SIX

The Renegade Revolutionary
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Stars are very bad at following instructions. You have not followed my instructions. There is no room for stars in my operational teams. You can go.

–Wadi Haddad to Carlos

In January 1976 Duane R. Clarridge, CIA deputy director of the Near East Division for Arab Operations, flew into Athens. The Central Intelligence Agency, concerned that the Lebanese civil war meant the wives and children of officers stationed in Beirut were at risk, had moved the dependents out of Lebanon to live in hotels in the Greek capital. The wives, all in their early thirties, refused to believe they had been in any danger, and bitterly resented the agency's decision. The official purpose of Clarridge's trip was to try to placate them. Clarridge heard the women out but, much as he sympathised with them, his thoughts kept turning to the other reason for his journey out of Langley.

The CIA had begun to take an interest in Carlos in 1974, when its newly reinforced station in Beirut heard of his reputation as a promising recruit of the extremist Popular Front based in the Lebanese capital. Vague reports had also reached the CIA's Beirut station that the Soviet Union supported Haddad's Popular Front. Indeed, in May 1975, KGB chief Yuri Andropov had described Haddad as an ‘authorised correspondent of the espionage services of the KGB’.1

Although it had no record of an attack by Carlos on American interests, the CIA decided ‘to operate against him’, in Clarridge's euphemistic phrase, as he was perceived to be a terrorist threat.² After the Rue Toullier killings, the Americans consulted the DST. Relations between the two secret services, however, were cool and the French made it clear that they were uninterested in cooperation.

‘After the Vienna business, Carlos put people's teeth on edge,’ Clarridge commented years later. ‘Carlos made the secret services of the democratic world look inept and ridiculous. Even though the prestige of the agency was not on the line, Carlos's activities were still of concern because they involved issues that were of interest to the agency such as the Palestinian question. So we began to look at what was possible.’³ The card that the agency held was an acquaintance of Carlos. The real purpose of Clarridge's journey to Athens was to play that card.

The view of the Acropolis bathed in moonlight was small compensation for the winter chill which Clarridge had chosen to endure in the rooftop bar of his Athens hotel. But Clarridge was anxious to ensure complete privacy for this particular encounter, and the cold guaranteed that no one would join him and his guest. The potential agent, recruited by a CIA Beirut case officer and whose name has not been revealed, soon arrived. Clarridge knew little about his guest – a good-looking, well-educated and left-wing European who spoke fluent English – but he knew that he had the potential to reach, and deliver Carlos. ‘If Carlos is killed in the process, so be it,’ a senior clandestine service officer at CIA headquarters had told Clarridge before he set out.

As Clarridge gently probed, the agent spoke about Carlos, describing him as a mercurial and charismatic character. The agent slowly explained what had made him offer to work for the CIA. ‘He claimed to be fed up with the terrorists, their unpredictability and their paranoia, but I rather thought his real motivation was money,’ Clarridge recalled. ‘I liked that better; ideological conversions can be temporary. His access was promising, but hardly sure. All in all, the situation looked like a go, so I got down to it. When I finished, the agent said he understood perfectly and would do his best.’⁴ The following month President Ford banned US government agencies from carrying out assassinations in Executive Order 11905. In his autobiography, which was published after being approved by the CIA's Publications Review Board, Clarridge wrote that what he asked of the agent was not in violation of Executive Order 11905.

In fact, the agent was told that the CIA's preference was for an advance tip-off when the Venezuelan next travelled to France, Britain or West Germany. But he was also promised that if he could arrange for Carlos to be killed, or do it himself, he would be paid $10,000. ‘I suspect that the agent didn't have the courage to pull the trigger himself,’ Clarridge explained. ‘What's more, he had no back-up, he was alone. His opportunity to get at Carlos was very limited and if it had happened, it would have been a stroke of luck. We thought Carlos was in Beirut or a neighbouring country at the time, and we saw no evidence that he was roaming around Europe. After Vienna he stayed very close to his Palestinian colleagues. The agent could never arrange to see him again.’5

Vienna had made Carlos. Or rather, it had made the ‘Carlos the Jackal’ myth. Carlos himself played no small part in the myth's crafting. In a career where discretion is often the better part of valour, Carlos went to inordinate lengths to write his name all over the OPEC saga. Again and again he made his identity clear, and it was of course the letter to his mother given to Hernandez Acosta which, although ignored by the French, gave Scotland Yard proof that the hostage-taker was indeed Carlos.

