THIRTEEN

The Jackal Caged
...............

My character is simple. I am a father first and foremost.

—Carlos in a message spirited out of La Santé jail

Carlos was taken to 42 Rue de la Santé. In a rare distinction, he was greeted by the governor of the greystone prison on his arrival in the main courtyard which had once been graced by Dr Guillotin's bloody invention but where the only dash of red now was that of geraniums in window-boxes. Carlos's fingerprints were taken yet again, he was searched, and with a sheet and blanket under his arm he was led to his new life as, in prison jargon, a détenu particulièrement surveille (specially guarded inmate).

A model establishment when it was built in 1867 in accord with the latest American theories on prison design and little changed since, La Santé was close to the heart of Paris. Too close for the comfort of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, held briefly in 1911 on suspicion of stealing works of art, who penned a few lines on his stay at La Santé:

I listen to the sounds of the city
And, prisoner without a horizon,
I see nothing but a hostile sky
And the naked walls of my prison.

La Santé had played host to an impressive range of political beliefs. Anarchists, communists, royalists, Resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation of Paris, Nazi collaborators after the capital's liberation, and Algerian nationalists had all despaired behind its filthy walls. In April 1919, it had welcomed Henri Landru who had recruited his female victims (chiefly war widows lured by his promises of matrimony) through lonely hearts columns. The women were dismembered and cooked.

The exploits of more recent inmates had forged the jail's reputation for spectacular escapes. Only a week before Carlos's arrival a rapist had sawn through the bars of his cell, and thrown an electric cable fitted with a metal hook across to the outer wall. He had then slid to freedom, commando-like, along the cable by hanging on to a brass tube. Eight years earlier the gangster Michel Vaujour was plucked from a roof of the jail by his wife Nadine who was flying a helicopter. And in 1978 another gangster, public enemy number one Jacques Mesrine, used a warder's uniform, a gun and tear gas to make his getaway.

According to Carlos's fellow inmates, security at La Santé was usually not too oppressive. ‘Compared to other jails I've been to like Fresnes and Fleury-Mérogis near Paris,’ one prisoner said after he had served a year of his five-year sentence for armed and violent robbery, ‘La Santé is very good, it's cool. At Fresnes the atmosphere is different. You're not allowed cigarettes there, and you have to walk along a yellow line painted on the ground close to the walls, with your arms hanging down at your sides.’1

But the prison governor was taking no chances with Carlos. A unit of CRS anti-riot police carrying submachine-guns was deployed outside the jail during Carlos's first few weeks there. Warders were ordered to glance through his cell's eyehole every seven minutes. Because of his weighty pedigree, Carlos was spared the promiscuity – and in some cases, consequent sodomy² – which hoodlums and petty drug dealers among La Santé's 1500 inmates were forced to endure, packed six strong to a twelve-square-metre cell, with only a waist-high wall partly concealing the lavatory in the corner.

From the Soviet empire and a wide swathe of the Middle East, Carlos's domain had shrunk to cell number 258187 in the isolation division. Behind a door painted a pastel shade of green the cell was ten square metres large, with most of the space taken by a bed, a metal chair, a concrete table built into the wall, a sink and a lavatory. Carlos could make out nothing through the plexiglass window barred with iron rods and wire meshing so thick that not even a cigarette could be pushed through it. His immediate neighbours were rapists, murderers and Corsican separatists. Two floors above him was the wing reserved for VIPs, including politicians and business tycoons who had been felled by corruption investigations. ‘Ten square metres, twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. I wouldn't put my dog in it,’ summed up one of those VIPs, the garrulous former soccer boss and government minister Bernard Tapie. ‘A prison is a machine to crush a man. People treat you like shit. It's not surprising that after six months some want to kill everyone when they get out.’3

The routine suffered only a few exceptions. A wake-up call at around seven o'clock by a guard to whom Carlos would hand his mail, then coffee and bread for breakfast, followed by a quick clean up of the cell and an hour's exercise which Carlos usually skipped in favour of a lie-in. The wait for his daily shower in a small cubicle at the end of the corridor must have irritated a man obsessed by personal hygiene. Lunch was described by Captain Bob Denard, a mercenary, as cold and ‘smelling like a corpse’.⁴ Afternoons included mail distribution and another hour set aside for exercise, with lights out at eleven o'clock.

