From today's viewpoint, everything looks different. At the time, we were all scared that by putting too much pressure on the group, we would become victims.
—Stasi Colonel Günter Jäckel
Ever since Carlos had taken the oil ministers hostage in Vienna, Colonel Qathafi had been generous in his support. While Carlos was still based in South Yemen in 1979, the Libyan leader had ordered a high-ranking Libyan army officer, Major Abdullah Zekri, to approach Weinrich.1 The intermediary the Libyan used was a senior official at the South Yemeni Foreign Ministry, Abdel Mohsen Assaf, who had helped Carlos's group settle in the country and had since given several of Carlos's associates diplomatic passports. Carlos had been invited to Tripoli where he was welcomed by intelligence chiefs and Qathafi himself. The Stasi files noted that Carlos met Qathafi on several occasions.
Funds, weapons and equipment were all supplied to Carlos by the Libyans. In one consignment in 1980, they delivered Ingram submachine-guns, pistols fitted with silencers, and hand-grenades.2 Inventories drawn up by Carlos and Weinrich also refer to receivers for Libyan remote-control detonators, timers and other weapons. In return, Carlos's organisation was drafted in to help Qathafi's purge of ‘stray dogs’, political opponents in exile. In one of his earliest missions for Qathafi, Carlos sent several subordinates to Switzerland to prepare the ground for an attack on a leading critic of the Tripoli régime, Omar Yahiah. Yahiah was placed under surveillance for several days at his villa on the edge of Lake Geneva, but the assassination never took place.
Qathafi also requested attacks on US and Israeli military and diplomatic targets, and the assassination of Saudi Arabian officials including diplomats in Paris. In May 1981, Carlos organised several surveillance operations for the Libyans in Beirut, where potential targets included the US and French embassies. Few attacks were carried out, however, and for a time Carlos and the Libyan Colonel slowly drifted apart. It is possible that Carlos's prices were too high. Tripoli was unenthusiastic about Carlos's idea of assassinating President Reagan for a hundred million dollars, an operation which would have involved a getaway submarine.
But at one of his regular meetings with Weinrich in East Berlin in 1983, an officer of the Libyan secret service, Major Salem Abu Shreda, took Carlos's lieutenant to task. The Major reproached Weinrich for not working for Tripoli any more. The Major promised that if the group agreed to carry out attacks for Tripoli, it would obtain significant resources from Libya and its intelligence service. ‘More than from Syria, Yemen and Moscow put together,’ the Libyan officer told Weinrich.
This alluring offer persuaded Carlos to work again for Qathafi. The Saudi ambassador to Greece narrowly escaped death in June when a team sent by Carlos, at the behest of Libyan intelligence, bombed his convoy in Athens. A car crammed with explosives blew up as the Saudi ambassador's motorcade sped by. ‘Why the two in the first car were not killed on the spot is strange. Maybe George [one of the members of Carlos's group] pushed a fraction of a second too early,’ Weinrich wrote to Carlos, adding hopefully: ‘Anyway perhaps they are killed.’3 Weinrich had scrutinised the newspapers hoping to supply Carlos with press cuttings, and photographs of the damage: ‘The newspapers lie about the ambassador, saying that he took extra security steps [such] as never going by car to the embassy but leaving it one km away and approaching on foot. A clear provocation.’ Partly because of the failed attack, Carlos's relations with Tripoli worsened in the months that followed.
*
In his lengthy letter to Carlos following the Maison de France bombing, Weinrich could hardly contain his glee at having, he thought, pulled the wool over the Stasi's eyes. Major Helmut Voigt ‘was always warning us not to have an operation in the west … directly from east and returning,’ Weinrich wrote to Carlos in his rudimentary English. ‘We always denied and kept hidden how we transported the bag to the west. They seemed to me not to be sure if we have done it … We have always done what we wanted, even if they have tried to sabotage our activities. It will perhaps serve them as a lesson when they will have the official confirmation that it was us. I don't have the intention of using Berlin for very long and that will be the best of the lessons I could give them.’4
So full of fight was Weinrich that he drew up a list, code-named Waterloo, of more French targets: the French military command and the French library in West Berlin, the French consulate in Düsseldorf, and in Switzerland the French embassy in Berne and the French consulate in Zurich. Weinrich's upbeat letter to Carlos was tempered only by a brief note of concern at the Stasi's reaction: ‘It seems obvious that their aggressive attitude could lead them to betray us.’ But the overly confident Weinrich quickly dismissed this.