Overnight Carlos turned into an icon of terrorism. The OPEC raid spawned hours of television and thousands of newspaper articles across the globe. The media coverage which Carlos's shooting of the DST officers had prompted paled in comparison. L'Aurore, whose offices he had bombed, marvelled at this ‘mocking, shrewd, and exhibitionist character who scoffs at borders and Western police forces with insulting cynicism’.

From then on the name ‘Carlos the Jackal’ became a label which the world's press slapped on to the latest outrage, however poorly it stuck. In March 1976, just two months after Vienna, the Egyptian weekly Al Mussawar reported that Libya now had a new leader, Carlos. In May newspapers speculated that it was Carlos who had assassinated the Bolivian ambassador on a busy Paris street. Again in May 1976 he was rumoured to have blown himself up at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport, together with a woman security officer. Carlos was reported arrested, almost arrested and dead several times.

In the aftermath of Vienna, Carlos started to believe in the image forged by the newspapers. He demanded that friends translate the articles about him that he did not understand. Whether or not he had read Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal before it was found near his London arms cache, he had done so by this time and would often compare himself to its assassin.

Worldwide notoriety was not all Carlos achieved in Vienna. He later assured Klein that he had decided not to kill the ministers, and to halt the operation, after the Algerian government promised him money and protection: ‘The Popular Front couldn't protect me if the Saudis and the Iranians went after me.’6 Years later, Carlos put the ransom at $50 million and explained that it was paid by the Saudis in their name and on Iran's behalf. But he denied pocketing the sum: it was ‘diverted en route and lost by the Revolution’.⁷ Had he taken one cent, he insisted to one of his lawyers, he would have signed his own death warrant.

Bassam Abu-Sharif confirmed that Carlos received a very large amount of money, and Klein quoted Carlos as admitting as much almost openly: ‘And he put all this money in a safe place in Algeria. For him, not for the group. In the world of terrorism, manipulation was permanent. You never knew who was pulling the strings. Manipulation was there all right, you could feel it, if only with those huge sums of money which were spent on such operations. It meant hundreds of thousands of dollars.’⁸

Who had manipulated Carlos? Klein indicated that the commission for the Vienna raid came from ‘an Arab President’, but he would not say which one. ‘All our information on the conference and the security measures came from that country which was part of OPEC and which was present at the conference,’ Klein revealed.⁹ Western intelligence services are convinced that Libya, possibly aided by Iraq, sponsored the OPEC raid. Libya wanted to impose its policy towards Israel on the Arab world, and Iraq had been angered by Saudi Arabian opposition to oil price increases. Of all the organisation's members, the two countries – both patrons of the Popular Front – were the most implacable foes of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Carlos himself has refused to point the finger, but he was still castigating Libya some time afterwards for failing to supply at Tripoli airport the long-haul airliner with which to fly on to Baghdad, a decision which he said showed that Libya was ready for a bloodbath as the lives of the hostages were at stake.¹⁰ Years later, an accomplice of Carlos confirmed the view that Colonel Hu'ammar Qathafi had commissioned the attack, promising Carlos an annual payment of $1 million as a reward.¹¹

While the world wondered where Carlos had vanished to after his theatrical exit from the Algiers airport, Austria assumed that he was still in Algeria and filed a request for his extradition. But the Austrian ambassador to Algiers was courteously informed that there was no extradition treaty between the two countries and that therefore, for legal reasons, the request could not be granted. Austria's demand was a move which France conspicuously failed to imitate although it had material proof (Carlos's letter to his mother) that he had led the OPEC raid. Seeking Carlos's arrest, France reasoned, would only offend its former North African colony, and rake up embarrassing memories of the Rue Toullier carnage. Better to let sleeping dogs – and jackals – lie.

Algerian President Houari Boumedienne was thus free to take Carlos under his wing. ‘When the Algerians offered us political asylum in exchange for the hostages, we accepted,’ Carlos explained. ‘The attitude of Algeria was loyal and honourable.’12 The head of state treated Carlos to pampered hospitality in a sprawling villa with a superb view of Algiers which had once welcomed the Viet-Minh commander-in-chief General Giap. Boumedienne also provided Carlos with bodyguards.

Carlos stayed at least a dozen days in the villa to give Klein, whom he visited in hospital, time to recover. During his stay his social agenda included several lunches with Bouteflika, the Foreign Minister who had embraced Carlos as he got off the plane, as well as dinners with the head of the secret service and the chief of police. When Klein was well enough to leave hospital, the chief of police surprised the left-wing guerrilla by singing the praises of his late countryman, Adolf Hitler.