Only the television Carlos was allowed to rent – he had to wait several days for it and thus missed seeing himself lead the news bulletins — and the three books he could borrow from the prison library each week varied the routine. Visitors were banned save for his lawyers. Nor was he allowed to join in the games of soccer that prisoners played against warders in a forty-five-square-metre yard. French, drawing and painting classes were also out of bounds as was the Thursday mass available to other inmates.

Every time Carlos had to leave his cell guards were mobilised to clear corridors, as regulations dictated that only prison warders should lay eyes on him. ‘You don't move Carlos the way you shift a petty thief who has stolen a hen from a farm,’ explained prison governor Yves Tigoulet.⁵ The governor, however, was ready to indulge some foibles of his most notorious prisoner. The privileges that Carlos sought were in keeping with the lifestyle he had previously enjoyed. He pleaded that the regulation-issue sheets irritated his skin, and was granted permission to sleep in silk sheets instead. He had his guards fetch him Cuban Cohiba cigars – the most expensive money can buy, and Fidel Castro's favourite —from an exclusive boutique in Paris. The silk sheets and cigars were purchased with money sent by Carlos's father. His cigar- cutter, which should have been banned, was another exception to prison rules. And when he heard that a former politician in the VIP wing had been granted permission to use a dictaphone, Carlos instantly demanded the same perk.

If detention took its toll, Carlos was careful not to show it. He impressed a senior official at the jail with his attitude: ‘Carlos took it all pretty lightly. He was convinced that he still had a market value.’ He was cheerful with the warders to whom he chatted non-stop as, too unfit for press-ups, he took perfunctory exercise in one of the cramped, so-called ‘Camembert’ courtyards (which owe their name to the fact that they have a triangular shape, like portions of the pungent cheese). He talked a great deal about women, about Lana and Magdalena Kopp, and boasted about the beautiful women he had had. Carlos also liked to list the Arab heads of state whom he had met. ‘For him, death is nothing,’ reported one jailer. ‘He talks of the people he has killed and of those he will kill. When I asked him how far back this past went back to – I didn't say “terrorism” because that's not what he calls it – he told me: “Since I was thirteen years old.” ’6 To another warder Carlos advised: ‘You earn 9000 francs a month. You should get another job.’ The guard replied: ‘I'm fine as I am. I'd rather be where I am than where you are.’

After grabbing $30,000 that Carlos had hidden away in their Khartoum flat, Lana had flown to Paris. In the French capital she lobbied judicial authorities for permission to see her husband, but her requests were fruitless. Carlos soon found out about Lana's journey to Paris, but this was the last he heard of her: ‘It's when he talks about losing Lana that Carlos realises what he has lost with his imprisonment,’ one of Carlos's lawyers related later. Lana was the second lover to vanish out of Carlos's life. Back in London after his studies in Moscow in the early 1970s he had spent months trying to find his Cuban girlfriend, Sonia, but without success.

The maverick lawyer Jacques Vergès was more than happy to defend a prisoner whom he termed both ‘a myth and a legend’, a courageous idealist who faced, in his words, a public lynching. Vergès added that he was not in the business of defending Mother Teresa. Two days into Carlos's captivity Vergès issued a rosy bulletin on his client's state of mind: ‘He has excellent morale, he is in good shape and he's cracking jokes … From now on he will justify his actions. He will justify his politics in general, his ideological struggle. There is no question of disavowing the actions he is reproached with.’ Nor of showing any remorse. ‘Carlos is a human being,’ Vergès explained. ‘He is very sorry about people who die, people who are wounded. But at the same time he thinks that his fight was in a very violent atmosphere.’7

Now, Carlos wanted the world to know that he did not feel beaten. He had started to nurture that image with his relaxed behaviour in the judge's chambers. Angered by the way the media had covered his capture, with colourful reports that he was addicted to alcohol, had been operated on to trim his waistline, and had slept with prostitutes, Carlos spirited a message out of La Santé. Published by a French newspaper two weeks after his arrest, Carlos's statement sought to polish his tarnished image:

I was seized in the truest Mafia style. But now that I have been neutralised, instead of assassinating me physically, people are carrying out a moral assassination. I don't understand. Why do people try to make me out as an alcoholic? All this is wrong, I've never been a drunkard. Why do they say I underwent a liposuction when I went to hospital for an operation on a varicocele? I don't understand. My character is simple. I am a father first and foremost. My wife and daughter live normal lives in Venezuela, in the heart of my own family. They live in a house next to my mother's.⁸