Carlos's dirty, private war to free Kopp and Bréguet, so far removed from his proclaimed ideal of world revolution as endorsed by the Stasi in its first reports on him, irritated the secret police. As the Stasi's day-to-day contact, Weinrich had since mid-1982 made himself increasingly unpopular with his lengthening list of demands: arms, explosives, travel documents, visas for contacts visiting East Berlin, logistical assistance for ferrying arms across the Iron Curtain, safe houses, and guarantees of protection and asylum in East Germany should the ‘enemy’ launch reprisals. After a confrontation with Major Voigt in October 1982 Weinrich had scrawled furiously in his notebook: ‘If the time comes, where is my submachine-gun and my silencer?’5
The more Weinrich demanded, the more the Stasi judged his requests a threat to the security of the East German state and refused them. Meetings turned acrimonious, with Weinrich accusing his hosts of weakness as they did not take up his suggestion that the Stasi should strike against NATO bases in West Germany. ‘If you don't want us, say it: “Leave!”’ he yelled. Apparently, an impatient Voigt was taking less and less care to mask his true feelings for Carlos's right-hand man whom he called ‘a political nutcase and a megalomaniac’.
The East Germans rebuked the Carlos group for its lack of caution, and its personally motivated attacks which did not even pay lip service to the revolutionary ideology officially espoused by the Communist state. The Stasi concluded that the group was completely uncontrollable, due to the personality of Carlos who was judged ‘brutal and contemptuous of human life’. This was an authoritative criticism, coming from a Soviet bloc secret service with a notoriety second only to that of the KGB. The East Germans noted Carlos's self-assurance based on ‘an over-estimation of his capacities’, and his fondness of appearing in public. In certain circumstances he was liable to lose all self-control and became totally unpredictable.
‘Carlos was a totally destructive person. I'm not sure that he had a real ideology,’ Stasi General Markus Wolf reflected years later. ‘Perhaps he had one at an earlier stage but now his actions were only a means to destroy. I make a distinction between Carlos and Che Guevara: although I don't think that Che was helpful or had a chance of success, his way was more thought out and more honourable than Carlos's.’6
For all Weinrich's attempts at keeping the group's involvement secret, it did not take the Stasi long to find out the truth about the bombing of the Maison de France in August 1983, and the Syrians’ role in harbouring the explosives. A report signed by Voigt drew the unavoidable conclusion: ‘The West Berlin attack has shown that the Carlos group uses the resources put at its disposal for terrorist ends although we have informed it of our security problems. It will therefore be necessary to reinforce measures of control and surveillance and to continue requiring that this group respect discipline.’
Surprisingly, the Stasi held back from expelling Weinrich and his partners.7 The strongest action it took was to seize the gun he carried without a licence. The gun was later returned to Weinrich who placed it in the safe at the Syrian embassy. The Stasi did however tighten surveillance of the rebellious organisation. The East Germans resorted to a tactic that mirrored the handsome Romeo spies employed to such good effect by General Wolf in foreign intelligence-gathering – the closest that spying, labelled the world's second oldest profession, came to what is reputedly the oldest, prostitution.
The tailing of Carlos's two lieutenants, Weinrich and Issawe, revealed that they had several East German lovers. The two men divulged nothing about their real activities to their girlfriends, posing instead as businessmen. Having uncovered these relationships, the Stasi decided to exploit them. Stasi officers approached several of the women and attempted to recruit them as agents. One was a young East German, Wilhelmine Götting. But a stratagem which worked wonders in the heart of the West German government or at NATO headquarters in Brussels made no headway in East Germany. Worse, it backfired on the Stasi. Gotting fell for Carlos's talk of world revolution and instead became a fully-fledged member of the group and, effectively, Weinrich's secretary.
Carlos's realisation that the Stasi had tried to penetrate his network drastically worsened relations between the two. An incensed Carlos began to consider the East Germans potential enemies. He threatened to occupy the East German embassy in Paris if the Stasi did not help him win freedom for Kopp and Breguet. Security at that embassy was reinforced. Shortly afterwards, Weinrich drafted plans for a bomb or machine-gun attack on a target within East Berlin. The plans were discovered by the Stasi during a routine check of Weinrich's belongings.
The Stasi took the threat seriously, and many Stasi files show that the all-powerful secret police exaggerated, intentionally or not, the importance and the true capabilities of the Carlos group, and especially its ability to strike East German interests. ‘From today's viewpoint, everything looks different,’ Jäckel testified.8 ‘At the time, we were all scared that by putting too much pressure on the group, we would become victims … In general, our aim was to temper the group, even verbally. Neither Weinrich nor Issawe would stray from their pig-headed attitude.’ A mighty security service, feared at home and abroad, had been brought to its knees by the threats of a small private army for hire.
In late December 1983 Weinrich wrote a short phrase in his pidgin English in his notebook. ‘The action: to blow Marseille.’ The jotting was linked to the letter that Carlos had sent French Interior Minister Gaston Defferre after the arrest of Magdalena Kopp and Bruno Bréguet in February 1982. The proposed operation centred on the Mediterranean port-city where Defferre served as mayor.