Three weeks after Vienna, Carlos and the recovered Klein flew to Libya. As they stepped off the plane the pair were greeted by a television camera crew sent by the state broadcasting network to record their arrival.

According to French intelligence, Colonel Qathafi footed the bill for Carlos's stay in Algiers. After a round of official encounters, par for the course in a country that funded and trained a host of Arab and non-Arab guerrilla groups, the colonel put a private plane at the disposal of Carlos and Klein to fly them to a Popular Front meeting in the South Yemen capital of Aden on 10 February.¹³ Qathafi's failure to arrest Carlos helped to earn Libya a place on Washington's blacklist of states that sponsor terrorism. Qathafi responded to the blacklisting by blithely allowing Carlos to make at least two other visits to Libya later in the year.

The Aden meeting in mid-February, a post-mortem on the Vienna operation, was a sobering experience for Carlos. The protagonists assembled before Wadi Haddad, Carlos's mentor, who had settled in South Yemen, a Marxist-Leninist oasis, two years earlier. Haddad's presence throughout the debriefing, which dragged on over several days, was an unsettling one. He remained icily silent virtually throughout, taking copious notes. The review turned into recrimination and bickering as the participants in the Vienna operation fought to justify themselves in the eyes of their master.

Carlos and Kröcher-Tiedemann sharply rebuked Klein for doing nothing to stop the Iraqi security guard fleeing. They accused him of taking too long to neutralise the switchboard, and of not being aggressive enough in repelling the Austrian Special Command unit. Klein protested that the Iraqi had been on his way out and that his hands were in the air. There had been plenty of other things to do, and having one fewer person to look after was fine by him. But none of this satisfied Carlos and Kröcher-Tiedemann, who returned to the attack. Klein had put them in danger, because Kröcher-Tiedemann was forced to catch up with the Iraqi herself when he neglected to do so. But despite his efforts to single out Klein for censure Carlos did not escape Haddad's inquisition. Again and again he was ordered to relive the events that led to the cancellation of the planned tour of Middle Eastern capitals, and the failure to kill Yamani and Amouzegar.

Carlos's unit waited nervously for Haddad's judgement. In the days that followed the stormy post-mortem, Carlos and Klein were assigned to a Popular Front training camp near what had once been the palatial home of the former British governor in Aden. There the Vienna veterans sat in on courses in military theory. Target and explosives practice was carried out in the desert.

Like the subject matter, the pupils from various radical groups were a potentially fiery mixture: they included Marxists and Christian Phalange militiamen from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Prudently, Haddad had ordered that guerrillas needed permission to speak to classmates from other movements. The atmosphere was hardly improved by the test imposed on candidates for the suicide squad. They had to go about their daily business with a grenade in one hand and a machine-gun in the other, both of which they were forbidden to put down for up to three weeks at a stretch.

Not surprisingly, after the excitement of Vienna, Carlos and Klein found the training camp boring. To while away the time as much as to keep fit, Klein went jogging in the desert. After courses, the pair drank and danced in Aden's nightclubs where Carlos spent lavishly. The ‘jet-set terrorist’, as the cash-strapped Klein called him, became friendly with officers of the Stasi (the East German secret police) who were stationed in Aden. Late at night, to refresh themselves after their carousing, the pair would go for a swim in Diplomats’ Bay, one of Aden's few beaches that sharks did not visit.

Klein's six months with Carlos gave him plenty of opportunity to study the man at close quarters. Vanity, Klein concluded, was one of Carlos's chief characteristics. A wanted poster in West Germany hurt Carlos's pride so much that he considered writing to the authorities to lodge a protest: the price on his head was the same as that for other guerrillas, and Carlos considered this a personal affront.14 The Venezuelan frequently treated himself to pedicures and manicures, and flushed crimson when Klein pulled his leg about his ceaseless washing and showering. For Klein, he was ‘incredibly anal’:

Carlos was very interested in his appearance. When he went into the bathroom he stayed there an hour and a half at the very least. He always put talcum powder on from head to foot, like babies. He literally drenched himself with perfume. When he came out of the bathroom, there was enough of a smell to make the flies fall off the wall. There was a discussion once. As his face was becoming too well known, the idea of plastic surgery in Switzerland was suggested. But his only concern was that he had breasts which were rather developed, like a fourteen-year-old girl, and the only thing that interested him was to know whether they could be operated on. When we went bathing, he always kept his T-shirt on.¹⁵

Haddad's verdict was that Carlos had disobeyed orders by failing to shoot any of the Oil Ministers, and by negotiating their release in exchange for a ransom (which was shared with Haddad) and safe passage. The political rationale for the kidnappings had been sacrificed on the altar of Mammon, with an incomprehensible Austrian radio broadcast in French the only public justification. Haddad excommunicated his pupil with the words: ‘Stars are very bad at following instructions. You have not followed my instructions. There is no room for stars in my operational teams. You can go.’¹⁶

In later years Carlos related that he had resigned from the Popular Front of his own free will and that his Palestinian comrades had wept at the prospect of losing him.17 The truth was he was sacked. Greed and indiscipline were to blame.

