EIGHT

A Dirty, Private War
...............

The group is waging a dirty, private war with France until the day the prisoners are freed by combat.

–Weinrich, questioned on arrival in East Berlin with fifty-three
pounds of explosives

Carlos's private army had been operational for only a year and a half when he agreed to help stage an attack on French soil. In January 1982 he sealed an alliance with extremist Swiss environmentalists to enable them to strike at the Super-Phénix nuclear plant, then being built at Creys-Malville in central France. Until then, the unambitious Magdalena Kopp had played a minor role in her husband's organisation. But now she was assigned the task of supplying an RPG-7 rocket-launcher, a weapon which Carlos and Weinrich had used to no great effect against the El Al plane at Orly airport seven years earlier.

Fired from the other side of the River Rhône shortly before midnight on 18 January, five missiles hit the outer shell of the nuclear reactor. But they were not powerful enough to penetrate the metre-thick concrete casing, designed to hold even if a plane fell on it.1 Despite the insignificant damage caused, Kopp later numbered the mission as her proudest achievement. ‘The French had greatly deserved it because of their shit nuclear policy,’ she proclaimed.2 Carlos's wife was deemed to have proved herself.

Until then, Kopp's role had been limited to forging documents and helping Weinrich maintain good relations with European guerrilla movements such as the Basque ETA. A month after the attack on the nuclear reactor, Carlos sent her on a more difficult assignment. She was teamed with Bruno Bréguet, a recent Swiss recruit who combined the physique of a tall playboy with a long, mournful face. Bored with studying science at a lycée in Lugano, and infatuated by the legend of Che Guevara, Bréguet had left home at the age of nineteen in 1970 to travel to Lebanon and volunteer for the Popular Front — as Carlos had also done that same year. In June 1970, only a few weeks into his new career, Bréguet had disembarked at the port of Haifa with two kilos of explosives hidden under a heavy raincoat. He planned to blow up the Shalom Tower, a skyscraper in Tel Aviv. But he got no further than Israeli customs where officials thought he looked rather odd, wearing a raincoat despite the summer weather. ‘I agreed to carry explosives into Israel for $5000,’ he brazenly declared. But his luggage betrayed him: Soviet-made charges, German detonators, and brass tags bearing the initials ‘PFLP’.

Freedom for Bréguet was among the demands that Haddad made when the Popular Front hijacked several planes to Dawson's Field in Jordan in September 1970. But Israel refused to yield. A less violent approach succeeded where Haddad had failed. A pro- Nazi Swiss banker with radical Palestinian sympathies, François Genoud, called on Bréguet's parents when he heard of the arrest and resolved to help his compatriot ‘who had set out a bit like a boy scout. In an age in which so many young people are passionate about nothing, he had gone off to carry out, perhaps stupidly, something “interesting”.’ Genoud joined a humanitarian committee of the great and the good, alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Noam Chomsky and other intellectuals. As a result of this campaign the young Swiss militant – the first European sentenced in Israel for pro-Palestinian activities – was pardoned in 1977 after serving seven years of his fifteen-year sentence.

Acting on Carlos's orders, Kopp and Bréguet travelled from Budapest to Paris in February 1982, using false Austrian passports. But a thief stole Kopp's handbag which contained $50,000, her Austrian passport and two spare passports. Two days later, the pair were spotted in an underground car park close to the Champs-Elysées near a rundown Peugeot 504 which despite its age boasted new number plates. Security guards, intrigued by their behaviour and suspecting they might be thieves, demanded the car's papers.

The couple, who had no papers to show, were told to wait while one of the guards called the police. But Bréguet pulled out from under his jacket a 9mm Herstal GP35 automatic pistol of Belgian manufacture, ordered the guard to put the phone down, and then set off at a run with Kopp. Out in the street police caught up with Kopp and tripped her. Further ahead, Bréguet pointed his gun at a policeman and pressed the trigger. The gun jammed, and Bréguet was overpowered.

Among the woman's few belongings police found an envelope containing $2000. The gunman had two passports. ‘I am a soldier,’ he said in English to the policemen who handcuffed him. A search of the Peugeot was far more productive: four 500-gram packs of Pentrite explosives, an uncommon type at the time, two Czech grenades, an alarm clock set for half past ten that evening, a battery and electric wiring, as well as another GP35 pistol.

In the offices of the Brigade Criminelle at 36 Quai des Orfèvres on the River Seine the pair were unhelpful. Throughout hours of questioning they stuck to a single statement: ‘We are members of an international revolutionary organisation. We had no intention of harming French interests, nor of committing any action in this country.’

The French had no idea who the two revolutionaries were. They had soon discovered that the gunman's passports, in the name of Swiss national Henri Richoz and Frenchman Gilbert Durand, were both false. As for his partner — ‘so plain nobody would turn round to look at her in the street,’ one policeman said unkindly – she carried no identity papers, and there were none at her hotel either.

But with help from their colleagues at West Germany's Bundeskriminalamt police force, the French identified the pair and sketched out their backgrounds. Kopp's German file said she was wanted for supplying explosives to the Baader-Meinhof movement. Unknown to German police the file was out of date as it still had her down as Weinrich's girlfriend rather than Carlos's wife. Bréguet's shortened prison record also surfaced.

