NINE

Licensed to Kill
...............

I authorise you to kill only Carlos and Abu Nidal.

–President Frangois Mitterrand to DGSE head Pierre Marion

Given the revolving-door mechanism that usually prevailed at the top of the French secret service, the extrovert Count Alexandre de Marenches was an exceptional figure in postwar intelligence who endured as many as eleven years, from 1970 to 1981, at the head of the SDECE. His longevity remains unmatched by his successors.1 It was de Marenches who first set the SDECE on Carlos's tail. De Marenches's gregariousness had come near to costing him not only his career but also his life in more youthful days. After escaping from wartime France, he had struck up a conversation with a well-dressed gentleman on a train bound for Madrid. Flush with success, the eighteen-year-old de Marenches related to the stranger how he had crossed the Pyrénées alone in driving snow, then kept silent under torture by Spanish Civil Guards, and would now enlist with General de Gaulle's Free French. ‘Oh! Really? How interesting! That must have been difficult,’ sympathised his courteous acquaintance. It was only when the train pulled into Madrid that de Marenches found out that he had recounted his triumphs to Baron von Stohrer, Hitler's ambassador to Spain. Fortunately the baron never did trouble the would-be Resistance fighter.2

Picked to lead the SDECE, the aristocrat, who was dubbed ‘Porthos’ after one of the Three Musketeers because of his tall stature and robust girth, found himself at the head of what he likened to a gangsters’ racket: ‘Some agents were running drugs and guns; others were engaged in kidnapping, murder, and the settling of the most bloody scores.’³ His purge of the SDECE weeded out most of the top brass and hundreds of lesser officers who were suspected of anti-Americanism, tainted by the scandals of the Algerian war of independence, or were simply deemed unworthy of his trust.

A unit in which de Marenches had complete confidence was the Action Service, the SDECE's clandestine operations arm. It was ordered to hunt Carlos. In late 1975, only a few months after his triple murder of the two DST secret servicemen and Moukharbal in Paris, Carlos was spotted in Algiers at his favourite nightclub, the chic Dar Salem. There the Action Service's Philippe Rondot watched him from a distance as, surrounded by female companions, Carlos sank into a drunken stupor. After consultation with the Action Service's chief, Count de Marolles, de Marenches suggested taking advantage of one of Carlos's drinking bouts to ‘neutralise him’.

The nightclub was deemed an unsuitable venue for a kidnapping as it would have upset delicate diplomatic relations, given that the Dar Salem's owner was the brother of Algerian President Boumedienne. The Action Service rushed to make alternative arrangements. But by the time a team had assembled, the quarry described by de Marenches as ‘an excellent young man, born of the champagne left and who always had primed grenades in his pocket’ had disappeared.⁴

In 1976 Rondot managed again to track down Carlos, to the Eden Beach Hotel in Malta. The Action Service is said to have suggested murdering Carlos using a technique borrowed from Mossad, an explosive device concealed in the telephone of his hotel room. As de Marenches observed: ‘When you're dealing with irregulars and terrorists, there are no more rules. Anything goes.’ According to published reports, President Giscard d'Estaing refused to grant the SDECE permission to carry out the killing. But former members of the Action Service have denied such an assassination was on the cards, insisting that they wanted to catch Carlos so he could stand trial in France. However, tougher action would have been justified had Carlos put their lives at risk, they added. In 1977 Carlos was spotted in Colombia where his mother was living. But yet again the Action Service failed to capture him.

By the time of President Mitterrand's election in May 1981, France's attempts to catch Carlos had led nowhere. Murders and bombings on the streets of Paris in the spring and summer of 1982 marked Mitterrand's first confrontation with terrorism. Twenty-one attacks in the first six months of the year claimed a death toll of thirty and wounded 178 people, the price France paid for its interventionism in Lebanon and in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Faction claimed the murders of the American Colonel Charles Ray and the Israeli diplomat Yacov Barsimentov; Carlos bombed French targets in Beirut; Carlos claimed responsibility for the Capitole train bombing; and the Carlos group, with the help of the Syrians, planted the Marbeuf bomb.

The list of attacks was lengthened when gunmen believed to have been sent by the terrorist Abu Nidal carried out a racist attack in the heart of Paris. Jo Goldenberg's kosher restaurant and delicatessen in the capital's Jewish neighbourhood, specialising in the diaspora fare of Eastern European Jews, was as crowded as ever at lunchtime on 9 August 1982 when a Czech-made grenade was lobbed through the window. Before customers and waiters, many of them wounded, realised what had happened, four of five masked men – the pandemonium was such that the exact number was never established — burst in and sprayed the room with machine-gun fire, killing four people and wounding another thirty, twelve of them seriously. A Moroccan waiter who tried to flee was pursued and executed in the kitchens. As the killers escaped into the street, they shot an elderly employee of the restaurant and a woman in her fifties who lived nearby. The investigating magistrate assigned to the case was Jean-Louis Bruguière, who happened to be one of the few Paris-based judges not away on holiday. Within hours of the massacre, he was in the restaurant looking for clues. It was Judge Bruguière's first introduction to terrorism after a career in which he had dealt mainly with the Paris underworld.