The Paris-bound, high-speed Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) which pulled out of Marseille's recently opened Saint-Charles station early in the evening on the last day of 1983 was almost empty. Three passengers consoled themselves with a drink in the bar of the sleek train. The hostesses wished everyone, a little early, a happy New Year. None of the dozen travellers in carriage number three had noticed the person who had lifted a heavy suitcase on to a luggage rack before slipping away.
At 7.43 p.m., as the TGV neared the sleepy town of Tain- l'Hermitage in the Rhone Valley, the bomb exploded. The explosive ripped wide holes through the roof and the sides of carriage number three. Had the bomb gone off thirty-five seconds earlier, it would have exploded just as the train passed another TGV hurtling in the opposite direction towards Marseille at 130 kilometres an hour. Designed to resist ‘normal’ accidents such as a derailing or an external shock, the carriage became a jagged-edged mess of curled steel, upturned seats, glass and pools of blood through which the hostesses gingerly picked their way to give a dozen injured passengers first-aid. Two women died instantly, including the wife of an entrepreneur who a day later also died of his injuries without having regained consciousness.
At 8.05 p.m. the TGV from Paris halted beneath the huge glass roof of the Saint-Charles station in Marseille. Well-wishers, many of them North Africans who had settled in the port-city, surged forward to greet the new arrivals. Four minutes later, an explosion in the left-luggage area blew to pieces two immigrants who had been walking past, an Algerian and a Yugoslav, and injured another thirty-four people. In the main hall a trail of blood streaked around the Christmas tree heavy with flashing lights and decorations. The station clock froze.
Both the place and timing of the two bombs, carried out with sophisticated, military-type high-explosive devices to ensure maximum casualties, left the French government with few doubts as to whom the bloody message was addressed. The bombs had exploded as President Mitterrand appeared on television to deliver his traditional New Year address to the nation. As he had done after the bombing of the Capitole train in March of the previous year, Interior Minister Defferre responded with a promise that security on trains would be strengthened, this time with extra police accompanying passengers.
According to Magdalena Kopp, both bombs were planted by Weinrich.9 The day after the bombings Weinrich travelled from Zurich to Budapest, using a false British passport in the name of Gerald Anthony Allen. Anxious as ever to sign his deeds, Carlos claimed credit for the explosions in the name of the Organisation of Arab Armed Struggle no less than three times. Letters were sent to the Paris and West Berlin offices of the news agency Agence France-Presse, and to the Reuters office in Tripoli in northern Lebanon. In his schoolboy handwriting, Carlos passed the attacks off as revenge for a raid the previous month by French Super-Etendard jets on a training camp for Moslem militias in Baalbek in eastern Lebanon. The French military had been riven by recrimination after the bombing run because it had resulted in fewer casualties than had been hoped for. But there were more than enough victims to sting Carlos into action. Or so he said in his letters: ‘We will not tolerate our children being the only ones to cry for the blood of the martyrs of Baalbek.’ A day later a bomb wrecked the French cultural centre in Tripoli. The attack was later attributed to the Carlos group.
Throwing caution aside, Carlos (or a member of his group) had posted his letter to the West Berlin office of Agence France-Presse from East Berlin. This forced Honecker's government to deny vigorously that Carlos was in East Berlin. However, the Stasi was still unsure how it should treat the Carlos organisation. After Weinrich and Issawe bragged in front of Stasi officers of supposed relations with the Soviet Union, the East Germans tried to verify the claims. In February 1984 the Stasi sent a message to the KGB asking for any information it might have on Carlos. The request went unanswered.10
By May 1984 the Stasi's counter-terrorism section had good reason to feel even less well disposed towards Carlos. Another wing of the Ministry of State Security, the HAIII division in charge of spying within West Germany, discovered that the ‘enemy’ was well aware of Carlos's bases in East Berlin and other Soviet bloc capitals.11 The Stasi now knew that at any moment it might be exposed to Western public opinion as Carlos's protector – a threat that hung like a sword of Damocles over the East German secret police.
Fear of a public reprimand by the West was common to all Carlos's Communist sponsors, and was fanned by the intervention of the United States administration in 1984. Relations between Washington and the East bloc had recently begun to thaw as President Reagan gradually softened his ‘evil empire’ stance. Eastern European countries were pressing the United States to boost long-neglected economic ties. The State Department was willing to lower barriers to closer political and trade links. But not at any price.
In mid-1984 the ambassadors to Washington of five Warsaw Pact countries — Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Romania – were summoned to the State Department, to meet Mark Palmer, deputy assistant secretary responsible for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. What he had to say cast a chill over his guests. The United States, Palmer reported, had discovered that Carlos and other guerrillas were being protected and given asylum by the countries the ambassadors represented. No East bloc country should expect better relations with Washington unless it put a stop to sponsorship of international terrorists and to spying activities. For Palmer, Carlos was a symbol of the Soviet bloc's support for terrorism.
