle of hair spraying? You're getting Assessna.
So yeah, they fly out Years where Carlos freeze thirty
and non Arab hostages in exchange for refueling the jet,
which then flies to Tripoli. Uh. Now Tripoli isn't wild

(01:22:38):
to have them there because of the Libyan they killed
Um and a number of other reasons, minor details they
didn't ask. Kadafi was a big asking guy. He did
do authoritarian dictators like it when you you know, maybe
get permission from them to do things. He's not psyched. Uh.
So the Carlos and is like, okay, well, could you

(01:23:00):
at least give us a plane that can like go
further so that we can like get away with all
these hostages we still have, And Kadafi's like, no, you
all you killed my guy, Like fuck you. Um, I'm
momar Kadafi. I'm not famous for being reasonable. Um. So
you know. Eventually though, in exchange for releasing all the
Libyan hostages and five other delegates, the plane was refueled

(01:23:20):
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.
Uh Now, this was supposed to this cash was supposed
to go to the movement, but Carlos took a bunch
of it um, which got him kicked out at the
Popular front. Um. So you know, this is kind of
the end of that part of his career, which also

(01:23:41):
you gotta well, yeah, you also you gotta 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 and those ladies attics.
At that time you just threw some grenades off of
a balcony into a random crowd of strangers, totally fine.

(01:24:01):
The time you totally funked 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. Yeah, that's
kind of where things go here. So yeah, Carlos, you know, Um,
he winds up kind of on the run for a while.

(01:24:23):
He flees to the Balkans, where he's detained by the
Yugoslavian government and then sent to a rack. 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 that's what they say in the
touris and brochures for Bagdad, not the Balkans. Ye. Well,
and he successfully he had successfully piste off quite a

(01:24:44):
few other countries. You getting kicked out of the Balkans. Yeah,
so he wound up kind of wriggling out of this
and sitting up and uh Adden, where he tried to
form his own terrorist group made of Syrian, Lebanese and
German rebels UM and he winds up getting the attention
of the s Gerban government UM and their secret police,
the Stazi, who offer him in office and a safe

(01:25:05):
house in East Berlin. Wa like yeah, they hire him now, yeah,
They're like, you're pretty good at this terrorism thing. Come on,
live in Berlin. 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 were only the Stasie. You don't even

(01:25:26):
know how to record things. That's what everyone says about
the Stazi. Also the Stai famous lovers of guys who
want to overthrow government. I don't think it really doesn't
in Prague pretty soon, yeah, I mean, considering who they
are and who he is, do you know about it
before he did? And they he spent some time as

(01:25:49):
like a semi legitimate agent of the you know, of
the USSR, and of of East Germany and like kind
of just like global you know, all of that stuff.
He lives in Prague. He gets seventy 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 seventies. Uh,

(01:26:09):
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. The staff
of seventy to come in out's 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

(01:26:29):
or I could scream wildly and wave a hand. That's
what do you think He's going to get a quicker response?
So he he keeps running his terrorist group. Um, and
obvious they do. They do some cool stuff and not
tinnity too. They carry it an attack on a French
nuclear reactor. Um, it didn't work out, but famous good
targets for terrorism. And yeah, I'm as someone that really

(01:26:55):
loves seventies Roger Moore Bond movies, I'm really pressed by
how well this all lines up. It's amazing. Yeah, that's
part of why those movies got made. It's because Carlos
the Jackal was doing this ship and now he goes
to the move and he goes he went to the
Moon in the seventies too, and it was great. No notes,

(01:27:16):
so um, yeah, he tries to carry his group, carries
out an attack on a nuclear reactor. It doesn't work. Uh,
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
gonna move on past this. But you say it doesn't work,
which I assume means they didn't blow and they did

(01:27:39):
not do that. And also his wife is just a footnote. Yeah,
he got married at some point. He got married at
some point. Sometimes we're fucking page twenty two here, there's
gotta be some throw a Duffel bag full of the
King dynamite and somebody's attic. There's a special connection. It's
different than all the other Duffel bags you've thrown and
all the other attics. I'm just know though, that once

(01:28:01):
you marry someone, it makes it harder to hide Duffel
bags of bombs and other people's attics. That really depends
on the nature of the relationship. I was going to say,
based on the Jackal's dead, I would say being married
is not an impediment of throwing your whatever in anywhere
you want. So uh, yeah, he demands his wife's release

(01:28:22):
of France after trying to blow up their nuclear reactor,
and France shockingly is like, we 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 Jack Sharrock, who was the president of France at
the time. Recently so something and they didn't give it

(01:28:45):
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 uh nuclear plant, and now
you arrested my wife. So they were just trying to
steal stuff from the plant. But okay, well whatever, but yeah,