For all his resentment at his betrayal by the Sudanese and other régimes, Carlos had no intention of behaving like those states and informing on his sponsors. ‘I am one of the founders of the Organisation of Internationalist Revolutionaries, and I am still a member,’ Carlos proclaimed in the message that he smuggled out of prison. ‘In my organisation, we shoot traitors. So don't count on me to betray friendly countries and name names.’⁹ Much later, he hinted darkly that the plan ‘to neutralise “Carlos”’ (he wrote about himself in the third person) had been masterminded by the Americans, in coordination with the French and with Israeli and Saudi financial support. Only French authorities, he said, had been ready ‘to transform a kidnapping – the result of state betrayal – into a due process of law’.¹⁰

Soon after Carlos's imprisonment Vergès swore to sue the French courts, arguing that his client – whom he liked to hail with a resounding ‘Don Carlos’ – had been kidnapped and should therefore be freed. If that failed, he would take the case to the European Court of Human Rights. It was the same argument that Vergès had used in his defence of Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie. Arrested by Bolivian police for failing to pay a sizeable fine following the bankruptcy of one of his companies, Barbie was put on a French air force Hercules C130. Two officers of the DGSE's Action Service took charge of him and he was served with an arrest warrant when the plane touched down in French Guiana. From there, he was flown on to mainland France.

Other victims of French high-handedness had fared no better. In the case of Colonel Antoine Argoud of the OAS movement of military conspirators who resisted Algerian independence, France refused to admit to any part in his kidnapping in Munich in February 1963. The official version held that Argoud, a brilliant officer and the army's youngest colonel, was discovered, following an anonymous telephone call, bound by chains in a van parked conveniently close to the headquarters of the Brigade Criminelle police unit, not far from Notre-Dame. ‘See what French police have done to a French officer!’ exclaimed the former Free French fighter when a police officer arrived at the scene.

Vergès's defence of Carlos was however soon undermined by leaks to the press about his past links to the prisoner. As if guided by some invisible hand, extracts from the East German Stasi files found their way into some newspapers. Vergès counter-attacked and alleged that he had been the subject of an assassination order by President Mitterrand, a claim ridiculed by the head of state's aides and by the heads of the secret services. Carlos joked to his attorney: ‘Soon it'll be you who's charged in my place, then I'll go out and bring you oranges.’ There was speculation in the press that Judge Bruguière was considering an investigation of Vergès – bringing about a situation in which the lawyer defending the main suspect would himself be under judicial scrutiny – because of reported contacts with Carlos, in the East German files.

For all his past work for the cause, Vergès was to disappoint Carlos. In an incautious admission, Vergès wrote in a book that was published in November 1994 that Carlos was guilty of the Rue Toullier shootings. ‘In Paris, Rue Toullier, he did indeed do something which was regrettable in order to avoid arrest. It was his liberty as a combatant,’ Vergès wrote. ‘The indicator he shot down was the head of the Popular Front network who had turned Mossad agent and was being protected by French police.’11 The admission angered Carlos, but it was when Carlos finally realised that there was no prospect of release that relations between the lawyer and his client deteriorated beyond repair. Carlos came to distrust Vergès and at the beginning of 1995 Carlos dropped him. Vergès diplomatically explained that the two had conflicting opinions on defence strategy and the role of an attorney.

Vergès was not the only lawyer to clash with Carlos. Mourad Oussedik, a Franco-Algerian appointed to work with Vergès, had made his reputation defending Algerian independence fighters, and Carlos's former patron Georges Habash, when he was briefly detained in Paris in January 1992. The official reason for his rift with Carlos was a problem with ‘lawyer-client relations’. In fact, in a closed courtroom hearing and before an impassive Vergès, Carlos had in February 1995 accused one of the lawyers in Oussedik's office of spying for the French police. A furious Oussedik, together with his aggrieved colleague, called on Carlos early the next morning at La Santé. ‘Terrorists like you, I shit them every day!’ Oussedik shouted at Carlos in the visiting room. After telling a deputy governor, ‘I leave you this stupid bastard,’ Oussedik stormed away. Carlos watched him leave in sullen silence.