Haddad allowed Carlos to keep his expulsion secret, giving him time to reflect on what to do now that he no longer had an organisation to support him. An embittered Carlos railed at the incompetence of the Popular Front. ‘I won't go on with them, my brand image suffers from it too much,’ Carlos burst out to Klein.

For Klein, Carlos's only purpose was to forge a brand image that would be tied to his name, like the Jackal. He was in the business of selling not soapsuds, however, but terror. ‘Carlos would say: “The more they write about me, the more they say that I am dangerous, the less difficulty I will have the day I have a real problem,”’ Klein recalled. ‘He had a theory of massacre. He would say: “The more the acts of violence I commit are terrible, the more I will be respected and people will lay off me. For example, if I get caught in France, they will expel me discreetly, out of fear of reprisals.” This reputation, it was his security.’¹⁸

Carlos's favourite topic of conversation was not politics but his future career. He shunned political discussions even with Palestinians. The ideological legacy of his father had been watered down: ‘Carlos inspires himself from what Ho Chi Minh says: “Bring revolution to each country.” So he goes from one country to another trying to start things up ... He did not like [Communists], he thought they were corrupt. He did not define himself as a Marxist, but rather as an international revolutionary, a bit like Che Guevara.’¹⁹

It took time for Carlos to decide what path to take. Still smarting from Haddad's sharp words, he left the Aden camp briefly to call without warning at Abu-Sharif s home in Beirut. ‘He looked terrible. I had never seen him looking so devastated,’ Abu-Sharif related. ‘He told me he was going to strike out on his own, set up his own direct action group, maybe in South America where there were plenty of fascists who needed sorting out, but I knew it would never work. It takes a mastermind to run that kind of operation and the man before me was no mastermind, he was an executioner. And for once he had failed to execute.’²⁰

Carlos's dismissal remained a secret for several months, which partly explains why press reports placed him in Uganda in July 1976 when an Air France Airbus was hijacked to the East African country's Entebbe airport. Carlos was in fact still at the camp in Aden. He was reduced to following events on the radio, knowing that his failure to play any part in them was a testimony to his cool relations with Haddad. Within hours of the hijack, newspapers speculated that Carlos was leading the operation. But the passengers were in the hands of his friend Wilfried Böse, and what the latter named the Che Guevara Force of the Commando of the Palestine Liberation Forces.

News that Böse, who had chosen the Airbus because ‘Air France is easier than El Al’,21 had segregated Israeli passport-holders from the other passengers made Carlos angry. Carlos's fury was a rare display of solidarity with Jews. In fact Haddad's orders to Böse, overheard by Israelis bugging his telephone, had been to kill the Jewish hostages whether or not the hijackers’ demands were met.

A few days later paratroopers of the Israeli Defence Forces shot their way into the Entebbe airport building where the 106 Jewish hostages were held. As the troops burst in, Böse made to throw a grenade at the hostages but then changed his mind. He barely had time to urge the hostages to duck and fire a few shots at his attackers before he was cut down in a hail of bullets. Böse died within forty-five seconds of the start of Operation Thunderbolt during which the Israelis, incensed by President Idi Amin's welcome to the hijackers, destroyed eleven Soviet-made MiG jets parked on the tarmac. The leader of the Israeli forces, Lieutenant-Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu (the elder brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), was killed by a Ugandan soldier who shot him in the back. Carlos expressed admiration at the Israeli coup. He's a kind of Jekyll and Hyde, thought Klein.²²

Since Palestinian movements had excellent relations with Belgrade, a holiday in Yugoslavia seemed a good idea. Carlos, accompanied by Klein, spent a pleasant three weeks in Yugoslavia, enjoying the late summer weather as they toured the country in September 1976. Carlos particularly appreciated the Brioni Islands, probably unaware that he was following in the footsteps of the European aristocracy and, in more recent times, of Marshal Tito who had ordered a luxurious villa to be built on the small Adriatic archipelago where he used to entertain visiting dignitaries in style.