Eight days after the Goldenberg bloodbath, Mitterrand, still shaken by the shouts of ‘Mitterrand assassin!’ and ‘Mitterrand trahison!’ (treachery) chanted at him when he had visited the Jewish neighbourhood, turned his back on the existing antiterrorism apparatus. For the first time in the history of the Republic, he created an operational counter-terrorism unit based at the Elysée Palace, reporting to him. The new unit was led by the energetic Colonel Christian Prouteau, who had headed the elite force of the paramilitary police, the Groupement d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN).5 Prouteau's force had previously ridiculed security at the Elysée by smuggling a bag of explosives into the Presidential office. Overnight, a purely action unit was entrusted with ‘the mission of coordination, intelligence and action against terrorism’.

Prouteau's appointment not only amounted to changing the ship's captain in the middle of a storm, it also sowed confusion among established French police and intelligence forces. ‘In the space of a few days, no one any longer knew who was doing what,’ recalled former DST chief Marcel Chalet, voicing the dismay of many who wrote off Prouteau's unit as gung-ho cowboys. ‘Our foreign partners were dismayed that doubts were cast over existing procedures for sharing intelligence, and they threatened to turn off the tap.’⁶ Prouteau's unit was already busy carrying out a discreet mission for Mitterrand, the illegal phone-tapping of politicians, film stars and journalists.

Mitterrand's creation of the anti-terrorism unit highlighted his long-standing lack of confidence in French intelligence, which had been dogged by a string of postwar scandals. The confidential report that the DST sent to Mitterrand after his election helped to devalue the secret services in his eyes. The report depicted one of his junior government members, Régis Debray, a revolutionary philosopher who served as intellectual companion to Che Guevara and recognised the ‘strategic value’ of terrorism, as Fidel Castro's stooge. French secret services, Mitterrand once confided, were nothing more than ‘costly eyewash’, and they suffered from ‘a sort of intellectual submission to the Americans’.⁷ To succeed de Marenches as head of the SDECE, Mitterrand looked outside intelligence circles and plucked Pierre Marion from the aerospace industry where he was on the verge of retirement.

In late August 1982, shortly after the Goldenberg carnage and four months after the bombing of the Rue Marbeuf, Pierre Marion strode across the courtyard of the Elysée. A tall figure with a piercing gaze and the dress and bearing of an English gentleman, he was escorted silently by the chief usher to the President's study. Marion was in confident mood: Mitterrand, he believed, was a man he could do business with. His conviction was born of the President's reaction to the Goldenberg murders. Mitterrand had immediately assembled the intelligence and police chiefs and declared terrorism public enemy number one, ordering them to wage war on it.

Marion had taken this as a go-ahead for action. Since mid-1981 the Action Service had infiltrated informers into several terrorist support networks, and had drawn up a list of potential candidates for ‘neutralisation’ . Carlos was not one of the names on the list, because Marion did not think him worth worrying about. ‘We completely erased Carlos,’ Marion admitted. ‘He wasn't interesting for us. He had lost his aura. When I was at the secret service he was no longer considered dangerous, he wasn't a real terrorist.’8

Five targets had been located in Paris, and a total of another seven in Rome, Geneva, Frankfurt, Madrid and Brussels. Most of the individuals held Syrian, Libyan or Iraqi nationality, and professed to be diplomats. Partly on the basis of intelligence from Mossad and the PLO, Marion believed he had definite proof that ten of the targets supported terrorists. There were some doubts over the two remaining individuals, but, in Marion's eyes, France's right to self-defence meant that ‘intime conviction’ (innermost conviction) was enough to justify their assassination.

Marion had selected volunteers from the 200-strong Action Service, ‘perfectly disciplined, good observers, and precise executors’.⁹ There was no shortage of candidates from the Cercottes training camp near Orléans run by the DGSE, formerly known as the SDECE. A four-strong team had been picked for each murder, which would be carried out with weapons that would point the finger at other terrorists. The teams were ready to strike. But Marion could go no further without consulting Mitterrand. What the secret service chief was seeking was an anonymous, blanket cover. All the President would know about was the number of targets involved, not their names.

Marion's witness-free meeting with Mitterrand — ‘With more than two people, there are no more secrets,’ the President was fond of saying – got off to a bad start. The President was in a foul mood, his handshake cold and his features set in stone. Handing Mitterrand his list of suggested operations, Marion told him that if anything went wrong or if news leaked out, the rule of the game was that he, Marion, would act as the scapegoat. The President, with the death-list in his delicate hands – Marion noticed they were as fine as those of a violin player — refused to give the green light for any of the assassinations.

Eight days later, in September, Marion asked for another urgent interview with Mitterrand. The encounter, also private, was just as strained. After another cold handshake, the President demanded roughly why the meeting was so urgent. When Marion suggested hitting an Abu Nidal base and a terrorist training camp in Beirut, the President grimaced and fell silent, the fingers of his right hand drumming the top of his desk. After a long pause, the President broke the tension: ‘Non. I authorise you to kill only Carlos and Abu Nidal.’