Within months of his arrest Carlos's private army had faded away. Soon after the capture French intelligence estimated that the group numbered no more than a dozen members, several of whom had been identified in Beirut, Amman and Damascus. Officers of France's DGSE spotted the forty-eight-year-old Johannes Wein- rich, still sporting his moustache, in early 1995 as he passed through Djibouti on the Horn of Africa before crossing the Gulf of Aden in a fishing boat bound for Carlos's former Marxist sanctuary. But a civil war fought the previous year, in which the Marxist secessionist rebels of South Yemen were crushed, and the unification of North and South Yemen reaffirmed, meant Weinrich was on less safe terrain. Living in Aden under the aliases John Saleh and Peter Smith, he desperately tried to retrieve all the records he had kept so meticulously from several hiding places, and from the dispersed members of the now leaderless organisation. No fewer than three different secret services – the DGSE, the CIA, and the German BND – managed to identify Weinrich in Aden. Vital evidence was supplied by the fingerprints that Weinrich left on a plate in a restaurant.

German intelligence insisted that it should be the service that tried to catch its countryman, Germany's longest-sought fugitive. The Central Intelligence Agency had no more grounds to seize Weinrich than they had had to seize Carlos, and took a back seat. The French felt that Carlos was enough for them to have to deal with, and were more than happy to leave Weinrich to the Germans. From a safe distance, BND officers watched Yemeni police arrest Weinrich in an Aden suburb in June 1995, almost a year after Carlos's abduction. Treated much more gently than his leader – something Weinrich must have appreciated, as he was described by the Stasi as ‘a soft-boiled egg’ – he was restrained only by handcuffs when he boarded a German air force plane.

From a safe distance, BND officers watched Yemeni police arrest Weinrich in an Aden suburb in June 1995, almost a year after Carlos's abduction. Treated much more gently than his leader – something Weinrich must have appreciated, as he was described by the Stasi as ‘a soft-boiled egg’ – he was restrained only by handcuffs when he boarded a German air force plane.

The charge sheet awaiting Weinrich on his arrival at Berlin's old Moabit jail – where fellow inmates included Erich Mielke, the former head of the East German Stasi – compared quite respectably with Carlos's: the first of the two bungled missile attacks at Orly airport, a failed attempt on the life of the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Athens, and the bombings of Radio Free Europe in Munich, the TGV train and the Marseille railway station, and the Maison de France in West Berlin. From his cell in Paris, Carlos could not resist writing an epitaph for the fallen ‘comrade Weinrich’, pronouncing him ‘one of the greatest revolutionaries produced by the German nation’. Describing Weinrich as his right-hand man, as one French magazine had done, belittled his contribution to the cause, and amounted to insulting Carlos's friend and companion.12

Only a few months later another middle-aged Carlos soldier fell. Christa-Margot Froelich had driven to Paris the car used to bomb the Rue Marbeuf in 1982. She had apparently been intent on bombing another French target when she was arrested at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci airport in June of that year as she prepared to travel to Paris with several kilos of explosives in her suitcase.¹³ After six years in an Italian jail, she had long broken with the Carlos organisation and was living a quiet life in her native Germany when he was seized in Sudan. Fearing that her past involvement with Carlos might catch up with her, she prudently and naïvely asked Italian authorities whether she would be arrested again if she made another of her regular visits to see her husband, a member of the Red Brigades jailed in Rome. The answer given to her lawyers was that there was nothing pending against her in Italy. It was a devious answer.

When Froelich arrived in Rome late one Saturday in October 1995 for a meeting with her husband, she was arrested because Judge Bruguière had issued an international warrant for her. Her husband struggled in vain to fight the French extradition request. She refused to talk and was ordered to await her trial in a French prison. Had she remained in Germany she would undoubtedly have remained free. German examining magistrates had launched an investigation into her past, based on the East German and Hungarian intelligence records, but concluded there was insufficient evidence on which to charge her. Her file was closed. ‘Froelich was arrested with the sole purpose of extraditing her. We had nothing else on her,’ a senior Italian police officer admitted.14 Only Carlos's other chief lieutenant, the Syrian Issawe, escaped. He vanished so completely that not even Weinrich in his last months as a fugitive, let alone Western intelligence services, were able to find him.

Long before her husband's arrest, the jilted Magdalena Kopp had traded in her meagre revolutionary credentials. Both in Venezuela and in Bavaria, where Kopp moved in late 1995 to give her nine-year-old daughter Elba a German upbringing and to be near her elderly disabled mother, her only concern was for Elba's future. There was none of the ideological brainwashing that Carlos's father had inflicted on him, and no private tuition. In her mother's home town of Neu-Ulm, Elba studied at the local state school. She was a hard worker whose parents had raised her to speak English and Spanish as well as German.