The Brigade Criminelle had little to go on. They found among Bréguet's possessions the address of a restaurant close to Paris's city hall, which counted mayor Jacques Chirac among its regulars. Perhaps the pair planned to blow up the restaurant. But no detonator was found in the car. Perhaps they were only delivering the equipment. The car was traced to its owner, Michel Jacquot, a Communist and an unemployed accountant with no background in terrorism. He shared a squat with a Corsican whom police thought might be a supporter of the separatists who bomb public buildings on the Mediterranean island.

It was a meagre harvest, and DST counter-espionage was partly to blame. The DST had known about Bréguet's presence in Paris thanks to a tip-off from West German intelligence, which had been monitoring his connections with West German and Palestinian extremists. French counter-espionage had also known about Bréguet's meetings with leftist militants in Paris, but it failed to pass on any of this either to police or to the investigating magistrate, Jean-Louis Debré. By default, it was left to Carlos to enlighten the Brigade Criminelle.

When the news of the arrests of Kopp and Bréguet reached him within twenty-four hours of their misfortune, Carlos was in Budapest where the pair had started their ill-fated journey. The news also reached Hungarian State Security Intelligence, and its officers told Carlos on the day after the arrests, 17 February, that this time he really must leave. The Hungarians feared that French investigators would sooner or later find out who the couple were, and uncover their links with Carlos and Budapest. Carlos promised to go, but yet again won a delay of a few weeks.

Carlos summoned Weinrich and four other members of the group, and after a few hours of discussions on 23 February wrote a letter in French, dated two days later. It had taken Carlos a week to respond to the arrests. Still convinced that his grenade attack on the Drugstore Saint-Germain in Paris had forced a government climbdown eight years earlier, Carlos was ready to repeat his performance for his wife:

His Exc. M. Gaston Defferre

Minister of State, Minister of the Interior and of Decentralisation.

I write to inform you:

Firstly: that two militants of our organisation, MAGDALENA CACILA KOPP and BRUNO BREGUET, have been arrested in Paris by the French security forces.

Secondly: that our militants were arrested during a mission which was not directed against France, following the orders of its [the organisation's] Leaders.

Thirdly: that our militants do not deserve prison as retribution to its [the organisation's] dedication to the Revolutionary Cause.

Fourthly: that our organisation does not abandon, ever, its militants.

On the decision of our Central Leadership, I give you the following warning:

1) We do not accept that our comrades stay in prison.

2) We do not tolerate that our comrades be extradited to any country.

We ask of you:

1) An immediate stop to the interrogation of our militants.

2) The release of our militants within thirty days of the date of this letter.

3) That our militants be released with all seized documents.

4) That our militants be allowed to travel together, on a regular flight to a country and by the route of his choice. As carriers of French passes.

We are not at war against socialist France and I pray you, in all sincerity, not to force us to be.

I assure you that the content of this letter is considered by us as a secret of the organisation. However, we do not have no interest that it be publicly known (sic).

We hope that this affair will end soon and in a happy way.

By the ORGANISATION OF ARAB ARMED STRUGGLE – ARM OF THE ARAB REVOLUTION.

Carlos

PS: Below the prints of my thumbs to identify this letter.

Carlos gave the letter to Christa-Margot Froelich, a former schoolteacher living in Hanover in West Germany who had been introduced to him, like Kopp, by Weinrich. A former member of the Red Army Faction and of the Revolutionary Cells, Froelich had joined Carlos's group the previous year. She travelled to Budapest to take the letter from Carlos, and dropped it off at the French embassy in The Hague during the night of 26 February, together with a covering letter to the ambassador.

Both texts carried the full official title of the addressee. The French ambassador to the Netherlands was termed ‘His Excellency M. Jean Jurgensen, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’. In spite of jargon and spelling mistakes, the letter to the French minister struck a self-assured tone – the Stasi branded it ‘conceited’. Few threats can have been couched so courteously. It was as if the thirty-two-year-old Carlos, sitting comfortably on the other side of Defferre's desk, were talking to him as an equal as they strove to resolve a delicate bureaucratic tangle.

The choice of the French embassy in The Hague was no coincidence. It was there that in September 1974 the Japanese Red Army, with Carlos's help, had taken eleven hostages, hoping to prise their accomplice Furuya out of jail. And Ambassador Jurgensen, whom Carlos addressed with such respect, had served in the same Second World War Resistance network as Defferre. Carlos's intelligence-gathering had operated efficiently.

Terrorism was slippery terrain for France's left-wing rulers. Ever since his election as the country's first socialist President in May 1981, François Mitterrand had been denounced by the right as being soft on crime. Western allies were also putting pressure on Mitterrand. Washington openly criticised the lack of progress in the investigation into the assassination that January of its deputy military attaché in Paris, Charles R. Ray. Italy accused the President of protecting members of the Red Brigades who had fled to France since his election. Defferre, known in his fiefdom of Marseille as ‘the godfather’ because of the iron hand with which he governed the city, had been appointed Interior Minister at the age of seventy-one to give the government a tougher image.

‘I pray you,’ Carlos had urbanely requested the French ambassador in The Hague, ‘to take personal charge of sending this letter for M. Gaston Defferre as soon as possible. It is urgent! I thank you for your cooperation.’ The ambassador obliged, and sent the letter straight to his former Resistance comrade. It was only later that he informed the Foreign Ministry of Carlos's threat through more orthodox channels.