Marion retorted that both men were much too well protected. French intelligence believed (mistakenly) that Carlos was in a fortress in Czechoslovakia, armed to the teeth. Abu Nidal, who had turned his back on Arafat in the mid-1970s, was known to be in Syria. Regardless of its feasibility, for Marion there was nothing morally wrong with Mitterrand's order. The motto that the graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique publicly espoused was an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Marion's defence of state-commissioned murder, in a country that abolished the guillotine in 1981 (at Mitterrand's initiative), was unwavering: ‘We are confronted by fanatics who stop at nothing to further their cause, to execute an order or to get a bonus … In the end it is morally more legitimate to remove them than to give soldiers in a war the order to fire on other soldiers who may be engaged in a conflict only through patriotic discipline. And then there is the fact that such actions of neutralisation would be carried out outside the law. I have less scruples on this point. It is indeed for such actions that the secret services exist and they must, in exceptional cases, act outside the norms of law.’10

Marion's stand was representative of the secret service's thinking and practice. During the war against Algerian independence fighters, the service had used the cover of a shadowy organisation it had created, the Main Rouge (Red Hand), to assassinate nationalist leaders and arms traffickers across Europe and North Africa, and bomb the latter's ships or cargoes. One former alcohol and tobacco smuggler turned arms merchant based in Hamburg, Georg Puchert, was warned to stop supplying the Algerians in 1957. When he took no notice, three of his ships were bombed and sunk in as many months, and he was finally blown up. An associate was killed in a Geneva hotel with a poisoned dart fired into his neck. Nor were relatives spared: another German arms salesman, Otto Schluter, stopped supplying the Algerian nationalists after a car bomb killed his mother. According to a former Prime Ministerial adviser, Constantin Melnik, the Action Service assassinated 135 people in 1960 alone.¹¹

One of Marion's successors, Admiral Pierre Lacoste, who was sacked after the French secret service bombed the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, would have gladly eliminated Carlos to satisfy Mitterrand: ‘If I had had Carlos at the end of my rifle it's probable that I would have obtained permission to have him slain. I myself wouldn't have been reticent. But we never got close enough to the stage where I could ask Mitterrand for authorisation to kill him.’12

Biographers have invariably assumed that the socialist President Mitterrand always refused to sanction state killings. As well as abolishing the death penalty, he is widely believed to have turned down such plans known in France as ‘operations humides’ (wet jobs) or ‘actions homo’ (short for homicide), and to the CIA as ‘operations to terminate with extreme prejudice’. In fact, the Action Service was still active during Mitterrand's long reign.

France's ambassador to Beirut, the 59-year-old Louis Delamare, knew that his life was in danger. He had received death threats. But he had refused bodyguards and an armour-plated car, saying that an escort would be pointless and would only mean that several people would die instead of just one.

Delamare was alone with his driver when his car, French tricolour flapping in the wind, was ambushed in West Beirut on 4 September 1981. Four gunmen sprang out of the white BMW which had blocked the way and, while the driver cowered on the floor, one of them took aim at the ambassador and fired through the window. Six bullets struck Delamare at point-blank range in the head, heart, and stomach.

Witnesses including Delamare's driver related that the gunmen had initially run up to the ambassador's car and tried to open the doors. But the doors were locked from the inside. Only a few dozen yards away, Syrian soldiers and intelligence officers looked on from a Syrian army check-point. When the white BMW sped away with the killers, the Syrian soldiers let the car through the check-point.

Three of the killers of Louis Delamare were slain – by members of the French Action Service. Within hours of the assassination of the ambassador, Marion had ordered his spies in the Middle East to identify and find the killers. Initial reports from Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian sources all pointed to Damascus. In an investigation lasting several months the French confirmed that Syria had commissioned the murder, although the original plan had been for Syria to hold Delamare hostage, as it had held a Jordanian diplomat a few months earlier, to put pressure on France.

The French spies discovered that the killers were members of the Red Knights, a new paramilitary organisation set up that summer and deployed in Lebanon by the Syrian President's brother, Rifaat al-Assad. The gunmen had trained at a camp in Syria run by Rifaat al-Assad's special forces, the 50,000-strong Defence Brigades. After the ambassador's murder the gunmen were escorted by the Syrian secret service to Damascus where they were held and questioned before being released.

The French were able to identify only three of the assassins and tracked them down in late 1982 to a village in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. Marion sent a team of a dozen Action Service recruits which shot two of the killers dead, and wounded the third. The commando contacted Marion to seek the go-ahead to complete their assignment. Marion gave them clearance, and a French officer followed the badly wounded man to his hospital bed, and wrenched out the oxygen and other tubes linking him to a life-support machine, ‘so that he would have no more memories’, as one senior intelligence officer put it. Mission accomplished, the team radioed back to Paris.

Carlos escaped having a similar fate inflicted on him by the Action Service, but the rival DST which had lost two men to his bullets was more than willing to step into the breach and execute him.