Several of the ambassadors, who had listened to Palmer's comments in stony-faced silence, were quick to deny his allegations. Palmer had very strong feelings about the issue, and he took malicious pleasure in retorting: ‘These denials are, quite simply, totally unacceptable and unjustifiable. If your governments want a balanced, positive relationship with the United States, then they must stop protecting terrorists.’ The ambassadors never did make such a commitment to Palmer. ‘The East Europeans were very elusive, they would never say that such protection would be halted,’ Palmer recalled. ‘But it wasn't as if we were making a huge request. There were bigger things we wanted of these countries, such as that they change their spots and move from Communism to democracy.’12
Palmer kept the source of his information about Carlos secret, but it was the CIA which had told him that it had very detailed intelligence about Carlos's movements, down to details about the hotels at which he stayed during his visits to Eastern European countries. It is possible that the agency benefited from information passed on by the West German secret service. Palmer suggested to his superiors that such intelligence be used to capture Carlos, or, failing that, to assassinate him. ‘I've always felt that the failure to do something against a Hitler, a Stalin or a Saddam Hussein should teach us something,’ Palmer explained. ‘Carlos is a criminal. Civilisation needs to protect itself from people like that. It needs the political will and the technical means to remove them.’13 But although the CIA was then directed by Bill Casey, who during his tenure spearheaded an aggressive expansion of clandestine activities, the plan was turned down. The agency argued that such a mission had no chance of success, and that the American people would in any case not support it.
The CIA's refusal to intervene echoed the stance of another Western intelligence service which had also become aware of Carlos's bases. Like the CIA, the British MI6 decided to take no action. ‘If we had gone in to East Berlin to get Carlos, we would have started a world war,’ an MI6 member recalled. ‘If we had gone in SAS-like we wouldn't have got out again. Or we would have risked the plane getting shot down. You couldn't seize Carlos there like the ex-Nazis in Bolivia. We had, or we thought we had, our hands tied.’
On 22 September 1984 the patience of the Stasi finally snapped. Its officers informed Weinrich that he was banned from East German soil. The official reason was ‘the dangers and risks which might threaten the security of the German Democratic Republic’.14 Carlos, however, had no intention of giving up on East Berlin. Told of the ban, Carlos swiftly substituted Weinrich, his second- in-command, with Issawe, the recruit from Syrian intelligence. Just as promptly, the Stasi threatened to ban Issawe too. The East Germans told Issawe that his presence would be tolerated only if he could prove that he was a guest of the Syrian or any other embassy.
Following the reproaches made to their ambassadors by Mark Palmer in Washington, an increasing swathe of East European states cold-shouldered Carlos. His relations with Romania had deteriorated since the bombing of Radio Free Europe. The Sec- uritate did ask Carlos to arrange the murder of the manager of the giant French aluminium firm Pechiney in Greece — ‘I like it,’ chirped Weinrich in a letter to Carlos15 — and to attack the French embassy in Athens, but neither request was followed up. By 1984 Carlos's emissaries in Bucharest were complaining of intense surveillance in the Romanian capital. In April 1985 Czechoslovakia declared itself out of bounds to the Carlos group. As the doors of the East bloc started closing on him, Carlos returned to one of his first sanctuaries, the South Yemeni capital Aden, for a few days. He took part in a meeting of Palestinian extremists at the Hotel Frantel, but he had long lost what little he ever had in common with the fedayeen.
Early in the morning of 4 May 1985 Jacques Verges arrived at the gates of the Fleury-Merogis women's prison on the outskirts of Paris clutching a large suitcase. The lawyer had come to collect thirty-six-year-old Magdalena Kopp — ‘my favourite client alongside Klaus Barbie’ – who was due out that morning. Her detention had caused bloody havoc in the world outside, but in jail Kopp had been a model prisoner and earned maximum remission for her demure behaviour.
Unknown to Vergès, French counter-espionage had also been preparing for Kopp's release. The previous day the DST head Yves Bonnet received a call from police chief Pierre Verbrugghe, appointed two years earlier by President Mitterrand with antiterrorism as his priority.
‘Magdalena Kopp has been granted remission. She's out tomorrow. We don't want her in France,’ Verbrugghe told Bonnet.
‘That's fine by me but she has the right to stay.’
‘She has to go.’
‘Then we won't do it by the book. We'll grab her as she comes out of the jail and we'll send her to West Germany.’
‘Okay.’
‘But what if she comes back?’ asked Bonnet.
‘Never mind. It won't be your fault.’
Bonnet immediately called his counterpart at West German counter-intelligence in Bonn, the BfV (Bundesamt fur Ver- fassungsschutz, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution) to announce that he would be sending a parcel the next day, ‘a parcel called Magdalena’. The BfV chief said that she would be made welcome, but only on one condition. ‘I'll take your girl but not before nine o'clock in the evening. We don't want her in broad daylight.’