When Judge Bruguière sent investigators to question her, Kopp invoked her right under German law not to testify against the man who was legally still her husband despite his marriage to Lana.¹⁵ But it was her concern for the child's future, together with a consuming desire to be left in peace, which led her to take one of the most dramatic decisions of her life. The betrayal not only of her husband Carlos, but also of her former lover Weinrich.

‘The war is over but Carlos hasn't realised it,’ the woman for whose sake Carlos had masterminded a string of bloody attacks to prise her out of jail told Berlin investigating magistrate Dieter Mehlis in December 1995. Although the revelations she made to the Berlin judge related specifically to Weinrich, they obviously hurt Carlos. ‘From the way she spoke about Weinrich,’ noted one investigator, ‘it was only logical to conclude that nothing happened without Carlos knowing about it or ordering it to happen.’ Her questioners however refrained from pressing her about Carlos's involvement in various crimes since he was her husband and the father of her daughter.

It was Weinrich, Kopp explained, who had parked the explosive-packed orange Opel in the Rue Marbeuf in Paris in 1982. And it was again Weinrich, possibly with the help of others, who planted the suitcases containing the bombs that went off within minutes of each other in a high-speed TGV train and at the Marseille railway station the following year.

Kopp seemed nonplussed by the impact of her indiscretions. ‘Whatever I tell you, Carlos and Weinrich will spend the rest of their lives in jail,’ she confided to Judge Mehlis, who could only agree with her. Carlos himself was unable to discover what had made her talk. When one of his lawyers reached Kopp on the telephone and asked the reason why, the only answer she gave was: ‘I don't know.’ Carlos concluded that as she had no source of income and was under the thumb of the German police, she had no choice but to cooperate with the authorities. In a magazine interview which she gave later in return for a hefty payment, she branded Carlos a megalomaniac obsessed by power, and capable of killing without batting an eyelid. ‘Carlos fought for no one,’ Kopp said. ‘Only for himself. I would be delighted to see his myth destroyed.’ She added bitterly: ‘He never really loved me.’16

Even in prison, Carlos continued to look after his appearance, and to play Don Juan. In his first months in detention his laundry was done by Vergès's maid, but apparently this was not good enough for Carlos and he began sending it to a local dry cleaner's, the only prisoner to do so. He earned a reputation as one of La Santé's cleanest and best-dressed inmates. At a meeting with Judge Bruguière, Carlos turned to the attractive blonde secretary and suavely asked her what her name was. ‘Isabelle,’ answered the bewildered secretary, blushing slightly. ‘What a beautiful name,’ Carlos cooed as he bent down to take her hand and kiss it, too quickly for her to pull it away. His female lawyers were also fair game for gallantry, and the forbidding surroundings of La Santé did nothing to suppress his spirited shows of affection. A warder discovered one of Vergès's colleagues, Marie-Annick Ramassamy-Vergès (no relation to the layer), sitting on Carlos's knees in the visiting room. The warder sternly urged her ‘to adopt an attitude more in keeping with the premises.’. ⁷

At another time, as armed police escorted him to a van in the prison courtyard, with motorcycle outriders revving their engines and the road outside blocked by yet more police, Carlos stopped in mid-stride. He had recognised another of his female lawyers, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre. With a wide smile and to the bafflement of his guards, Carlos walked up to her and kissed her hand in greeting. She was impressed by him. ‘He has many qualities,’ she said later. ‘He is very intelligent, immensely cultivated, and his memory is impressive. One feels good with him.’¹⁸ So good that in La Santé's cramped visiting room the two made a habit of pulling on fat Cuban cigars as they discussed his defence strategy.

In the autumn of 1995 an elderly gentleman showed his Swiss passport at the gate of Fresnes jail outside Paris and was ushered to a visiting room which was almost certainly bugged. He was joined there by Carlos, who had been transferred to Fresnes temporarily. The two men spent just over an hour together. Carlos confided to the visitor that his morale was good although he was convinced that he would never again see his homeland Venezuela, and he still had no news of Lana.