In December 1982 the CIA's Paris station chief John Siddel telephoned the new head of the DST, Yves Bonnet. They had urgent business to discuss, insisted Siddel, whom Bonnet had nicknamed ‘von Siddel’ because the American carried himself as stiffly as a Prussian officer. The CIA officer brought his French colleague a magnificent Christmas present: a chance to seize Carlos. Bonnet, a career civil servant, had been in the job barely a month, but that had been long enough to realise how much the CIA's information mattered to his service: ‘I found the DST still very traumatised by the Rue Toullier shootings. Carlos had become a mythical beast; he was undoubtedly public enemy number one for the DST.’13

Siddel was convinced that the CIA's source, a Syrian, was reliable. Carlos, who had been located in Damascus, apparently planned to travel in the next few days to the Swiss resort of Gstaad, favoured haunt of the European jet-set, and would stay there in a hotel over Christmas. Siddel had the name of the hotel and the date on which Carlos was due to arrive. Bonnet's superior, Interior Minister Defferre, jumped at the opportunity to get even with the man he had tried to placate through negotiation, only to see a bombing and shooting campaign strike France and French targets abroad. ‘We'll take the risk of catching him, we'll gun him down,’ Defferre enthused to Bonnet. ‘I take full responsibility. My duty isn't to ask the President; he cannot order this assassination.’14

Technically, the DST had no right to carry out such a mission. Its brief was national, as clearly underlined in the decree defining it as ‘responsible for detecting and preventing, on the territory of the French Republic, the activities inspired, engaged in or sustained by foreign influences of a nature that threatens the security of the country’. Foreign operations were the DGSE's domain. Countless DST chiefs had manoeuvred to gain wider powers, only to be obstructed by their rival.

As there was no question of the DST passing on the American tip to the Action Service of the DGSE, Defferre had little choice but to turn to Colonel Prouteau, the officer promoted only five months earlier to head Mitterrand's new anti-terrorist unit. Thirsty for a coup to legitimise his unit in the face of intense criticism from the French police and secret services, Colonel Prouteau personally led a team to Gstaad where the athletic paramilitary team merged with some difficulty with the resort's jewel- arid fur- clad revellers.

Colonel Prouteau found no sign of his quarry, in the hotel or on the slopes. ‘If a famous terrorist was present in this town, which we have not been able to prove, in no case was it Carlos,’ he reported in a confidential note to Mitterrand, adding a sybilline reference to the President's order to catch Carlos: ‘It is certain that in your mind, given the danger Carlos represents, it was important, as soon as he had been located, to do what was necessary so that he could no longer do harm.’¹⁵

An irritated Bonnet challenged Siddel following the operation's failure. ‘You took us for bloody idiots,’ the Frenchman protested. ‘No, no. We were certain. We'd put the informer through a lie-detector test,’ Siddel answered. Yet again the CIA had paid the price of its reliance on polygraphs, widely decried by other intelligence services and by critics within the CIA itself. ‘Some cultures polygraph more effectively than others,’ remarked a politically incorrect Clarridge, who had made his own attempt at neutralising Carlos in the mid-1970s. ‘Americans, because of our puritanical tradition of right and wrong, are good subjects. Arabs and Indians, for example, are notoriously difficult, because lying under certain circumstances is culturally acceptable.’16

In the year that followed Carlos's wave of terror against French targets, the missions launched by France's secret services amounted to little more than boxing with his shadow. The closest either Marion of the DGSE or Bonnet of the DST came to Carlos was in the quirky ‘para-diplomacy’ which they — separately — attempted with his chief sponsor of the time, Syrian intelligence. Bypassing the cumbersome diplomatic apparatus is nothing exceptional in France, where politicians, chairmen of state-owned companies, and secret service chiefs alike regard managing personal networks of foreign contacts as part of their job.

At his September 1982 meeting with Mitterrand, Marion had sought and obtained permission from the President – ‘Yes, but hurry’ – to try to secure a pledge from Syria's Rifaat that there would be no more Syrian-sponsored terrorist attacks in France. The Syrian was not an easy individual with whom to negotiate. The previous year, in February 1981, Rifaat al-Assad had crushed a revolt by the fundamentalist Moslem Brotherhood. The rebels had managed to seize the ancient city of Hama north of Damascus before Rifaat sent in troops backed by a tank division. Some 10,000 members of the Brotherhood and civilians are believed to have perished in the bloodletting that followed.

Marion had already shown the Syrians that he meant business. Five days after the Rue Marbeuf bombing an Action Service squad which had been despatched to Madrid fired a volley of shots at Hassan Dayoub, the Syrian cultural attaché, as he arrived home. Dayoub was suspected of masterminding the murders of Syrian opposition figures exiled across Europe. He survived unharmed. The Action Service had been ordered to wound but not kill, but failed even in that limited task.

Following the Presidential go-ahead, Marion arranged a meeting with Rifaat al-Assad later that September at a luxurious villa owned by the Syrian on the edge of the Saint-Nom-la-Bretêche golf course in Paris's western suburbs. Locals reported that whenever Rifaat, a skilled golfer, strode around the course, a swarm of bodyguards would follow. Marion was told not to bring any of his own bodyguards, but DGSE officers were unobtrusively deployed within eyesight of the villa. Accompanied only by his driver, Marion was greeted by a row of Syrian bodyguards armed with machine-guns.