On the day of her release Magdalena Kopp was woken an hour earlier than usual. She had been due to leave the prison at eight o'clock, and was surprised to hear from her wardens that she would be set free earlier than scheduled. Another surprise awaited her when, clutching her few belongings and waiting for the metal gate to swing open, two men and a woman jumped on her, pinned her arms to her body and thrust her into a waiting car. Too bewildered to react, Kopp offered no resistance. She was forced down, head out of sight, on to the back seat of the car as it sped out of the prison, followed by two other cars. She did not see Vergès, suitcase in hand, standing waiting for her.
A safe distance away from the prison, Kopp's captors, officers of the DST, introduced themselves and revealed that their orders were to take her to Hoffenburg in West Germany. But they had fourteen hours to waste before parting company with her. Kopp was treated to a snail's-pace crawl around the Paris suburbs. The officers drove all day, going around in circles, doubling back on their route, stopping for snacks. Bonnet had feared that Kopp might lodge a complaint accusing the DST of kidnapping, torture, or even rape. ‘I put the woman in the team so that she would not accuse us of rape because it would have to be really perverse to rape her with a woman present,’ Bonnet explained.16
He need not have worried. Kopp was quiet throughout the long drive, and made no formal complaint after she was finally handed over to West German police at nightfall. She was briefly held for questioning, then allowed to go and stay with her mother, Rosina, in the town of Neu-Ulm where she had been born. On the evening of Kopp's arrival at her mother's house, the telephone rang; Carlos had already tracked her down and was calling to find out how she was. ‘It was a wonderful time,’ Rosina recalled. ‘She stayed here and relaxed. She had to get a new driver's licence and a passport because everything was gone. We rode our bikes together to my husband's grave. I hoped she would stay but she said she had to go to Frankfurt. I assumed she had gone back to Carlos.’17 Not that the two women ever talked about the man in Magdalena's life. They had a tacit understanding not to.
Rosina had guessed correctly, but Frankfurt was not Magdalena's final destination. Carlos, who was visiting Damascus at the time, ordered Issawe to accompany her to the Syrian capital. All Carlos's bombing and shooting frenzy had achieved was to knock a year off his wife's sentence. Five months later, in September, Kopp's erstwhile partner in crime Bruno Bréguet was also released before completing his sentence, for ‘excellent behaviour’ in detention during which he had taken several examinations to qualify as a draughtsman and geometer. Bréguet's refusal to rejoin Carlos, despite the ‘dirty, private war’ waged partly on his behalf, must have tasted of ingratitude to the group's leader. Like Kopp, Bréguet returned to his partner, a German woman with whom he had been living before his arrest, in Lugano.
After meeting his patrons in Damascus, Carlos flew back with Kopp to Budapest. But they were allowed only a few months to celebrate their reunion. In late August 1985 the US State Department stepped up the pressure on Carlos's backers, this time on Hungary in particular. In the office where the previous year he had received five Soviet bloc ambassadors, Mark Palmer met the Hungarian chargé d'affaires in Washington privately. The two men discussed bilateral relations, and it was only when they shook hands at the end of their meeting that Palmer broached the key point on his agenda. ‘Oh, by the way,’ Palmer, all smiles, casually remarked. ‘I've heard it said that Carlos was in Budapest recently. I hope that he enjoyed himself!’18
Palmer's unexpected aside stung the Hungarians into action. A few days later Carlos was notified of the State Security's decision to evict him and his organisation from their safe houses, and ban them from its territory, this time for good. Carlos's pleas fell on deaf ears. Weinrich flew to Bucharest on 4 September, followed a day later by Issawe. Kopp flew to Damascus on 13 September, and Carlos to Baghdad the following day. On 18 September a relieved Colonel Jozsef Varga of Hungary's counter-espionage unit told officers of the Stasi that Budapest was rid at last of the Carlos group.19 Romania eventually yielded to pressure from West Germany, and expelled Weinrich and Issawe.