With the police and secret service chiefs assembled before him, the Interior Minister blithely declared that he and Carlos had much in common. ‘Defferre told us that Carlos had singled him out as one of his peers because he had himself been a very efficient terrorist when he led a Resistance network in Provence during the Second World War,’ recalled Pierre Marion, then head of the SDECE intelligence service. ‘He said that because of his past he was the only member of the government fit to talk to Carlos. We all stared wide-eyed at Defferre. I told him that he couldn't start talks, he must hit back. He didn't like that at all. For him Carlos was a brother in arms. He said he wanted to meet Carlos alone, “man-to-man”.’3

Defferre's audience should have known better. That a government minister was ready to talk to a man most of France considered to be a terrorist was part and parcel of French political life. ‘The French will never shut a door without trying something out first,’ an MI6 officer reflected later. ‘As a government, as a culture, the French are much happier to improvise when the chance arises.’

The letter's implications were not lost on Defferre. ‘When you've received a letter like that, you don't need a second one to understand,’ the Interior Minister growled. Within a few hours of Defferre receiving the letter, an extra police officer had been assigned to ride with him in his official car, and more bodyguards followed in a separate car.

The DST unearthed the Rue Toullier file to check the fingerprints. The file left no room for doubt as to the letter's author. Defferre gave strict orders that the letter must not be divulged, not even to the unfortunate Judge Debre who was struggling to investigate the arrest of Kopp and Bréguet. But on 5 March the popular daily France-Soir splashed the letter's contents across the front page. Defferre was so furious that ‘he foamed at the mouth’, according to one senior official. ‘This is too serious,’ Defferre raged. ‘Carlos is a redoubtable man. His organisation exists. One can't fool around with this. Those who divulged the letter committed a very serious mistake. If tomorrow people are killed, they will be responsible.’ He made a list of possible moles, but the culprit was never found. Publication of the letter incensed Carlos as much as it did Defferre.

The reason that Defferre gave for his – public – display of anger was that the leak might encourage Carlos to turn violent. The real reason for the anger of both men was that the leak threatened to blow the cover off their gentlemanly efforts to resolve their differences through secret negotiation. On the French government's part, this amounted to a cloak-and-dagger attempt to turn the country into a sanctuary safe from terrorism, even at the cost of placating a guerrilla wanted for the murder of two DST officers.

Much as he had wanted to, Defferre never did get to meet Carlos for a ‘man-to-man’ encounter. Instead he had to make do with his envoy, Jacques Vergés, France's most provocative lawyer.

Born in Thailand in 1925, Vergés had moved to France and built his notoriety as ‘the devil's advocate’ on a willingness to defend the indefensible, and to do so with a radical slant. The more outrageous his stand the better. The lawyer wrote a book about his strategy, published in the near-revolutionary days of 1968, in which he described what he called the défense de rupture, a subversive defence tactic which denied all legitimacy to the opposing side, judged the judges, and challenged the political establishment. Threats were a feature of Vergés's advocacy.

There was much about Vergès that appealed to Carlos. In his youth a Stalinist student leader of the French Communist Party (Vergès's other heroes are Robespierre, like him an intriguing lawyer, and Napoleon), he had been editor of the Maoist journal Revolution; a gun-runner for guerrillas fighting Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique and Angola; and a defender of independence fighters in the Algerian war and of Palestinian fedayeen. ‘How can one understand a criminal,’ Vergès wrote some time later, ‘without having oneself, even by using one's imagination just once, tasted the roots of crime?’4 Vergès converted to Islam to marry a ‘freedom fighter’, Djamila Bouhired, whom he had helped to save from the death penalty with a vibrant pamphlet in her defence.

A slice of Vergès's life, from the spring of 1970 to the end of 1978, is unaccounted for and he delightedly fans the mystery, saying that he had ‘crossed to the other side of the mirror’. His student friendship with a young Kampuchean, Pol Pot, has led to speculation that perhaps he spent part of his time with the Khmer Rouge. Or, goes another theory, he served a lengthy spell in a jail in China, in the Soviet Union, or in Algeria. ‘Your secret is your blood. If you give it up entirely, you die,’ runs a Berber proverb that Vergès likes to quote.

According to French intelligence, Vergès may have first met Carlos during this period. Vergès has denied this, claiming that his knowledge of Carlos was based purely on accounts from Kopp and Bréguet whom he was appointed to defend. Years later, Vergès had a flattering view: ‘Carlos is a very modern mix of idealism and man of action ... He was fascinated by the Cuban experience, by Che Guevara, a legendary figure, and decided in the end to fight with the Palestinians for the Arab cause.’⁵

The fifty-seven-year-old Vergès proved so dedicated in defending Kopp and Bréguet that he was described by the Stasi as ‘one of the most important liaison individuals of the group’.⁶ Vergès and other lawyers enabled Carlos to stay in touch with the prisoners, and keep abreast of the judicial investigation. Weinrich, who on at least one occasion met Vergès in East Berlin during this period used him to pass on money and messages, including an upbeat note to his ex-girlfriend: ‘We hope you are okay ... Everything we are doing is aimed at getting you out of there.’7

Defferre instructed his legal affairs adviser, Roland Kessous, not to close the door on a possible approach from Carlos. As a result, Kessous and Vergès met about once every two weeks from March to August 1982. Kessous's portrait of the lawyer was slighting: ‘I have the memory of a man standing in front of a mirror, soliloquising for half an hour while smoothing his hair. Apparently, he appreciated his own speech. He explained to me that a lawyer was an artist and the defence plea a work of art.’⁸ Vergès told Kessous that it would not be ‘in France's interest’ to keep the two in jail and suggested ‘direct contacts’ with Carlos himself. Vergès even sought an audience with President Mitterrand but the head of his private office, Jean-Paul Colliard, rejected his request.