In two five-hour rounds of talks, Rifaat angrily and repeatedly denied any links to terrorists. Marion wielded carrot and stick. The carrot was the prospect of warmer relations with France, the stick a threat to strike at the terrorists’ support networks in France and other European countries, including Syrian so-called diplomats, even though Mitterrand had refused to grant Marion permission to do just that. The bluff was not called, and the two shook hands on a mutual non-aggression pact. ‘You can count on my word,’ Rifaat said. ‘Abu Nidal will no longer act against you.’17

No mention was made of Carlos. ‘The negotiations did not concern Carlos,’ Marion recalled. ‘In the DGSE's assessment, he wasn't yet supported by Syria. Carlos wasn't even considered operational by the Syrians.’¹⁸ In fact, as Carlos himself was shortly to demonstrate, he was at the time a key element in Rifaat al-Assad's stable. The DST chief Yves Bonnet was similarly duped by the Syrians. Several months after Marion's meeting with Rifaat, Bonnet flew to Damascus for his own attempt at diplomacy.

The two French intelligence chiefs made no attempt to coordinate their initiatives. ‘I never had the habit of asking the DGSE for permission when I went on foreign missions,’ Bonnet sniffed.¹⁹ In the words of an MI6 observer: ‘The French secret services keep their sharpness and tautness more by jousting and competing with each other than by cooperating.’ The feud between the two intelligence agencies was rooted in the Dreyfus scandal which had spawned mistrust of the secret services among French leaders and public opinion. In the intelligence community the decision prompted by the Dreyfus affair to strip the military of its domestic counter-espionage role bred lasting resentment. The army-linked secret service, of which the DGSE was the heir, jostled continuously with its civilian counter-intelligence rival (now the DST), which gave as good as it got.

Like Marion, Bonnet had to sit through a monologue, a two- hour denunciation of French meddling in Lebanon by General Mohamed Al-Khuli, the head of Syria's élite secret service, the air force intelligence corps. Relations between the two men soon warmed, however, and the heavily built general, friend and personal adviser to President al-Assad, pulled on a cigar as he took Bonnet for a stroll through the streets of Damascus, surrounded, Bonnet remembered, ‘by his likeable mates with bulges at their sides’. In the Omayyad Mosque, he pointed out the mosaics to Bonnet, as their escort, minus shoes but still with bulges under their jackets, strolled nearby.

Bonnet was evasive about the other figures he met in Damascus on his visits in 1983 and 1985. He admitted to seeing ‘people from the Abu Nidal group – not unpleasant but stirred up. People who have an unrealistic vision.’ But he denied meeting Abu Nidal himself. It seems surprising, however, that the head of France's DST, on a visit to the Syrian capital to see General Al-Khuli, should have to deal with an obscure subordinate of Abu Nidal's. The fact that in 1985 Abu Nidal sent Bonnet a personal message of sympathy, verbally and through an intermediary, on his dismissal from the DST – ‘You have left but you remain our friend’ – would suggest otherwise.20

Like Marion, Bonnet claimed credit for a two-year pause in Syrian-backed terrorist attacks in France, which by his own admission was won on entirely selfish terms: ‘The terrorist attacks continued in other countries, but France was the only one that was spared. The truce was based on balanced relations – an exchange of information and a mutual non-aggression pact with no attacks on France and French interests abroad. At the same time, the message was: “If you conduct operations against your opponents, I don't care as long as it's not in France.” The Arabs were interested in information about their opposition figures in France. But I gave nothing that led to anyone's death. I have no deaths on my conscience.’²¹

Yet again, Carlos was not part of the deal. ‘Operationally, Carlos was of no interest. I was more concerned by Soviet spying,’ Bonnet recalled. ‘When I asked Al-Khuli about Carlos, he told me: “Don't get excited about a guy who represents nothing.” Palestinian groups told me that Carlos was completely wrecked by drugs and alcohol. Abu Nidal's people said the same thing.’²²

Unoperational, and addicted to drink and drugs. Not a flattering portrait. Nor an accurate one. Both Marion and Bonnet's diplomatic efforts were missed opportunities to restrain the hand guiding Carlos. The Stasi files spotlight Rifaat al-Assad, General Al-Khuli and his deputy Haitham Sa'id as Carlos's direct contacts in Syrian intelligence from the mid-1970s onwards.