The visitor was the ‘Black Banker’ Francois Genoud, the Nazi friend of Carlos who was the only person aside from his lawyers granted permission to visit him in prison by Judge Bruguière. It was to Genoud that Carlos wrote to proclaim his commitment to world revolution. In Genoud's archives Carlos's letters sit among others from Martin Bormann, Klaus Barbie, Emma Goering and Oswald Mosley. The missives from the self-styled revolutionary show that the Nazi Genoud, who denied that the Holocaust had taken place, was a father figure to Carlos.19

Genoud had once boasted that he had planted ‘a small bomb’ against British forces in Palestine, and in 1969 he appeared at Vergès's side to defend three members of the Popular Front who had attacked an El Al plane in Zurich. Three years later Genoud helped to hijack a Lufthansa plane for a $5 million ransom from the airline.²⁰ Such acts earned him the everlasting gratitude of his Palestinian friends. In later years Genoud made no effort to hide his appreciation of Carlos. For Genoud, ‘Carlos threw himself heart and soul into the Palestinian struggle and he risked his life many times for it. He is a courageous man of action whose deeply held convictions are beyond doubt. He was never scared of gambling his skin for a cause which was not his. Remember the OPEC ministers hostage-taking. I admire him for that.’²¹

In one of the first letters to ‘my dearest comrade’ from jail, dated 4 December 1994, Carlos thanked Genoud for a gift of 10,000 francs and expressed admiration for an interview that Genoud had given to a Swiss newspaper. In the interview Genoud had admitted to his friendship with Carlos for the first time. ‘I admire your fearlessness in denouncing ignominy just after my abduction by the Sudanese authorities,’ Carlos wrote, assuring his friend that he was in good health and that his morale was holding well. Censure of the Sudanese regime was more than justified in Carlos's eyes, but he cautioned Genoud against weakening Arab nations in general: ‘Condemnation of the betrayal of Hassan al-Turabi does not imply condemnation of the true Islamic revolutionaries which form the vanguard of the struggle against imperialism and Zionism. Regarding other Arab governments, it is my opinion that any accusation of treachery should be weighed against the impact it could have on the ability of the Arab peoples to face the enemy.’22

Carlos advised Genoud against visiting him in prison, which he called ‘a great school for revolutionaries’. A visit to the jail, Carlos wrote, ‘could give room to attack you as a symbol of resistance against Zionist lies and calumnies. And anyway we would not have any privacy to allow us to speak freely and at leisure.’ The latter was a reference to the strong likelihood that the visiting room at the jail was bugged. Carlos asked Genoud to try to contact Lana because he had had no news of her since his capture, and signed his letter: ‘Yours in revolution’. Genoud later flew to Beirut and then Amman to try to track down Lana, to find money for his friend's defence and to pass on messages to friends of Carlos. Lana, however, had vanished without trace.²³

In his next letter to Genoud, dated 19 January 1995, Carlos again thanked him for sending money to the jail, this time 5000 francs. Soon there would be no need for such gifts, Carlos wrote, because he was awaiting help from his family. Carlos proudly announced that he had begun to set up a group of lawyers to assure his defence. These attorneys ‘have not sold their souls to the devil and truly cherish justice’. He thanked Genoud for a letter ‘full of militant ardour, which has really raised my spirits.’ In a long and effusive letter dated 18 March Carlos told Genoud that he was the only person, aside from his close family, with whom he corresponded from jail. ‘If we never meet again, we shall wait for the Valhalla of revolutionaries where we shall share the moments of complicity with our dearly missed martyrs ... I shall be happy to arrive at your ripe age with only a tenth of your indomitable spirit. I want you to know that I truly admire you, trust you and cherish your friendship.’

On 30 May Carlos asked his friend to suggest a French lawyer who could help defend him and who would not betray him to the enemy. ‘Like every true revolutionary, I am an optimist but I do not expect that the treacherous enemy will allow me to reach Venezuela alive ... Nevertheless, I shall persevere in my struggle until my last breath.’ Genoud's friendship with Carlos led Judge Bruguière to question the retired banker on 6 July 1995. Genoud simply explained that he had pro-Arab sympathies and that this was the reason why he supported Carlos. Genoud was faithful to Carlos, so much so that the last trip he ever made was to keep a promise to Carlos to travel to Venezuela and try to convince Magdalena Kopp not to return to Germany. Genoud kept his promise, but failed to sway the estranged wife.