The threats hit home. Vergès twice met Louis Joinet, a magistrate and an adviser to Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy. Joinet received Vergès at his office the first time but then, given the delicate nature of their talks, invited him to breakfast at his home. ‘I asked Vergès if he was in touch with Carlos, as he was making threats of reprisals in his name,’ Joinet recalled. ‘He told me that he communicated with him through coded advertisements in the newspaper Le Matin de Paris.’⁹ Joinet reassured Vergès on the forthcoming trial of Kopp and Bréguet, guaranteeing that the government would lean on the judge to ensure any heavy sentence was suspended: ‘The third chamber is the most reliable ... the government has the most influence.’

However, long before the case reached court, pressure was brought to bear on Judge Debre via the Paris public prosecutor Pierre Arpaillange. ‘The public prosecutor would have liked me to think that this case did not deserve all the noise it was generating and in addition advised me not to be over-zealous because it was possible that an extra-judicial solution would be reached quickly,’ Debré recalled.¹⁰ Judge Debré's insistence that he did not bow to pressure does not tally with the judicial fate of Carlos's accomplices. One witness to Debré's meetings with Arpaillange remembers the judge ‘simply took his orders from his superior’.

The policemen who caught Bréguet were adamant that he had tried to kill one of them, and Debré initially charged Bréguet with possessing arms and explosives as well as attempted homicide. By the rule-book, Bréguet should have been put on trial before an assizes court, an institution used only for the trial of felonies. But the judge later dropped the attempted homicide charge on the grounds of insufficient evidence. In fact, as a ballistics expert demonstrated, Bréguet had indeed pulled the trigger but the gun had failed to fire.

Debré's leniency ensured that Kopp and Bréguet were ordered to stand trial on 15 April before a magistrate's court where they would face lighter sentences than if they had been brought before an assizes court. ‘Carlos's blackmail abruptly turned Kopp and Bréguet into a hot potato, and sent the government into a St Vitus dance,’ explained Alain Marsaud, the deputy public prosecutor. ‘The government – Defferre and Justice Minister Robert Badinter — pushed the judiciary into moving fast so that they would be released as soon as possible. The judiciary let itself be crushed.’11

To underscore Carlos's warnings, a bombing and shooting frenzy punctuated the negotiations in the two-month run-up to the trial. The targets, all French, were both in Europe and the Middle East. On 15 March a five-kilo bomb exploded inside the Villa des Dunes in Beirut, home to a French cultural centre. Five people were wounded. On 29 March at 8.41 p.m., four days after Carlos's ultimatum to Defferre had run out, ten kilos of Pentrite high explosive blew up the Trans-Europe-Express train from Paris to Toulouse, the Capitole, as it sped through flat countryside north of Limoges. The explosion eviscerated a sixty-year-old woman and trapped her daughter under a seat. The body of one victim was thrown more than sixty metres from the train, and another passenger was decapitated. Five passengers died and thirty were injured. The train driver only just prevented the gaping carcass of bloodstained twisted steel from powering off the track.

‘It is signed Carlos, obviously,’ Mitterrand's special adviser Jacques Attali noted in his diary. ‘The President took the news with sang-froid, his face set. It was expected, announced, inevitable: Carlos's love story with Magdalena Kopp costs France a great deal.’¹² As Defferre announced that police patrols in railway stations would be reinforced, the Police Judiciaire in Paris logged an anonymous telephone call from a man who spoke in French with no trace of a foreign accent. ‘I claim responsibility for the Capitole attack in the name of the Terrorist International, a friend of Carlos. You free our friends Bruno Bréguet and Magdalena Kopp, otherwise we have other projects which are even more terrible.’¹³ Terrorist International was a front for a guns-for- bombing deal. The Spanish Basque ETA helped to carry out the train bombing, which was planned by Weinrich on Carlos's behalf, in exchange for weapons.¹⁴

The bomb had been hidden in a Samsonite suitcase, which investigators believe was planted by Carlos's associate, Christa-Margot Froelich, just before the train's departure from the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris. She placed the suitcase in carriage eighteen which was reserved for bearers of a special card issued to VIPs by the state-owned railway company. Paris mayor and former Prime Minister Jacques Chirac had planned to take the train on his way to the Corrèze region but he changed his mind at the last minute and flew instead. Carlos later wrote that the bombing was ‘quite obviously’ an attempt on Chirac's life.15 According to Stasi files quoting from Weinrich's notes, Vergès had indirectly informed Weinrich that Chirac was against any deal with the group. Weinrich noted on the day of the bombing: ‘29.3. Capitole. Jirac (sic) had made a booking for the compartment.’ But there is no evidence to prove that Carlos or Weinrich knew this when the bomb was placed on the train.