Some eighteen months after first visiting East Berlin, Carlos had established direct contact with the Syrian ambassador to ask for help. In the winter of 1980 the ambassador received Carlos, his wife Magdalena Kopp and Johannes Weinrich – all of whom carried Syrian diplomatic passports – for a half-hour interview in his office. After the meeting, the ambassador ordered the third secretary in charge of security, Nabil Shritah, to ‘look after’ the group. Soon afterwards, the Syrian Foreign Minister sent a coded telegram from Damascus ordering the embassy to give Carlos support.23

The thirty-year-old Nabil Shritah served as President al-Assad's interpreter during the head of state's visits to German-speaking countries, but in the eyes of the East German Stasi Shritah was a Syrian spy. The tasks that Carlos and Weinrich requested of him were initially mundane. Letters of recommendation for visas to Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia. Currency swaps, hotel and car-hire bookings. Weinrich's accounts detail various sums of money given to him by the diplomat. A few days after the first meeting with the Syrian ambassador in East Berlin, Weinrich asked Shritah to store a Samsonite suitcase containing guns and explosives packed in perfume boxes. The ambassador, Weinrich said, had told him he had no objections. Later, Weinrich's armoury of submachine-guns, automatic pistols, ammunition, detonators and other items was placed in a large safe in Shritah's office. Weinrich helped himself from it once a month.

Weinrich was always sure of a warm welcome at the Syrian embassy. He was on first-name terms with the ambassador, Amin Askari (and from 1981 onwards his successor Faisal Summak), who served as Carlos's intermediary with Rifaat al-Assad. In a letter to Carlos, Weinrich wrote that to establish contact with Rifaat he was supposed to call someone in the latter's office in Damascus and say: ‘I am Steve [one of Weinrich's aliases] from Carlos. Best regards from Amin Askari, Germany.’²⁴

The explosives that the Stasi had taken from Weinrich at East Berlin's airport on 31 May 1982 – prompting Weinrich's declaration that Carlos was waging ‘a dirty, private war with France’ – had sent alarm bells ringing. The explosives, neatly wrapped in small packs, were analysed by the Stasi's Operative Technical Sector, which identified them as Nitropenta weighing in at 24.38 kilos. The Stasi concluded the Nitropenta had been supplied by the Securitate, the Romanian political police. At tense meetings with Major Voigt, head of the Stasi's counter-terrorism section, Weinrich repeatedly demanded his property back. But he refused to enlighten the East Germans on how the explosives might be used, beyond saying that they would be shared out among ‘liberation movements’.

Irked by Weinrich's refusal to cooperate, Voigt ordered junior officer Borostowski to search his room at the Hotel Metropol. There were plenty of clues as to how the explosives might be used in Weinrich's briefcase. Plans of the Maison de France, which housed the French consulate and a cultural centre on West Berlin's smartest avenue, the Kurfürstendamm. Together with notes in Weinrich's hand detailing the results of surveillance of the consulate by two members of the group. Other searches revealed plans for an attack on the home of the general commanding French troops stationed in West Berlin, a kidnap in Beirut, the blowing up of a university building and the Hotel Méxridien in the French Riviera capital Nice, attacks on the French and American embassies in Beirut, and the French embassy in Bonn.25

Carlos's private army was so large and well deployed that it could contemplate more or less simultaneous attacks in both Western Europe and the Middle East. The time-consuming process of watching the three embassies in Beirut and Bonn had already been undertaken by members of the organisation. Borostowski reported in a prophetic memo: ‘As far as other attacks are concerned, the plan is for the gang in all cases to free its two members [Kopp and Bréguet] through pressure … The longer their imprisonment lasts, the more brutal must the attacks be … The group has the intention of carrying out actions until the prisoners are released.’²⁶

Carlos's organisation suffered its first defection in mid-1983 when the Kurdish refugee Jamal al-Kurdi turned his back on the group after he was arrested in Switzerland as an illegal immigrant. Since 1979, when he had refused to assassinate the journalist who had interviewed Carlos for Al Watan al Arabi, al-Kurdi had refused to carry out several other operations for Carlos. Unconfirmed reports reached Weinrich that al-Kurdi had betrayed the organisation in testimony to Swiss authorities, because he feared that he would become the target of reprisals. But the news did not worry the organisation unduly, because it was felt that al-Kurdi did not know enough about its workings to put it in jeopardy. Similarly, the Stasi, which found out about al-Kurdi through its surveillance of Weinrich, concluded that there was little risk that East Germany would be identified as one of the group's safe havens.

After more than a year's lobbying by Weinrich, Major Voigt finally ordered Borostowski in August 1983 to fetch the Nitropenta explosives from the Stasi's arms store where they had been placed and return them to Weinrich. This was despite Borostowski's warning of future attacks, and in violation of the usual practice whereby explosives seized by the Stasi were destroyed. Weinrich recovered his precious consignment with only a cautionary word from the Stasi: he must not use the explosives in a way that might allow Western nations to track any member of the Carlos group down to East Germany. On the evening of 21 August 1983 Weinrich added the explosives, together with a detonator, to his armoury in the Syrian embassy.

The previous morning one of Carlos's associates in Damascus, Mustafa Ahmed El Sibai, had flown from the Syrian capital to Berlin-Schönefeld airport. The Lebanese-born Sibai then checked in at the Metropol Hotel in East Berlin, conveniently situated across a leafy square from the Friedrichstrasse station. He was given room 1108, two doors down the corridor from Weinrich's room.27 Sibai's travel plans were already known to the Stasi, which had been tipped off a day earlier by the Hungarian secret service in a telegram about Sibai, branded the ‘Kamikaze candidate’. A few days earlier Carlos's Syrian lieutenant, Ali Al Issawe, had taken a room at East Berlin's Palast Hotel.