Conscientious to the last, the Stasi officers recorded Carlos's comment on the East bloc regimes that had abandoned him: ‘The Communists are terrible, they are worse than the imperialist adversaries. The [East] German Communists are the worst.’20 The Stasi had finally shaken itself free of Carlos, a state of affairs it could have engineered many years earlier. As is to be expected from a former Stasi general, Wolf plays down the East German links with Carlos: ‘Minister Mielke was labouring under an illusion. He thought that control of the Carlos group could ensure that nothing would tie the German Democratic Republic to the group's terrorist acts in Western countries. There was no direct support from the Stasi for the group through knowledge of such terrorist acts, but of course I have to recognise the Stasi's responsibility.’21 The fact that the Stasi handed explosives back to Weinrich knowing that he planned to use them to bomb a target in West Berlin demonstrates that Wolf s assertion is untrue. Wolf s cheeks flushed when this was pointed out to him. He pleaded ignorance, and the Stasi's good faith. Wolf s prodigious memory, a vital asset in his intelligence career, was lacking in this regard: ‘With this knowledge you have now, you may say that there was complicity on the Stasi's part. But I do not think such acts were committed with the clear will of someone in the ministry to give support to terrorists. I cannot explain the reasons why the explosives were seized and then given back. I did not see details of all the activities of the counter-terrorism section.’22
Forced to abandon his bases in Eastern Europe, Carlos searched for a new refuge, just as he had done when he set up his organisation a few years earlier. He tried to improve his fraught relations with Libya, and sent Issawe to Tripoli on an exploratory mission. Issawe returned shortly afterwards with discouraging news. Carlos had been sidelined because of the influence enjoyed by the short, bald Sabri Khalil al-Banna, alias Abu Nidal, as much a recluse as Carlos was a showman. In the late 1970s, when he was under Iraqi patronage, Abu Nidal had apparently felt only respect for his colleague. ‘My comrade Carlos defies all the police forces of the world,’ Abu Nidal told an interviewer at the time. ‘With him, I support all actions directed against American imperialism, the destruction of the reactionary regime of Lebanon and of Saudi Arabia. The ultimate objective is to establish a democratic state in Palestine.’23
But halfway through 1985 Abu Nidal had shifted his faction's headquarters from Damascus to Tripoli where, as reported by the official Libyan news agency, he met Qathafi and enjoyed shelter, aid and the use of training camps in exchange for services rendered. It was Abu Nidal who elbowed Carlos out of Qathafi's favours by bad-mouthing him behind his back so as to rid himself of a rival. 24 In January 1986 a triumphant Abu Nidal praised the Libyan leader for having been ‘of great help to us … an honest man with whom we have strong ties’. To make things worse for Carlos, his tenuous link to the fight for a Palestinian homeland was fast losing credibility. In November 1985, and after the hijack of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by a Palestinian gang led by Abu Abbas had ended in the callous murder of a paraplegic Jew, Leon Klinghofer, the PLO's Yasser Arafat renounced any ‘military action’ committed by Palestinians outside Israel.
Beyond the Middle East, Carlos tried to breathe new life into relations with Cuba and the Direccion General de Inteligencia (DGI) secret service which had reached a low point in 1981 when Fidel Castro allowed the group only short stopovers on the island. In early 1982 Cuba was ready to renew links and Carlos met a DGI spy in Hungary to discuss a possible partnership. But no agreement was reached and the talks came to a sudden end.25 Carlos made another attempt to woo his Latin American cousins in the summer of 1983. Weinrich re-established relations with the DGI station chief in East Berlin, Juan Miguel Roque Ramírez, and the Cuban became the liaison officer between Carlos and Havana. The group kept Roque Ramírez informed of its activities. ‘[We] organised the Marseille explosion in answer to a French air attack on a Lebanese village,’ the Stasi files quoted Weinrich as telling Roque Ramírez in February 1984, before adding that there would be further similar actions.26 But despite a visit to Cuba which Carlos made shortly afterwards, the relationship did not improve. Unknown to Carlos, Roque Ramírez had also been passing on the information that he had gleaned from Weinrich to his colleagues at the Stasi.
The Syrians had long proved the most steadfast of Carlos's allies, and it was in Damascus that he found asylum after his expulsion from Eastern Europe. Among the honours that had in the past been showered on Carlos, according to the Stasi archives, was a six-hour private audience in 1983 with President al-Assad.27 Acting on the head of state's orders, intelligence chiefs now helped Carlos establish himself in the Syrian capital. Carlos and his partners flew in their arsenal and false papers, along with Weinrich's files and accounts.
The Syrians drove a hard bargain, and had plenty of ideas on how Carlos should repay their hospitality: strikes against opposition figures abroad, especially the Moslem Brothers in West Germany; attacks to intimidate ‘reactionary Arab régimes acting against President al-Assad’; attacks to be committed in an offensive launched jointly by Syria and Iran against Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states; and attacks against Israeli and other anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon. The Hungarian and East German archives reveal that Syria's task-list also included the kidnapping of a president (they do not say which) for a ransom of $10 million.
The sudden closure to Carlos's organisation of the Hungarian and Czech borders had caught him unprepared, forcing him to abandon sizeable sums of money in bank accounts in both countries. Carlos was in no mind to lose this wealth. On 10 June 1986 Carlos, Kopp, who was seven months pregnant at the time, and a bodyguard flew to the Czech capital Prague, carrying Syrian diplomatic passports bearing false names. But the Czech secret service soon discovered their real identities, and three days after their arrival several intelligence officers called at the married couple's hotel room. Carlos nervously smoked cigarette after cigarette as his visitors begged him to leave. The encounter was so tense that every time Carlos was about to reach in his pocket for another cigarette, he would signal to his bodyguard in case the latter concluded that he was reaching for his gun.