On 5 April the French embassy in The Hague, where Carlos had sent his letter to Defferre, received a threat couched in more political terms, and signed by the local wing of West Germany's Red Army Faction. Passed on immediately to the DST, it was never disclosed by French authorities, and highlights Carlos's very close relationship with the West German movement – as well as threatening more violence:

To the French embassy to the Netherlands

We declare our solidarity with the action of our comrade Carlos and the actions he will launch. We demand the immediate release of our comrades Bruno Bréguet and Magdalena Kopp. They are imprisoned in your country. If you do not fully satisfy this demand, we will for our part take powerful measures against you. These measures will be comparable to the measures taken by those who in your state tear liberty to shreds and of all those who seek to oppress human beings. This is a unique and ultimate message. If it is not accepted by your government, it will mean that it refuses dialogue. Our task is to stand by our comrade prisoners because where states persecute democracy through imprisonment, resistance becomes a duty. The revolution will triumph.¹⁶

The trial of Kopp and Bréguet had been due to start on 15 April, but a strike by prison guards forced a postponement. That evening in their Beirut home, non-commissioned officer Guy Cavallo, twenty-eight, an employee of the French embassy, and his twenty-five-year-old wife Marie-Caroline, a maths teacher who was seven months pregnant, were preparing dinner for some friends. ‘These premises are placed under the protection of the French embassy,’ read the tricolour sticker on the door of the flat, located in an area controlled by Syrian and Palestinian forces.

When the doorbell rang Marie-Caroline glanced through the eyepiece set in the door, but could only make out a large bouquet of gladiolas and roses. So big was the bunch of flowers that she could not tell which of her guests had arrived early. She opened the door and stretched out both hands to receive the flowers. Two bullets fired with a silenced, 7.65-calibre pistol struck her body. Her husband rushed forward and was shot twice in the head. The first guests to arrive found blood seeping under the closed door. They forced their way in and discovered the dead couple, with Marie-Caroline still clutching the bouquet. Guy Cavallo was officially described as a coder at the embassy. In fact, he worked for the French SDECE secret service – more evidence of the strength of Carlos's intelligence-gathering network. Carlos now had the blood of France's two secret services, the SDECE and the DST, on his hands.

Kopp and Bréguet's task, when they were arrested in Paris, had in fact been the bombing of the Paris offices of the magazine Al Watan al Arabi, which two years earlier had published the long interview with Carlos.17

In a sadly prophetic scoop less than a week before the assassination of the French ambassador to Beirut, Louis Delamare, in September 1981, the magazine had reported that Syrian intelligence planned to kill Delamare in order to stop France pushing for the withdrawal of foreign troops on Lebanese soil — first and foremost the Syrian army. The Syrians conveyed their displeasure three months later, on 19 December. A TNT bomb was found on the fourth-floor landing outside the magazine's offices in Paris. The device had been programmed to explode at 8.14 p.m. and was deactivated by a bomb disposal expert at 8.13 p.m. Investigators discovered that Mokhail Kassouha, the cultural attaché at the Syrian embassy, had been involved in the bombing attempt.¹⁸ But France had no desire to worsen its tense relations with Syria, and the Justice Ministry ordered prosecutors to shelve the probe.

That same December Carlos visited the Syrian capital Damascus where he stayed at the Hotel Méridien. On his return to Budapest, accompanied by two Syrians, he decreed another round of surveillance of Al Watan al Arabi.¹⁹ Bréguet, who was part of the surveillance team, sent Carlos a detailed account of the routine of its editor, Walid Abou Zahr. A month after the arrests of Kopp and Bréguet, Carlos flew yet again to Damascus where he met Rifaat al-Assad, the Syrian President's brother and Carlos's patron. Carlos is also believed to have met his sponsor in Syrian air force intelligence, Colonel Haitham Sa'id, on this trip. A few weeks later, news leaked out that the French state-owned TF1 television channel would run a documentary in late April on the murder of the French ambassador to Beirut. Syrian intelligence considered bombing the broadcaster. But TF1 was deemed too big and too costly a target if the whole of it had to be blown up. The Syrians decided instead that Al Watan al Arabi should be the target. Syria wanted both to punish the magazine and to warn the new French administration against dabbling in Syria's Lebanese back yard after President Mitterrand demanded that foreign powers leave Lebanon in peace.

In early April Walid Abou Zahr was told by an Arab informer that a thirty-strong Syrian unit had arrived in Paris and was planning an attack. But the informer did not know what the target was. Abou Zahr tipped off the DST, and surrounded himself with nine bodyguards. Defferre sent police to patrol the editor's home and the inside of the magazine's offices. He did not think it necessary to station any men in the fashionable Rue Marbeuf, just outside the offices.20

On 19 April a brown-haired, forty-something woman with an unkempt appearance walked into the Hertz rental agency at Yugoslavia's Ljubljana airport and asked to hire an estate car. She presented a Swiss passport and a Swiss driving licence in the name of Margit Stadelmann, and said she was travelling to Vienna where she would return the car in a week's time on 26 April. She was handed the keys to an orange Opel Kadett with Austrian number plates.