West German intelligence found out about Carlos's visit to Yugoslavia, and notified its Belgrade counterpart, the National Security Council. The West Germans insisted that he be arrested and extradited to Bonn forthwith. Carlos, who had been travelling under a false name on an Algerian diplomatic passport, was arrested and taken to a hurriedly prepared prison that consisted of an entire floor of the federal police barracks at 34 Sarajevska Street in Belgrade.

Carlos's jailer was the commander of the federal police corps, Slovenian Pavle Celik, a tall, fresh-faced sociology graduate in his mid-thirties, who had been given only a day to prepare the prison: ‘I did not know who was due to arrive. I was only told that the person would be held until his trial, that he was a very wanted individual and very dangerous, an enemy of the state.’23 It was only through friends that Celik found out that the moustachioed foreigner who was ushered under heavy escort into the makeshift prison was Carlos. He was accompanied by Klein and another bodyguard. Carlos did not appear to be particularly flustered. Celik found him ‘extremely calm, which is not surprising given his line of work’.²⁴

After four days, during which Carlos was honoured with a visit from Interior Minister Franjo Herljevic, Marshal Tito ordered his release. The presence of Carlos in Belgrade during an impending visit by the French President, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, was a potential embarrassment for the Yugoslavs. Belgrade fended off strong rebukes from both Bonn and Washington, replying ingenuously that its checks had thrown up no indication that Carlos had passed through Yugoslavia. ‘It was a political decision, taken at the apex of the Yugoslav leadership,’ Celik related. ‘As a policeman, I obeyed ... It was the time of the Cold War. It was logical that the socialist countries gave asylum to the terrorists who were, in a way, undermining capitalist regimes. Yugoslavia wanted to stay neutral ... We benefited from his release because there were no terrorist actions against Yugoslavia.’²⁵

Carlos and Klein were told that they would be put on the next plane for the Iraqi capital Baghdad which would first, for an unexplained reason, stop at Damascus. They were bundled into a car, and Carlos broke into a cold sweat as, rifling through the directory of international flights that he had with him, he could find no such flight. His fears that he and Klein might be bound for another destination proved unfounded. But at Damascus airport the Syrians refused the plane permission to take off again. Neither Carlos nor Klein was armed. ‘When we go out, they will shoot us,’ Carlos told his companion. A group of men describing themselves as cleaning staff, but whose bulging pockets betrayed them as members of the security forces, tried to enter the plane. However, the pilot insisted that they respect the principle of the cabin's extra-territoriality. ‘Carlos armed himself with an axe, the kind you find in planes,’ Klein recalled. ‘He was more and more overcome by fear; it was the first time I saw him scared. I was scared too.’26

After some five hours of negotiations, during which the ‘cleaners’ unscrewed the wheels of the plane to prevent it taking off, Yugoslav diplomats to whom Carlos had appealed put pressure on the Syrians and the plane was allowed to leave. Carlos and Klein finally arrived in Baghdad where they were put up free of charge, and provided with bodyguards and a chauffeured American limousine.²⁷

The two Vienna veterans spent only a few weeks in Iraq. The fact that Saudi Arabia had put a million-dollar price on Carlos's head, and the incident at Damascus airport, highlighted his precarious situation. He chose to settle in a country he knew would not betray him, South Yemen. In a further guarantee of his security, Carlos enjoyed the protection of Libyan Colonel Qathafi, who supplied South Yemen's rulers with the money to meet Carlos's expenses. Inevitably, given his experience and notoriety, Carlos soon found himself acting as an instructor to several of the myriad radical groups training in Aden.²⁸

But Carlos's ambitions stretched far beyond teaching would-be guerrillas. As he had revealed to a sceptical Bassam Abu-Sharif of the Popular Front in Beirut, he was intent on setting up his own organisation. But Carlos was unsure where to do so: in South America, the Middle East or elsewhere. And while he had recently established some influential contacts in Algeria, Libya and Iraq, he presently lacked both the recruits and the steady source of funding that were necessary for such an organisation.

Carlos, however, was quick to pick his right-hand man. Unashamedly rekindling links established by Haddad, Carlos again looked to West Germany's Revolutionary Cells. As Böse had been shot dead during the Entebbe hijack, the man whom Carlos sent for was Johannes Weinrich, who had helped him carry out the first rocket attack on the El Al plane at Orly airport. Some two months after the Orly operation Weinrich had been arrested in Frankfurt and charged with hiring the cars used at the time. After eight months in custody he had jumped bail, which he had obtained on health grounds, and was now on the run. Weinrich accepted Carlos's offer, and was assigned the job of recruiting Hans-Joachim Klein.