The letter that Carlos wrote to Genoud on 30 August 1995 showed that Carlos saw himself as akin to Moslem fundamentalist guerrillas: ‘Our materialistic conception of the world did not prevent us from seeing years ago that a new kind of militant, the Islamic revolutionist, has joined the vanguard of Revolution of which he is now the spearhead. This new state of affairs was not accepted by most fellow revolutionaries at the time out of dogmatism.’

Carlos's correspondence with Genoud drew to a close in the spring of 1996. On 30 May Genoud gathered friends around him at his home in Pully, a leafy eastern district of Lausanne, where one of his proudest possessions was a watercolour painted by Hitler in Vienna in 1913 when he was a talentless artist. Watched by members of Exit, a pro-suicide group he had joined the previous year, he drank a cocktail of drugs and then lay down to await death. He had decided to choose the time of his death in order ‘to leave in a dignified way without physical deterioration’.

Carlos's closeness to the banker who had paid for the defence of Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie was due at least in part to an undercurrent of anti-Semitism common to both men. In Carlos's case, it echoed the beliefs of his father, Ramírez Navas. When media in San Cristobal denounced one of Carlos's brothers, Carlos's father branded one of the journalists involved ‘that dirty Jewess’.24 Relatives of Carlos have testified to his racial leanings. ‘He believed in a free state of Palestine and he detested Jews,’ according to his cousin Luis Sánchez, a dance professor.²⁵ Much later, and before a Jewish lawyer of his, Carlos pejoratively referred to his former OPEC accomplice Hans-Joachim Klein as ’enjuivé (a non-Jew who pretends to be Jewish). His prejudice also surfaced in court. Needled by the campaign waged by lawyers representing victims of his attacks, he denounced Françoise Rudetzki, the head of the French association SOS Attacks, as ‘the heiress of Vladimir Jabotinsky’, one of the pioneering figures of Zionism.²⁶

As the months, and then the years passed, the confinement and isolation which Carlos himself called tortura blanca (white torture) began to take their toll. His belief that his stay in jail was only temporary evaporated, and on some occasions so did his self-confidence. Late one evening in June 1996, as two prisoners discussed television programmes by shouting to each other from one cell window to another, a high-pitched whine broke into their conversation: ‘I am Carlos! It's me, Carlos!’ The wail for recognition fell flat when one inmate yelled back: ‘Carlos who?’ But when the prisoners realised who the cry had come from, they fell silent. No one answered Carlos and there was no need for prison warders to order quiet. ‘His voice made people feel ill at ease,’ recalled the mercenary Bob Denard, who was in a cell two floors above Carlos. ‘It was as if his voice came from the beyond. He was isolated, he wanted to talk. We didn't speak about him among us, he was almost taboo. He had quite a lot of blood on his hands, and that surprised people, even common criminals.’27

Carlos's frustration exacerbated a feature of his character which had been noted by his guardians in the Stasi several years previously: the superiority complex mixed with insecurity which made him incapable of tolerating contradiction. The few individuals allowed to approach Carlos at La Santé described him as pleasant, convivial and warm-hearted, but capable of flying into a rage if anyone showed him a lack of respect.

Prison warders and guards who escorted him to and from the law courts for his interrogations by Judge Bruguière were the butt of his tantrums. When on one November day in 1996 the guards insisted on stripping him of his belt before he left La Santé, as regulations dictate, Carlos started yelling at them. They promptly handcuffed his arms behind his back, seized him by the shoulders and legs, and heaved his burly frame into the van. Awaiting him at the law courts with the judge was a team from Scotland Yard which had finally obtained permission to question Carlos after first making a request soon after his capture. The British officers looked on in quiet amazement as the guards, still bearing their load, struggled through the narrow armoured doors. The judge struggled vainly to calm Carlos down.

Carlos refused to make a sworn deposition, but politely assured the Scotland Yard team that the incident had nothing to do with their presence. Back in jail, Carlos demanded a medical examination because of a bruise on his arm caused by one of the guards using a truncheon to carry him. So incensed was Carlos that he had his lawyer send a letter of protest to the Venezuelan consul in which he charged that his manhandling meant that he had been unable to present himself before the judge ‘in decent posture’, and that this was a violation of the European Convention of Human Rights.’28

When the Scotland Yard officers returned to Paris a month later, determined to question Carlos on the shooting of Joseph Edward Sieff, the president of Marks and Spencer, in December 1973 and on the bombing of the Israeli bank a month later, they learned little new. He protested that Britain was yielding to a Zionist lobby in dusting down investigations such as the Sieff murder. When they told him that one of the revolvers found in a cache of his in Paris in the summer of 1975 was the one used to shoot Sieff, Carlos pretended to be clueless about ballistics studies and asked how they could tell.