The passport and driving licence were both false, and had been manufactured and supplied by the Stasi two days earlier when the woman had flown in to East Berlin en route to Ljubljana. The woman's real name was Christa-Margot Froelich. Three weeks earlier she had placed the bomb on the Capitole train. On the day she rented the car in Ljubljana, Froelich drove as far as the small town of Postojna, reputed among tourists for its grottoes and among guerrillas for pyrotechnists skilled in fitting out vehicles. Her instructions from Carlos were that she should drive the car to Paris and hand it over, filled with explosives, to an accomplice. On her route, via Trieste and Lyon, she used another two false identities, Marie Zimmerman and Beatrix Odenhal, to cover her tracks.21

On 21 April a bomb exploded outside the office of the military attaché at the French embassy in Vienna, where Carlos had paced the world stage during the OPEC raid. An Austrian policeman on guard duty was killed. On the evening of the same day the French television channel TF1 broadcast its documentary on the murder of Ambassador Delamare. The programme relayed the accusations against the Syrian secret service made by Al Watan. Late that night in Paris a man in his thirties with a thin moustache drove an orange Opel Kadett down the Rue Marbeuf and stopped outside the Tunisian restaurant Chez Bébert.

The driver, speaking in French, asked a waiter whether he knew who owned the Renault parked just in front of the restaurant. The stranger then walked up to the Renault's owner who was dining in the restaurant and asked him: ‘Do you mind moving your car? I'm staying the whole night and I would like to park my Opel.’ The Renault owner got up from his table and obliged. The driver of the Opel was Johannes Weinrich.²² And three floors above the restaurant were the offices of Al Watan al Arabi.

In their cells at the Fleury-Merogis women's prison and at the Fresnes jail outside Paris, Kopp and Bréguet had spent more than two months waiting for their trial. Kopp passed part of the time knitting sweaters for Vergès. On the morning of 22 April the pair were brought into the dock sealed off with bullet-proof glass at the Palais de Justice on the Isle de la Cité. In a crowded courtroom guarded by members of the élite GIGN anti-terrorism unit wearing combat gear, Vergès greeted Kopp with a kiss on the cheek.

At 9.02 a.m. on the other side of the city from the law courts, Carlos's offensive ripped across the Rue Marbeuf during the morning rush hour. A few seconds earlier Nelly Guillerme, a thirty-year-old secretary dressed in a blue check suit, had reached into her bag for a letter she intended to put in the postbox next to Chez Bébert. When the twenty-kilo bomb hidden in the back of the nearby Opel station wagon exploded, a volley of steel shrapnel tore into the pregnant Guillerme and catapulted her body across the street. She died of her injuries.

As a fireball soared several storeys high, Philippe Rouaut, a messenger boy, was swept off the pavement, and thrown on to the bonnet of a car. Half his left leg was torn off. Nelly Barthomeuf, another young secretary on her way to work, had stopped to buy some croissants for breakfast at a nearby bakery. The explosion wounded her in the face and burned her leg. At the Boucherie Marbeuf, adjoining the restaurant, young butcher's apprentices ran to take cover at the back of the shop. Clad in their white aprons, the apprentices emerged, shards of glass crunching underfoot, to see billowing black smoke shutting off the sun, and fire devouring cars and the awnings of boutiques. As a shop alarm set off by the blast wailed lugubriously, ten people lay seriously wounded in the street, and another fifty-eight with lighter injuries stood or sat in shock, or struggled to flee.

Of the shattered Opel, only part of the front wheel-axle remained. The engine had punched its way into the car parked in front. Twisted pieces of the Opel's coachwork were found on the roofs of nearby buildings. A burned wing mirror landed on the terrace of a café on the Champs-Elysées, and the handbrake in the courtyard of the Europe 1 radio station nearby.

In the law courts, reports of the attack made no visible impression on the pale, fragile-looking Kopp and an apparently more robust Bréguet. Behind their bullet-proof glass, they stayed as mute as goldfish in a bowl throughout the trial. It was left to Vergès to speak for them, and for Carlos. As an appetiser, the lawyer accused Mossad of planting the explosives found in Kopp and Bréguet's car, and eulogised Carlos in vibrant and sardonic tones: ‘In keeping silent and in awaiting your judgement, this man of audacity and courage shows that he knows how to keep the cool head of a great politician.’

The plea he launched into was characteristically forceful, and shocking: ‘[Kopp and Bréguet] are already beyond the court's judgement. They will leave jail ... They are soldiers, prisoners of a noble cause. They know that their friends will not rest as long as they are in prison. It is not possible that the Republic will keep them in its hands. Will they stay forty-eight hours, a month, three months in prison? The length of time raises the problem of the blood to be shed.’23

The speech was a public repetition of the warnings that Vergès had given government officials in the secret negotiations. The lawyer went one better and denounced France for failing to respect a tacit and mutual non-aggression pact with certain revolutionary movements. According to Vergès, the pact stipulated that ‘If you don't commit any attacks on my territory, I turn a blind eye.’ Carlos, Vergès concluded, ‘demanded that this agreement be respected. Full stop.’24

As for the person who had leaked Carlos's letter to Defferre: ‘It is this man who will carry or who already carries the responsibility for the blood spilled in presenting expulsion as an attitude of weakness.’ This was one of the sharpest manifestations yet of Vergès's belief in the need to empathise with clients, to the extent of sharing their anxiety and anger. Vergès behaved ‘like the spokesman of a terrorist movement’, recalled the presiding judge, Jean-Georges Diemer. ‘He multiplied provocations, he threatened us implicitly. So much so that for a time I was protected by police.’²⁵

Like the investigation that had preceded it, the trial itself was stage-managed. The policemen who had arrested the pair were not called as witnesses, because authorities feared that they would insist that Bréguet had tried to shoot one of them. The ballistic report which showed that Bréguet had pulled the trigger was not produced in court. The sentences that the public prosecutor, who ultimately answers to the Justice Ministry, recommended were lenient: a minimum of three years in jail for Bréguet and two years for Kopp. In an ambiguous plea, he asked the court ‘to take a significant but measured decision to respond precisely to the immoderation of the terrorists’.²⁶ On a day that had seen the Marbeuf bombing and a spirited plea by Vergès, the verdict handed down in the early afternoon was a little heavier. Five years for Bréguet and four years for Kopp, with a fine of 10,000 francs for each of them.