During the months that he had spent at Carlos's side Klein had concealed his growing misgivings about the use of violence. Klein's doubts had caused a furious argument with Carlos on the eve of the Vienna raid, and Klein was wary of provoking another outburst. When Weinrich arrived at the chalet in the Italian Alps where Klein had sought refuge, the discussion was rowdy. Klein realised that his days were numbered. He defected from the Popular Front, rejected guerrilla violence in general, and fled to Milan. He sent a letter and his gun to the magazine Der Spiegel in April 1977, at the same time revealing plans for the murder by the Revolutionary Cells of two members of Germany's Jewish community. He then went into hiding: ‘If my people get me, they'll kill me. If police get to me, I go to jail. Who knows, maybe for ever.’29 Whatever Carlos's feelings towards Klein, he kept them to himself. Years later he refused to answer questions from German investigators on Klein's role in the Vienna raid.³⁰

Klein's defection was a blow for Carlos. A close associate had not only declined to join his new organisation, but had actually switched sides. At this point Carlos appears to have taken a rest from the complexities of Middle Eastern politics, and the searing summer heat of the Arabian Peninsula, to visit Latin America. He travelled to Colombia to explore the possibility of following in his ancestors’ revolutionary footsteps across Latin America. But Carlos decided this was not fertile territory for him, and he returned to the Middle East. As he continued to search for a new role, Haddad and the Popular Front struggled with a confused strategy. Neither the Vienna hostage-taking nor the Entebbe hijack could be viewed as successful operations. Haddad, however, refused to believe that he was losing his touch and began to plan for a repeat hijack. Carlos, who had by then returned to Aden, was again sidelined.

Instead, Souhalia Andrawes was among the four selected to erase the Entebbe humiliation by hijacking, on 13 October 1977, a day after Carlos's twenty-eighth birthday, a Lufthansa Boeing 737 bound for Somalia. Eighty-six passengers were taken hostage, their hijackers demanding the release of Palestinian and Baader-Meinhof guerrillas, and a ransom of $15 million.

For five days the plane's Captain Juergen Schumann was forced to follow the hijacker's orders, touching down in Italy, Cyprus, Bahrain, Dubai and South Yemen. The passengers were told to sit strapped into their seats, and were doused with kerosene, perfume and spirits from the bar as their captors threatened to set them alight. The hostages remember Andrawes as a fury, screaming at them continuously, with grenades held ready in her hands, the pins linked to rings on her fingers by a thin cord.

In South Yemen, the crazed leader of the hijackers, Mahmoud, castigated Captain Schumann for talking to officials at the airport outside Aden. With the pilot forced to his knees in front of him in the central aisle, Mahmoud insisted despite Schumann's denials that he had tried to flee. ‘Guilty or not guilty?’ the hijacker shrieked. Moments later, he pushed his gun into Schumann's mouth and pulled the trigger. Andrawes burst out laughing. ‘Most mothers had just enough time to cover their children's eyes, then the captain toppled over, dead,’ recounted one passenger. ‘They left him lying there in front of us. We had to climb over his body to get water or go to the lavatory.’ Captain Schumann's body was eventually thrown out of the plane on to the tarmac below.31

After the co-pilot had flown the plane to Mogadishu in Somalia, and ninety minutes short of a deadline set by the hijackers, an attack was launched by Green Berets of the West German GSG-9, a commando unit set up in the wake of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games fiasco. Blinded like everyone else in the plane by magnesium-based stun grenades supplied by two British SAS officers, Andrawes barely had time to seek refuge in the toilet. She fired through the door at her pursuers. The shots fired in retaliation turned the door into a colander. Seven bullets hit Andrawes in the shoulder and legs before she fell to the floor. Blood covered the portrait of Che Guevara on her T-shirt. As she was carried away on a stretcher moaning in pain, Andrawes still found the strength to make a victory sign and to shout: ‘The Arabs will win!’ and ‘Palestine!’ She was the only hijacker to survive.

Haddad's new failure made it clearer than ever to Carlos that it was time to press ahead with his own plans. The violent response of Israeli and West German authorities to the Entebbe and Mogadishu hijacks suggested that Haddad's tactics needed refining. Escorted by Libyan intelligence officers, Carlos travelled to Baghdad in December 1977. According to French intelligence, Carlos met President Saddam Hussein during this visit.³² Iraq was among the first Arab countries to offer Carlos support, with the blessing of the KGB-trained members of Iraq's most powerful secret service, the Al Mukharabat.