On the morning of 25 August Weinrich called again at the Syrian embassy just behind the ruined Reichstag building. He asked Nabil Shritah, the third secretary in charge of security, to fetch the brown leather bag containing the Nitropenta explosives from the big safe in his office. Weinrich then asked a favour: would the third secretary ferry the bag across the Berlin Wall? Uncertain as to how far he should go in helping Weinrich, Shritah sought advice from Ambassador Summak. The ambassador was unhelpful, telling Shritah that it was his affair. Shritah refused the request.

But Weinrich had little difficulty finding another courier. Reluctant to walk even a short distance carrying the heavy explosives, Carlos's second-in-command took a taxi to the Friedrichstrasse station, a key link between East and West Berlin in both fact and fiction. The man he had picked as his alternate courier, Issawe, was awaiting him. Moments later, Issawe crossed unchallenged into West Berlin with the explosives. Issawe had used a Syrian diplomatic passport. Shortly after Issawe had walked through the heavily guarded border, he met another member of Carlos's organisation, Sibai, who had previously crossed over into West Berlin.

During the morning of 25 August someone on the third floor of the Maison de France, where the cultural centre, offices and a restaurant were located, saw a well-dressed man, carrying a loud, fluorescent-coloured travel bag, pressing to his chest something wrapped in brown paper. The same figure was spotted a short time later on the fourth floor, which was virtually empty because of maintenance work.

At twenty minutes past eleven an explosion tore the roof off the Maison de France, destroyed the fourth floor, where the bomb had been left, and caused part of the building to collapse. Michael Haritz, who a few days earlier had joined the Youth for Peace church group and was about to deliver a petition to the French consul protesting against French nuclear tests in the South Pacific, was buried alive under the ceiling of the third floor. The twenty- six-year-old Haritz died of asphyxiation. Twenty-two other people who were in the building and in the street below, including a baby girl and a five-year-old boy, were wounded by flying blocks of concrete, shards of glass and debris.

Twenty-five minutes after the blast, which was later estimated by police as involving explosives weighing between twenty and thirty kilos, Sibai, who had planted the device, and Issawe crossed back from West to East Berlin at the Friedrichstrasse station. At lunchtime, Weinrich again visited the Syrian embassy in East Berlin. He told Shritah to listen to the one o'clock news bulletin on the radio. ‘That's my work,’ Weinrich smirked when the bombing was reported.28

On 1 September Carlos wrote a letter, in English, which he had an emissary of his organisation deliver a few days later to the West German embassy in Saudi Arabia. The threat he made to the West German Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann echoed the threat made to France's Interior Minister Gaston Defferre soon after Magdalena Kopp and Bruno Bréguet were arrested in Paris:

Your Excellency,

In the name of our Central Leadership:

1) We have destroyed the French Consulate in West Berlin at llh50 on 25th August last. This operation enters in the cadre of the armed conflict imposed upon us by the French Regime. A drawing and some explanations regarding the operation are attachéd.

2) The choice of West Berlin is a warning to desist from the activities engaged by your predecessor against our organisation. Mrs Gabrielle Krocher-Tiedemann, who has never being (sic) a member of our organisation, is being extradited by Federal Germany for her presumed involvement in the OPEC operation of 21st December, 1975. Any judicial or police initiative against Mrs Kröcher-Tiedemann (or against anybody else) on the grounds of presumed or actual involvement in the activities of our organisation would be considered a wanton aggression to which we would answer accordingly.

For the Organisation of the Arab Armed Struggle – Arm of the Arab Revolution:

Carlos

As usual, Carlos added his thumbprints below the signature. He also slipped into the envelope, in case there were any doubts as to the veracity of the claim, a plan he had drawn of the fourth floor of the Maison de France. Entitled Sketch of the 4th floor at time of explosion, it was a precise drawing, with captions including ‘Toilet (locked)’ and ‘Locked glass doors to empty art gallery’. An arrow pointed to ‘Smaller storage room’, with the words ‘25kg of high power plastic explosive placed here’.

With Syrian help, a chivalrous Carlos had struck a blow not only for the jailed Kopp and Bréguet – part of what Carlos called ‘the armed conflict imposed on us by the French Regime’ — but also for his female comrade Kröcxher-Tiedemann. Two months earlier public prosecutors in the West German city of Cologne had requested that Kröcher-Tiedemann be extradited from Switzerland, where she was imprisoned. As was her habit when cornered, she and an accomplice had started a gunfight when Swiss police had stopped her as she crossed the border from France in December 1977. Two border guards were wounded before Kröcher-Tiedemann and her accomplice surrendered. The Cologne public prosecutors wanted her to be extradited so that she could be tried in West Germany for her two murders in the opening minutes of the OPEC raid. Eventually, Kröcher- Tiedemann did walk free but not because of Carlos's intervention. Witnesses refused to testify about the Vienna killings at her trial in 1992 and the court in Cologne was forced to release her.