Within hours, Defferre condemned the bombing: ‘The method employed is revealing of the mentality of the authors of this kind of outrage, who do not hesitate to make blood flow on French territory to settle scores which have nothing to do with France.’ In the same breath, he announced the expulsion of two Syrian diplomats, naval attaché Colonel Ali Hassan and cultural attaché Mokhail Kassouha. The DST explained to the press that the two were not linked to the Marbeuf bombing but had been under surveillance for some time as Syrian spies. However, Kassouha had been linked to the bomb that had been defused outside Al Watan's offices in December, while Hassan had in March organised a savage attack involving knives, pickaxes and truncheons on Syrian students demonstrating in the square outside the cathedral of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.²⁷

At his next meeting with Weinrich and Issawe in East Berlin, Vergès berated them for planting the Marbeuf bomb. The attack, he said, had not helped Kopp and Bréguet. The lawyer need not have worried. Although French newspapers speculated that Carlos was behind the bombing, Defferre had no intention of letting it wreck the negotiations.

Defferre's orders to the head of the DST's counter-terrorism section, Commissaire Jean Baklouti, were clear: ‘Defferre ordered me not to follow the Carlos lead, and to concentrate instead on the Syrians. Everything was done to make Syria carry the can. The diplomats who were expelled were scapegoats. It was a way of calming public opinion and shifting the police's attention away from the real authors of the bombing so that negotiations with Carlos could continue.’ The DST defied the minister's instructions however: ‘We went on investigating Carlos though. We knew that Vergès was travelling to Eastern Europe and was meeting a French Interior Ministry official, so we reached our own conclusions.’28

On the day after the Marbeuf bombing President Mitterrand summoned what Defferre called a ‘war cabinet’ on terrorism in his gilded office in the Ely see Palace. Facing the head of state were Defferre, Marcel Chalet, the DST chief, Pierre Marion, who had renamed the SDECE the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), and General Jean Saulnier, the President's chief of staff. Their decision was that Defferre should chair a weekly meeting on terrorism. But by late July these Wednesday evening meetings in the Interior Minister's office had lost all purpose. Far from launching a new anti-terrorism strategy, participants got bogged down in minutiae, such as the form residence permits should take, or Defferre's stories of his experiences in the French Resistance.

Less than a month after the Marbeuf bombing Carlos's offensive restarted. A rocket-propelled grenade struck the French consulate in Beirut, hitting a block of flats assigned to French diplomats. No one was hurt. In May twenty-five kilos of explosives hidden under a car blew up inside the French embassy compound in Beirut. Eleven people, including five embassy employees, were killed and another twenty-seven were wounded. Mitterrand's adviser Attali noted in his journal: ‘A clear signal: in the eyes of many people, our presence is not needed here. Something is about to happen?’²⁹

The butchery earned Weinrich a compliment from another of the Carlos group's lawyers, Swiss attorney Bernard Rambert: ‘Graf [Rambert's code-name] has congratulated [us] for this action,’ read a note by Weinrich, who had been despatched to Beirut by Carlos to prepare the attacks there. Weinrich's notes show that more attacks were planned. In the Lebanese capital the French and United States embassies and the French consulate were placed under surveillance. In Paris the home of Justice Minister Robert Badinter was also watched, while Rambert supplied Weinrich with details of the police security at the Justice Minister's home. Rambert, however, denies this. In Rome other members of the Carlos organisation considered an attack on the French embassy, housed in the Renaissance Palazzo Farnese.30

The nature of the targets owed much to Carlos's Syrian paymasters. ‘To my knowledge, and this is a personal assessment, the Syrian secret services were indisputably behind Carlos,’ the Stasi's Colonel Jackel recalled. ‘Especially at the time of the attacks in France and against France. More precisely, the secret service of the Syrian air force was involved ... For me, the members of the [Carlos] group were instruments.’³¹

Weinrich himself explained the purpose of the offensive when border guards challenged him on his arrival in late May at Berlin-Schönefeld airport with a heavy load of explosives tucked into a brown leather bag he was carrying as hand luggage on a mid- morning TAROM flight from Bucharest. Brandishing a false Syrian diplomatic passport in the name of Joseph Leon, he proudly declared: ‘The group is conducting a dirty, private war with France until the prisoners Kopp and Bréguet are freed by combat.’³² The Stasi, however, seized the explosives. At a later confrontation with Major Helmut Voigt, the head of the counter-terrorism section, and Colonel Jäckel, Weinrich explained just what kind of war he had in mind: ‘Until now we have not moved from house to house in a Paris neighbourhood, killing everybody inside. We have the means to do this and to escape.’³³

Carlos's ‘dirty, private war’ suffered a setback in June, only two months after the Rue Marbeuf blast. Froelich, who had driven the Opel Kadett to Paris, was arrested at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci airport carrying a suitcase artfully transformed into a portable arsenal: three and a half kilos of detonating/explosive cord had been neatly wound into a spiral to nestle underneath the inner lining. The suitcase also contained a cheap traveller's alarm clock turned into a timer for use with a bomb, and two electric detonators. Froelich, who also carried a false German passport in the name of Marie Zimmerman, spent the next six years in prison.