Mogadishu was Haddad's last hijack. Carlos's erstwhile mentor, aged only forty-nine, died an enigmatic death in March 1978 – officially of leukaemia in an East Berlin clinic, but rumours abounded that he was poisoned, perhaps by the Iraqis. His partner Habash mourned him as a martyr: ‘Wadi was far from being a terrorist. He was a sensitive person, from whom the sight of suffering children would wring tears ... Wadi was a revolutionary and a humanist who hated evil. His role, among us, is equal to that of a Che Guevara.’33

Carlos would no doubt also have agreed with the tribute paid by another former student of Haddad's, Japanese Red Army leader Shigenobu Fusako: ‘He gave extreme care to each detail. He was a maniac for the most absolute secrecy. With him, the least risk of error was eliminated. He duped many secret services, especially the Mossad. He still remains today, even after his death, our master and our model.’³⁴

Haddad's death acted as a catalyst for Carlos. It rid him of a powerful competitor for the favours of Middle Eastern states, released several combatants whose first loyalty had been to Haddad, and triggered Carlos's emergence as the leader of a private army for hire which broke free of Palestinian shackles. With the master safely dead and buried, Carlos borrowed the name for his new group — Organisation of Arab Armed Struggle — from the man he had slain in Paris three years earlier, Michel Moukharbal. The Popular Front newspaper Al Hadaf, in an article following Moukharbal's death, had made the first public mention of the name.

In order to attract patrons who would be ready to pay for violent acts to be committed on their behalf, Carlos needed to build a professional force capable of carrying out bombings, assassinations and kidnappings. His ambition was to serve more than one master at any one time, and for that reason his organisation must also be capable of carrying out simultaneous operations in the same or different countries. Each mission would involve careful planning based on detailed surveillance of the objective, to be carried out by a large number of associates boasting a variety of different skills.

Carlos needed not only a core of close subordinates dedicated to the cause but also an international network of ‘sleeper’ agents who could be activated at short notice to carry out specific missions: watching selected targets for weeks on end, transporting explosives and weapons across borders, or providing safe houses. Carlos's organisation would also have to rely on associates who were not fully-fledged members, but who would keep the group supplied with false identity papers, intelligence on its enemies, and help transfer funds when necessary.

The men and women who swore allegiance to Carlos in the wake of Haddad's death made up a cosmopolitan group. They included Syrian, Lebanese, West German and Swiss radicals. The core of Carlos's organisation, which was permanently under his orders, was drawn from West Germany's Revolutionary Cells, whose members he had already recruited for several of his earlier attacks. Carlos also secured the allegiance of Ali Al Issawe alias Abu Hakam, a Syrian intelligence officer.

One contribution Weinrich made was the girlfriend he had fallen in love with when his attempt at married life with an American ended. Weinrich met Magdalena Kopp, the daughter of a post-office worker, when she worked in his Red Star bookshop after studying photography in West Berlin had failed to get her a job. Kopp was married at the time, and she had a young daughter who was being raised by her parents. But Kopp's relationship with Weinrich led her to divorce her husband and she joined the Revolutionary Cells in the early 1970s, where she soon earned a reputation as an expert forger.

After Weinrich told him about Kopp, Carlos asked to meet her and she flew out to Algiers where Carlos was staying at the time. He was entranced by the fragile-looking redhead with moist eyes and a finely chiselled face, who was just a year younger than him. Carlos felt no scruples in pursuing Kopp despite her relationship with Weinrich.35 Kopp found Carlos smarmy at first. But when he later turned up outside her hotel room with a bottle of wine, Carlos's advances were successful and the two spent the night together. Carlos rose in her esteem: ‘He was a real seducer. Very charming. He knew just how to woo a woman.’³⁶ Carlos's partnership with Weinrich did not suffer, however. As Kopp drily observed, ‘What else could Weinrich have done? Where could he have gone?’³⁷ In the years to come, Carlos had no qualms about entrusting Kopp to Weinrich's care whenever he travelled abroad.

The core of his team established within months of Haddad's dying, and with the backing of several Arab states, Carlos began to seek support across Eastern Europe. In this he was, yet again, following the example set by his deceased guardian.

At about the same time that the CIA commissioned an agent to do its dirty work, the French secret service also set out on Carlos's trail. The manhunt by the SDECE's Action Service, France's clandestine operations unit, was initiated in the late 1970s by President Giscard d'Estaing who ordered the unit to intercept Carlos when he next passed through France or Europe.