(01:29:09):
like you arrested my wife and now I'm on a
series of terrorisms to get my wife. Is it personal
or was he actually planning on blowing those things up anyway?
And he's just using it a justification because if it
really is about his wife. It might be one of
the only he's done. Yeah. So he bought blows this plant,

(01:29:30):
this train up that the President of France is supposed
to be on, and he kills five passengers, he injured thirty.
The next year he bombs two more French trains. Is
payback for a French bombing of Lebanese training camps. Okay,
so moved from and for like yeah, for more than
a decade, Carlos the Jackal. You know, it was like
the most famous terrorist on earth, the inspired movies and
a lot of villains and now forgotten TV action dramas. Um.

(01:29:52):
But yeah, in Prague, his drinking and his whurring in
his increasingly unfocused attacks on civilian targets started to get
like on the nerves of the power wars to be
And in nineteen eighty six check 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

(01:30:16):
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 he's this is like in there's a reason
he's famous, Like he wasn't bad 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

(01:30:37):
how to explain to you, uh, and kind of retired
for a while. UM. France was content to give up
on catching him, but in nineteen nineties, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Uh that didn't work out great. And you know, once
he was licking his wounds and angry in America, he
reached out to fame terrorist Carlos the Jackal and was like,
what have you did some terrorism on America? UM and

(01:30:59):
Carlos I don't think really got around to it. But Uh,
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 we're 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

(01:31:20):
Carlos immediately didn't. If you're if you're down to Sudan,
that's your that's your last place. Um. And he wore
his welcome out there basically instantly because again you got kicked. Yeah,
all of the drinking and whorring and then like a
pretty fundamental Yeah, he just couldn't stop drinking and whoring.

(01:31:41):
So Sudan gives him up an extradit. Sudan extradites him
to France. God damn ship uh in August of nineteen
ninety four o nine. He had a good run, he
had a asked run. But that also explains why there's

(01:32:02):
very few communist countries that he could. Yeah. Yeah, that
was a pretty fucking good run. Uh, pretty fucking good
run of being the most wanted man in the world. Um.
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. Um, he's still alive. He still gives interviews

(01:32:26):
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. Um. Hell,
have the thing to brag about. He also bragged in court,
I have been a professional revolutionary since I was a teenager.

(01:32:47):
WHI was a little bit of a little bit of
an exaggeration, but not all that much um insofar as
being trained by private tutors makes you a profession Also
in the way of like in age, he is profoundly
a boomer at this point, and his teenagerhood versus his
thirties are all very far away from him. She doesn't

(01:33:10):
really matter. He was a professional revolutionary as a teenager
in the same way that the current president was a
businessman as a teenager. His dad gave him a whole
bunch of ship. He didn't have to work. But unlike
the current president, he did become a self made man.
He and he did it by shooting people right in

(01:33:32):
their faces and making bombs and making bombs and running
from the police for like decades. So you know, uh.
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 his philosophy
on life. I like good food, I like to drink,
and I like good cigars. I like to sleep in

(01:33:53):
a comfortable bed which has just been made. I like
to wear good shoes. I like to play cards, poker,
and blackjack. Also like parties a dancers. But I'm against possessions.
What I possess belongs to others as much as to me.
So that's that's his That's that's we describes himself. I'm
just gonna put it up there. That's like a luxury

(01:34:14):
communists 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 to and after they
go off, no one has anything. Yeah. Look like this
department that you own is also very soon going to
be lots of other people's apartments. This is how we

(01:34:35):
spread Marxism. Carlos. Yeah, so he's a there's a fun story. Yeah.
I like this, honestly. I like this one more than
the one where all of those Japanese college students co
murdered each other on the mountain. So yeah, that's the

(01:34:59):
story of Carlos the Jackal. Everybody learned something good. I
sure did. I learned that everybody gets the plane. Everybody
gets everybody the first no matter how badly your terrorism goes,
you get plane. No matter what happens, you get a plane.
Were you were you trying to blow up some planes unsuccessfully?

(01:35:19):
Let's give you a plane to make me 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
was easily my favorite. Uh so, yeah, you gotta got
Um we're on Twitter and Instagram and medium at Curtist.

(01:35:45):
You can find things that you write and pictures that
you take and random things that we post on all
of those. And you know, if you find yourself in
the streets of Portland's getting repeated tear gas and shot
the impact munitions by law enforcement, um, come say hi. Yeah,

(01:36:06):
well we'll we'll say you should not be here, there's
tear gas or something along those and you'll say what
because it'll sound like because yeah, it will be a
good time for everybody, all right, godspeed, h