As bombings underscored Vergès's negotiations, Weinrich drafted a hard-hitting statement for the lawyer to recite if French government officials challenged him about the offensive. A note in Weinrich's handwriting read: ‘Message for Vergès: If during his meetings with government representatives he is asked the question, he must answer in accordance with the directives from Michel [alias Carlos]: “We have undertaken a secret approach of Defferre and the answer was a public challenge to our organisation. We have accepted this challenge and we combat with the weapons of our choice, until such time as our comrades are returned to us in a definite manner.”’34 In a surreal exchange after one of Carlos's outrages, a French official turned to Vergès and remarked: ‘Terrible, this Carlos has no consideration for anyone, but perhaps he has a political obligation.’ Vergès retorted: ‘But Carlos, Monsieur, has no obligation in France.’³⁵

The need to keep Carlos informed plunged Vergès into a complex procedure designed to shake off anyone shadowing him as he ferried messages to and fro, including one rousing recommendation for the prisoners: ‘Your duty is to stay strong psychologically.’ At least a week in advance of any trip to Berlin, Vergès was required to send a telex, signed ‘Jean’, to the Palast Hotel in East Berlin addressed to ‘Mr Saeed’, an alias that Weinrich used for receiving messages. Vergès's official cover for his travels, if discovered, was that he was visiting a West German national who had a child by Bréguet. If Carlos's team wanted to get in touch with Vergès it would send him a postcard with the meaningless message: ‘Greetings ... we are happy ... to the sumptuous tower ... affectionately – big kisses. Your Danielle.’ The sign-off was a private joke. Danielle was the name of President Mitterrand's wife.

In Berlin Vergès used the dead-letter technique tried and tested by spies of both East and West. He left the files of the judicial investigation into Kopp and Bréguet in a locker at the Friedrichstrasse station, gateway between West and East Berlin. Weinrich collected the papers, but not before a Stasi officer had passed by to copy them. Weinrich attempted to simplify the procedure by asking the Stasi's Major Voigt for help in facilitating the lawyer's trips through the Berlin Wall. Vergès, he pleaded in April 1983, ‘has already done so much for the revolution’. The Stasi, which had opened a file on Vergès and put border posts on alert, turned Weinrich down. A sheepish Weinrich noted in his report: ‘Shame: no visa for Vergès.’

Carlos stopped at nothing to free his accomplices. He even considered exploiting the last indefensible cause espoused by Vergès, that of Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, known as ‘The Butcher of Lyon’ because of his unrelenting enforcement of Hitler's Final Solution. As head of the information section of the Gestapo in Lyon, Barbie had been ordered to wipe out the Resistance. Twice condemned to death in absentia by French courts, he was tracked down to Bolivia by French Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld, and captured in February 1983. Vergès had joined de Gaulle's Free French forces at the age of seventeen, but he had no qualms about taking on the defence of a former enemy: ‘No human being is all black or all white. There is in the heart of the worst criminal a secret garden, a kind of astonishing individual little paradise. There is in the heart of the most honest man a cesspit full of awful reptiles.’36

Weinrich and Carlos pondered a plan to kidnap the sixty-nine-year-old Barbie from the Saint-Joseph jail in Lyon. Weinrich's only reference to Barbie, in a letter to Carlos, underlined the Stasi's horrified reaction: ‘Barbie affair is very interesting ... Don't worry I don't discuss about it with socialist camp but had a clash with Helmut [alias Major Voigt] longer time ago when they learned about it. He was furious.’³⁷

Carlos's comments about his intentions are more telling. The revelations that he hoped to wring out of Barbie once he was captured would ‘compromise Western regimes’ and detail how the Nazi had worked for the American Counter Intelligence Corps in Germany after the war. To help prepare the kidnap, Vergès was expected to pass on details of Barbie's prison conditions to Carlos.³⁸ For all Carlos's enthusiasm, however, his group failed in its attempt to stage its own trial of the Gestapo officer. The kidnap was never attempted. Barbie was tried by a French court four years later, and sentenced to life in jail for crimes against humanity.³⁹

But Carlos was not the kind to give up easily. If bombs failed, then he would arrange the escape from jail of Kopp and Bréguet. Again, Vergès's participation was required. The lawyer suggested that Kopp simulate a suicide attempt and make her getaway during the medical check-up that would inevitably follow. For Bréguet, the plan was to bribe a guard who would help him escape through the sewers.⁴⁰ The winter was deemed the most opportune season. The planned escape route led ultimately to Damascus, but Bréguet rejected this saying he wanted to be free to go where he liked.⁴¹

Carlos has told one of his lawyers that the KGB summoned him to Moscow about this time to warn him of a trap to capture him planned by the French secret service should either Kopp or Bréguet try to break out of jail. There is no evidence to substantiate this claim, but Carlos did drop both plans. Kopp and Bréguet stayed behind bars.