At the SDECE headquarters in a grimy neighbourhood of north-east Paris beyond the Père Lachaise cemetery, the brief was handed to a young and brilliant graduate of the Saint-Cyr military academy thirteen years Carlos's senior, Philippe Rondot. The Action Service chief, Count Alain de Gaigneron de Marolles, thought of Rondot as a French Lawrence of Arabia because of his impressive contacts across the Arab world. With impeccable Cartesian logic, Rondot began at the beginning: his quarry's origins in Latin America. His team, with some cooperation from friendly intelligence agencies, focused on Carlos's family, and on his parents in particular.

The letter to his mother, Elba, that Carlos had entrusted to the Venezuelan Oil Minister during the Vienna epic had signposted as publicly as possible the warmth of his filial affection. The SDECE also had reports that Carlos occasionally visited his parents. The French opted to exploit his love for his parents, and especially for Elba, as a potential flaw in his security.

An Action Service colonel settled in Colombia, and succeeded in befriending Elba who lived there, separated from her divorced husband Ramírez Navas and ill. In 1977 Carlos was spotted in a Colombian hotel restaurant, but the officer made the crass mistake of speaking in French with his companion. Carlos, who had been sitting at a nearby table, left the restaurant immediately. ‘Carlos was a very cautious guy. He had a feel for war, like warriors and hunters,’ acknowledged Count de Marolles, who had served with the battle-thirsty lléme Choc parachute commandos in both Indochina and Algeria. ‘When you go underground, only the anxious survive.‘38

Across the border in Venezuela, another Action Service officer struck up an acquaintance with Ramírez Navas in San Cristobal, winning the father's confidence by pretending to share his passion for cycling. According to a widely published report, Rondot travelled to the border ready, green light from Paris permitting, to have Ramírez Navas drink a concentrate of hepatitis A virus, to be topped up if necessary with an inoculation of the hepatitis B virus³⁹. With the father sick, Carlos would, according to this unlikely plan, rush to his bedside, be seized by the Action Service and flown to French Guiana or the West Indies in a small private plane. The go-ahead, the story concludes, was never granted and all the French intelligence officers were recalled.

There would be nothing extraordinary about an intelligence service using poison to eliminate a target, even though that tactic was more commonly associated with the KGB than Western services. For men of France's clandestine operations unit, one senior SDECE officer observed, ‘assassination is part of the daily routine. They dutifully carry out their orders and are proud of their skill, confident that it is equal to that of the Gestapo or the KGB.’40 As Rondot himself once observed in an essay on the secret services: ‘Special operations prolong diplomacy by other means. Certainly, one could allege that any special operation conducted by a Western democracy is illegal, anti-constitutional, immoral and unseemly.’⁴¹

However, had there been an order to assassinate Carlos, it would have had to come from the French President. Asked whether he granted the intelligence agency a licence to kill Carlos in what would have amounted to a ‘non-judicial execution’, Giscard's eyebrows shot up into his high domed forehead: ‘There was no question of shooting him down. The order was never given. The order was to identify him, to follow him, to become intimate with his family and thus to find out his movements and to intercept him when he came to Europe ... There was no plan for an operation over there. The officers did not suggest one to me. We respected international law and justice, we wanted to try him.’ But the former President confided: ‘If there had been an attack, if Carlos had been armed, things would have been different.’⁴²

Count de Marolles, who later headed SDECE intelligence but resigned from the service after fostering a failed coup against Colonel Qathafi in August 1980, ridiculed the idea that he or his men could have considered resorting to a virus: ‘It's literature. It was ethically unallowable for the service. The plan was to be present in all the places where the quarry might turn up, and we were.’⁴³ The Colombian hotel restaurant was the closest the French secret service got to Carlos in a very long time.

Giscard's order became a dead letter. According to the mistaken reports sent to the President by the secret service, Carlos had not returned to Europe by the time Giscard was voted out of office in May 1981. When Giscard handed over the presidency to Francois Mitterrand, he briefed the socialist victor about the mission to track Carlos down in Latin America:⁴⁴ ‘I told Mitterrand that this operation was under way when I was informing him about matters of presidential responsibility on which there were no documents and he said nothing, he expressed no interest. After the spring of 1981 the mission was ended. I don't know why.’45 Rondot however did not give up. In the words of former SDECE head Alexandre de Marenches, from then on ‘Rondot turned this into a personal matter.’