From Belgrade, where he had flown two days after the Maison de France bombing, Weinrich (alias Peter) sent an account of the attack to Carlos (alias Michel), who was in the Romanian capital Bucharest. Under the heading ‘Berlin Operation’, Weinrich wrote: ‘The operation had a greater impact than I'd expected. I send you some pictures.’ The dispatch, a twenty-seven-page round-up of activities past, present and future, reflected Weinrich's self- confidence. ‘[The Palestinians] known that you are in Bucharest, I learned this from their questions about you. My reply was: “We are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. People can find us only in the underground.”’ Weinrich concluded his letter with the words: ‘Dear Michel, I try to keep everything around here under control. I want to meet you, the sooner the better. Please take care of yourself and the comrades. We need everybody … a big kiss for you, yours, Peter.’29

Marxist lawyer José Altagracia Ramírez Navas with two of the three sons he named after the father of the Bolshevik Revolution, his favourite Ilich (left) and Lenin (right), in Venezuela in 1954.

Carlos's mother Elba Maria Sánchez, who would take him to mass while her husbands back was turned. According to a friend, Elba was ‘the only thing Carlos really loved’.

On the eve of Carlos's first trial since his capture after two decades on the run, Ramírez Navas holds a photograph which his son sent him from a Paris jail.

‘E1 Gordo’ (Fatso), the schoolboy who would answer taunts with the cry The whole world will hear of me!’, at sixteen. Ilich's identity card from the Fermin Toro school in Caracas.

Carlos photographed by French counter-espionage (the DST) in the Latin Quarter in Paris in June 1975. The service under-estimated Carlos, with fatal results in the nearby Rue Toullier a few days later.

‘Tell them I'm from Venezuela and my name is Carlos. Tell them I'm the famous Carlos.’ Carlos, minus Che Guevara beret, at Algiers airport in the last moments of the OPEC raid, the most audacious coup of his career.

Gabriele Kröcher- Tiedemann, who at Carlos's side in Vienna demonstrated how mistaken Interpol had been in describing her as ‘submissive’.

The bombing of the Paris-Toulouse Capitole express, one of Carlos's opening shots in a ‘dirty, private war’ to force the release from jail of his wife and an accomplice.

Rue Marbeuf, off the Champs-Elyséees avenue, devastated by a car bomb on 22 April 1982, the day set for the trial of Carlos's partners. ‘Carlos's love story with Magdalena Kopp costs France a great deal,’ an aide to President Mitterand noted in his diary.

‘Usually, I fire three bullets in the nose which kills immediately’. Carlos on his attempt to murder the president of Marks and Spencer, Joseph Edward Sieff, pictured recovering on his hospital bed with his wife.

Louis Delamare, France's brave ambassador to Beirut, was ambushed and assassinated in September 1981. French intelligence hunted down the murderers, and granted itself a licence to kill in a mission that has remained secret until now.

Two French counter espionage officers sent to their deaths in the Rue Toullier blunder which humiliated the DST: Algerian war veteran Raymond Dous (left) and young recruit Jean Donatini (right).

Count Jacques Senard, the French ambassador to The Hague, taken hostage by the Japanese Red Army in an operation which Carlos helped to plan. ‘I don't understand why the Japanese didn't kill their hostages one by one.’ Carlos commented later.

Carlos's right-hand man Johannes Weinrich, described by the Stasi as a coward and ‘a soft-boiled egg’, five months into detention at a Berlin prison after he was captured in Aden.

‘My character is simple. I am a father first and foremost.’ Mr and Mrs Ramírez Sánchez (alias Carlos and Magdalena Kopp) and their daughter Elbita.

The Jackal's lair. The Bayswater home of Angela Otaola, who described Carlos as ‘a friend – well, a former friend now’ after a bag he had asked her to keep for him was found to contain Semtex explosives, hand grenades, pistols and rubber coshes.

Carlos lived like a man of the world in Hungary, and the secret service supplied him with women behind Kopp's back. The service feared Carlos's associates would declare ‘Allah's revenge’ on Hungary if something happened to him.

Carlos's villa on the Hill of Roses in Budapest, from which he was allowed to run a private army with bases across the Soviet bloc.

Carlos's last refuge in the Sudanese capital Khartoum. ‘He was a very lovable guy,’ a neighbour said of him. ‘Entertaining and nice to everybody.’

Carlos's living room. His high-ranking friends ensured a generous supply of alcohol in a country ruled by a military dictatorship which had turned Sudan into a Moslem fundamentalist bastion.

Reading matter for the world's most wanted man, who kept himself well-informed on current affairs and the Arab-Israeli dispute.

A passport photograph of Carlos, supplied by Venezuelan police to the French DST in 1975 after the Rue Toullier killings.

The photograph on one of Carlos's false passports, with which he posed as a Peruvian economist by the name of Carlos Martinez Torres.

A Polaroid snap of Carlos in his Paris jail cell, cheerful and dapper before his trial. The Spanish message translates as: ‘For my dear old man from a son and comrade.’