A telephone call to the PLO's representative in Czechoslovakia persuaded Carlos that there was no point in staying in Prague. Carlos was photographed in Kopp's company at the airport, a shot highlighting his aquiline nose and his jutting chin. Dressed in a suit and tie, the heavily built Carlos looked to all appearances like a businessman pulling a sour face after a hard day at the office as he loaded a trolley with hefty suitcases. The only giveaway was the suitcases’ contents, his customary arsenal which led to a brief dispute with the pilot before it was accepted on board the plane. The plane flew to Moscow, from where Carlos and his companions caught another flight back to the Middle East.
To casual acquaintances in the Syrian capital Damascus, Carlos introduced himself as a Mexican businessman dealing with the Arab world, although he held Syrian passports in the name of Michel Khoury and Michel Assaf. His hosts loaned him a flat with a large terrace on Al-Akram Ben Sayfi Street in the city's smart Mezzeh district. The tightly protected residential neighbourhood was home to the heavyweights of Syria's political establishment, and officers from the military political academy lived just opposite Carlos's new home.
Many streets in Mezzeh, lined with trees and jasmine bushes, were closed to non-residents. Among those living in Carlos's neighbourhood was the world's most wanted Nazi criminal, Alois Brunner, blamed for the deaths of 120,000 Jews including more than 46,000 who were deported from Salonika to Auschwitz in 1943. Like Carlos, Brunner – who once told a German interviewer ‘That junk [the Jews] deserved to die’ — was wanted by France which had twice sentenced him to death in absentia for his work as Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man.
As detailed in a rough map scrawled by Carlos, his first-floor home had a pleasant view over orchards, was down the street from a women's teaching institute, and conveniently close to the airport. The only reminder of Carlos's long-lost revolutionary ideals was the Kalashnikov – perhaps the most common firearm ever made, but snubbed by Carlos himself – carried in desultory fashion by the bodyguard who escorted him whenever he emerged from the block of flats. In the evenings, up to six bodyguards watched over him.
The Stasi files report that among the well-wishers who visited Carlos in Damascus was Vergès. The lawyer has always denied that he met Carlos in Syria or earlier. ‘Even if it were true that I had met Carlos, that would be within the framework of my profession,’ Verges once said. ‘When a woman is arrested, I have the right to see her husband. If her husband is the object of legal proceedings, I don't have the right to help him in his activity, but I have the right to meet him.’28
The East Germans were still keeping watch over Carlos and his organisation, albeit from a distance. The Stasi files record a visit which Verges is alleged to have made to Damascus in July 1986. As in the case of his visits to East Berlin, it was shrouded in secrecy and benefited from intricate precautions devised by Weinrich. Vergès sorted out the bureaucratic formalities for his journey with the Syrian ambassador to Paris and the embassy's first secretary. The plan was for the lawyer to travel under the official pretext of meeting three of his clients, Lebanese nationals living in Damascus. Vergès was told to check in at the Hotel Méridien in the city and wait for a call from Weinrich or Issawe.29
On 17 August 1986 Kopp gave birth to a daughter – in Beirut, according to French intelligence.30 Carlos named the child after his own mother and Kopp's – Elba Rosa. The words of Carlos's Lebanese friend, Assam El Jundi, may be a guide to his reaction to the birth of a baby daughter: ‘His relations with children are bizarre. When he has them before him, he seems stunned. And when a friend's children are introduced to him, he spends the best moments of his life. A mix of sorrow torn by sadness and deep pride appears in his eyes when he is with children.’31
The Nazi who had stood by Carlos ever since they met in the early 1970s, the retired Swiss banker Frangois Genoud, regularly flew to the Syrian capital to see him. The ‘Black Banker’ was an unlikely figure for the left-wing Carlos to identify with as a fellow revolutionary. Genoud helped fugitive Nazis after the war, and claimed rights on writings attributed to Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels, whom he published. He had a strong sympathy for extremist Palestinian movements – for him, Nazism was part of ‘a global war against Zionism’. Genoud himself admitted to visiting Carlos and Weinrich in Damascus, describing them as guests of the Syrian government which had welcomed them as ‘brothers of the Palestinian revolution’.32
Carlos's hungering for adventure was slowly draining out of him. Over recent years the world's press had continued to see Carlos's shadow lurking behind a host of attacks. In September 1980 it was immediately assumed that he had shot dead the ousted Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza, in the centre of Asunción in Paraguay. That same year he was credited with masterminding the hostage-taking at the United States embassy in Tehran. And in December 1981 he was believed to be about to lead a six-man commando to assassinate President Reagan. In July 1984 he was arrested by the Israelis, seized by gunboats, according to the Evening Standard, when they intercepted a ferry from Cyprus, the Alisur Blanco, on its way to Beirut. Two years later, in February 1986, his obituary was written when the Israeli newspaper Davar reported his execution and burial several feet under the sands of the Libyan desert, at the hands of Libyan agents. According to a senior Israeli military intelligence officer, General Yehoshua Saguy: ‘He knew too much, and his intimate knowledge of the involvement of Arab leaders and their security services in international terrorism posed a danger to them, so they got rid of him.’