Carlos's insistence on respect for his rights landed him in another row when one prison warder, a plump black man, refused to take a letter from him. ‘You gnu, you!’ Carlos shouted. The prison authorities launched proceedings against Carlos, and his protestation that ‘gnu’ was merely the name of an African antelope, and not an insult, failed to sway the governor. Carlos was given a suspended ten-day spell in a disciplinary cell, which he would have to serve if he offended again.

Carlos would often consult the copy of La Santé rules which he kept in his cell, and liked to quote from it chapter and verse. ‘My father is a lawyer. I have the greatest respect for the law. I want the law to be observed in all cases,’ he said at one closed court hearing. The fact that the prison intercepted and delayed his correspondence with his family particularly irritated him, and he once slammed his fist down on the desk of Judge Bruguière as he raged about this infringement of his privacy.

Since the light-hearted banter at the start of their first encounter, Carlos's relationship with Judge Bruguière had rapidly soured. Debonair, Carlos would arrive at the chambers with a yellow scarf thrown around his neck and a booklet of crossword puzzles peeking out of his jacket pocket. At first he refused to answer questions, in protest at the way he was seized. ‘I'm not here, I don't exist, so you can't investigate me,’ he scoffed. But Bruguière persisted and the temptation to talk was soon too much for Carlos, and he began telling the judge at length about his youth and the start of his career. Questions about specific outrages, however, were met for the most part with a stony silence or with unsmiling repetition that as an officer leading the commando unit of a revolutionary organisation he could not speak for its actions.

Under questioning, Carlos was in Bruguière's eyes ‘a mixed bag of fascination, attraction and repulsion – and of anxiety. He was always lively, a braggart, provocative, manipulating, charming and threatening. All at the same time.’ The judge's plodding approach, and his habit of asking lengthy questions that virtually filled a whole page, irritated Carlos, who would reply with a single sentence. When Carlos was in a more verbose mood, the pair got bogged down in verbal jousting as neither was prepared to give an inch over the wording of the testimony, which Carlos couched in the literary French he had learned at school. On one occasion the two clashed for forty long minutes over one word, with Bruguière, a classicist, invoking its Latin or Greek etymology, and Carlos its English or Spanish translations.

After three years in jail, Carlos launched a personal attack on the judge, casting doubt over his independence and impartiality because of his links with the victims’ association SOS Attacks, which under French law has access to investigation files as a civil plaintiff. Carlos took Judge Bruguière to task for attending a ceremony at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris to commemorate the victims of the bombing of a French UTA DC 10 airliner six years earlier with Françoise Rudetzki, the president of SOS Attacks. One of the association's lawyers has acknowledged that its representatives met the judge as often as once a week, but this in itself is not illegal under French law.29

In the first few years following Carlos's arrest, France showed no desire to give him a chance to proclaim publicly that his arrest had been illegal. His rare and brief court appearances, at hearings prompted by his appeals against his detention on the grounds that he had been kidnapped from Sudan, were with one exception behind closed doors. His manner was private theatrics. When the judge entered, Carlos would stand in the dock, join his hands together and bow forward slightly to proffer the traditional Arabic greeting Salam Alaykum (May peace be with you). Robbed of an audience, these were for Carlos only dress-rehearsals for the public performance that was yet to come.

Carlos's determination in pressing the kidnap suit won him a judicial triumph. On the day that he was hauled to France, the Justice Ministry had made it clear that it had no intention of investigating the circumstances of the abduction, as these were classified a state secret. An investigating magistrate invoked ‘technical reasons’ to justify his refusal to follow up Carlos's plea. But in June 1996, almost two years after his capture, an appeal court found in Carlos's favour. The verdict was a public slap in the face for both Interior Minister Pasqua and Judge Bruguière. The arrest had taken place ‘outside any legal framework, and without either an international warrant or an extradition convention between France and Sudan’.30 The court ordered an investigation into ‘events that may have involved French nationals aboard a French plane and on French territory’.³¹ The ruling was however only a fleeting victory for Carlos, as it was later crushed by the supreme court.