In fact Carlos was alive but his Syrian sponsors showed less and less interest in using his private army. Over the years Carlos became resigned to the idleness of a twilight existence. As little Elbita, whose chubby features echoed those of her father, grew up, Carlos would walk her through the streets, holding her by the hand, a bodyguard trailing not far behind them. Carlos and Kopp often dined at the Golden Star restaurant on the fifteenth floor of the Cham Palace Hotel, which boasted a slowly rotating floor which gave diners a 360-degree view over the city. For a holiday, Carlos would take his family to the seaside.
The fire had long gone out of Kopp, whose telephone calls and letters to her family, including a collage of holiday snaps of Elbita playing on the beach, and Elbita blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, were intercepted by German police. ‘I'm well. Everything is well with us,’ Kopp told her sister in one call. In a letter posted from Cyprus, she wrote: ‘I now need a new pair of glasses. I'm beginning to get old.’ She may have thought the same of her husband.
Soon Carlos's hosts warned him against any temptation to break out of his domestic routine. The investigation into the bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jet over Lockerbie in Scotland in December 1988 had exposed the role believed to have been played by Syria.33 As the West put pressure on Damascus, President al-Assad tried to demonstrate that he was cold-shouldering terrorists and ordered several gangs out of the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Carlos was told that his presence in the capital would be tolerated only on condition that he remain inactive. One suggestion that Carlos made in 1989, for an attack on an American base in Greece, was turned down. Only Weinrich, who spent much of his time in the South Yemen capital Aden, was still active. He was an instructor at camps in Syria, Lebanon and on the Indian Ocean island of Socotra.
Not yet forty years old, Carlos had effectively been forced into early retirement by the régime that had for so long rained money and weapons on him. As an MI6 officer observed, the late 1980s was a time when Carlos ‘went off the boil’. The lack of interest shown by several Western intelligence agencies threatened to make a travesty of the title Carlos had long been honoured with: ‘the world's most wanted man’. Most wanted by whom? For the CIA, Carlos in the late 1980s was a has-been. To Vincent Cannistraro, the agency's head of counter-terrorism until 1990, Carlos was only ‘a historical curiosity … a rather sad character. A Communist whisky barrel who doesn't believe in God and who was no longer of use to Moslem governments. Operations were blamed on him because the truth was people didn't know who had committed them. In Damascus, he was dead drunk most of the time.’ Mossad judged Carlos practically irrelevant to its counter-terrorism efforts, despite his links to Palestinian movements, as he had attacked no Israeli targets since his failed rocket attack on an El Al jet in 1975.
Even the DST was taking little notice of the fugitive who had shot two of its officers dead and wounded a third. ‘We considered him to have retired,’ said a former director of the service. ‘We always knew more or less where he was. Some of our agents went through the neighbourhood where he lived in Damascus; we knew which was his block of flats. But we didn't need a potential target. And in any case we never got President Mitterrand's green light to jump on him in Damascus.’
The boisterous crowd which, a million strong, streamed across the Berlin Wall during the night of 9 November 1989 tasted freedom for the first time in twenty-eight years. It thronged West Berlin and gaped at the glittering boutiques of the Kurfürstendamm. On that heady night young Germans from both sides of the Iron Curtain stood on the soon-to-be-demolished Wall, and sprayed each other with champagne.
In the weeks of turmoil that followed the East German decision to allow unrestricted travel through the Berlin Wall, the KGB predicted that the revelry would turn nasty. Mikhail Gorbachev was warned that East Berliners might attack the Red Army's barracks in the city. As it turned out, they made for a more feared and hated testimony to Communist rule: the headquarters of the Stasi. On 15 January 1990 a furious mob swarmed across its sinister complex of offices on the Normannenstrasse, in a bleak working-class district of East Berlin known locally as Stasigrad.
Hundreds of rioters raced down the long corridors of the tall and lifeless buildings. They daubed slogans – ‘Nazi swine’ and ‘Gestapo’ – and urinated on the walls. Windows were smashed, locked doors knocked down, and thousands of files scattered about. Rumoured to have been masterminded by the West German secret service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the assault ensured that many files were saved from destruction. The archives revealed that for years neighbours had spied upon neighbours, friends upon friends, and even wives upon husbands.
As the Berlin Wall collapsed, so did the system that had shielded Carlos for so long. The East Germans who streamed across the Wall not only buried Marxism and the Cold War, they also rewrote the rules of international terror. Deep in the archives of the Ministry of State Security, and stacked in neatly-bound folders on rows and rows of shelves, were thousands of reports, photocopies of letters and transcripts of bugged conversations which detailed Carlos's years in the East bloc's embrace.