I could make Qathafi fall from power if I wanted to. I have a million things on him.
– Carlos to one of his lawyers
Carlos's lawyers drew a blank when they tried to extract a convincing ideological stand out of him, solid enough to exploit in court and portray him as a political victim. ‘It's impossible to make him think something up,’ remarked one lawyer. “I don't know what there is up there in his head, but he's not Fidel Castro.’ Revolution for Carlos meant a state of mindless euphoria, chasing after women and luxurious living. The definition of himself that he came up with after his arrest – ‘professional revolutionary’ – smacks of a business career path rather than heady idealistic inspiration.
The battle lines of the Cold War supplied Carlos with a convenient rationale for his organisation, and more importantly with the shelter and resources necessary to strike deep within the opposite camp. The collapse of the Soviet empire took the wind out of his Marxist sails. The launch of peace talks between Arabs and Israelis, culminating in the birth of a new Palestine, did the same for his early commitment as a fedayeen. The empire forged by Ilich Ramírez Sánchez's namesake had withered away, and one of his patrons, Nicolae Ceausescu, lay mangled in his grave after he was shot by his own soldiers for genocide of the Romanian people. Not that Carlos ever acknowledged that a page had been turned. Three years after his arrest he still defined himself as ‘a revolutionary militant dedicated to the most noble of causes, the liberation of Palestine within the context of the World Revolution’.1
This irrepressible belief in the righteousness of his personal cause, and the refusal to acknowledge that the cause had become a historical irrelevance, were sources of strength for Carlos after his capture. His public performance at his trial for the Rue Toullier murders underscored his refusal, or perhaps his inability, to accept defeat. Uncowed, he defiantly waged a war of attrition against French justice which forced the judge to appoint new defence lawyers and extend the trial, and which helped to sow doubts about the validity of the prosecution's case in the mind of the jury. Carlos might have achieved much more had he limited himself to his claims that he had been illegally kidnapped and that the case against him was a travesty of justice. There were plenty of shortcomings to pinpoint in the French investigation, and Carlos often showed he was more than a match for the sharp legal minds pitted against him. But Carlos overplayed his hand in admitting that he knew part of the truth about the Rue Toullier killings, and in boasting in repetitive monologues of the importance of his violent contribution to the causes of an independent Palestine and world revolution.
‘Many people would prefer Carlos dead,’ French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua had said after hauling in his prize. In fact, all the signs are that the masters whom Carlos served as a foot soldier, whose names are listed in the files of the East German and other Soviet bloc intelligence services, will continue to sleep soundly. Only the Romanians have launched an investigation into the links of former Communist rulers (in this case, the Securitate secret police) with Carlos. Despite Judge Bruguière's reputation as a fearless bulldozer of diplomatic conventions, the Libyan, Syrian and other Arab patrons who hired Carlos and his group have so far been spared judicial proceedings. On a visit to Tripoli as part of his investigation into the blowing up of a French DC10 aircraft, the judge interrogated many Libyan secret service officers but, as he himself admitted, he did not question them about Carlos. For the bombing, Bruguière blamed six Libyans, including Colonel Qathafi's brother-in-law.
The judge pledged to see the probe into the car-bomb attack on the magazine Al Watan al Arabi in 1982 through ‘to the end’. But no action was taken against the Syrian intelligence heads, of whom President al-Assad's brother Rifaat was one and without whom Carlos would never have existed. Carlos himself made no secret of his subservience at one court hearing. In a stunningly frank admission, he described himself as ‘a senior officer of the Syrian secret services’.2 But France was in no mood to turn against Syria. President al-Assad, welcomed to the Arab-Israeli negotiating table, was wooed by a President Chirac anxious to carve France a role in the Middle East without which, he believed, like his inspiration General Charles de Gaulle, it could not match the superpowers. Washington too treated Syria with kid gloves, despite intelligence reports that the country served as a refuge for a myriad of Palestinian, Turkish and Lebanese guerrilla groups, and that Moslem fundamentalists trained in the Syrian-ruled Bekaa Valley.
German justice, bolstered by all the evidence from the East German Stasi files, tried but failed to take on Damascus. At Berlin's request Faisal Sammak, who had been Syria's ambassador to East Berlin from 1981 to 1989 and had allowed Weinrich to store weapons and explosives in his embassy, was arrested in Vienna in August 1994 shortly after Carlos's capture. But Sammak was released only five weeks later. Syrian President al-Assad had telephoned Austrian President Thomas Klestil to intercede on behalf of the one-time ambassador, who happened to be a relative of the Syrian head of state. Summak, who now managed Syria's state tobacco industry, was declared a bona fide diplomat — a sudden upgrading, given the fact that he had entered Austria as a tourist – entitling him to that caste's immunity from prosecution.
Judge Bruguière obtained many intelligence reports from Berlin, but much less from Hungary. With bad grace, Budapest supplied only an unsigned, undated six-page summary of its copious records on Carlos (which amount to thirteen thick dossiers) on the grounds that handing over any more ‘would violate important security interests of the Hungarian nation’.3 Other clues to Carlos's past must lie in the archives of Moscow, Bucharest, Prague and Havana. The French judge has said he has no desire to travel to Moscow, but although Carlos was no agent of the KGB its files are likely to contain copies of the reports about him sent in by the Soviet Union's Communist cousins.
It is improbable that Carlos himself will lift the veil. In private meetings with his lawyers he has bragged that he met Libya's Colonel Qathafi, Syria's al-Assad and Iraq's Saddam Hussein among other heads of state. Were Carlos ever to renege on his pledges not to betray his masters, the Libyan leader would apparently be the first in the firing line. ‘I could make Qathafi fall from power if I wanted to,’ Carlos told one of his attorneys. ‘I have a million things on him.’ In public, however, a different Carlos speaks: ‘I have never worked for the countries behind the Iron Curtain nor in any other part of the world.’4 Exposure of the patronage, be it in the former Soviet bloc or in the Middle East, must be the priority for investigators if they are ever to make both Carlos and those who aided and abetted him pay for their crimes.
For too long during Carlos's career the refusal of Western intelligence services to jeopardise delicate relations with Soviet allies or with Arab dictatorships guaranteed him impunity. His aura was so great that one French security service, the Renseignements Généraux, used his name in September 1980 to ambush two leaders of the Action Directe guerrilla movement, Jean-Marc Rouillan and his girlfriend Nathalie Ménigon. An Egyptian informer was paid to tell them that Carlos needed them to help blow up the Aswan dam. It was a pretty outlandish proposal, but the bait worked. When Rouillan and Ménigon turned up for what they expected to be a rendezvous with the Jackal himself in a Paris flat, they were greeted not by the outstretched hand of the world's most wanted man but by the cocked guns of the police.
When the secret services did decide to intervene against Carlos it was often to attempt to assassinate him – a democracy adopting the same tactics as his private army for hire. Typically, the former chief of the French DGSE, Claude Silberzahn, claimed a ‘droit de mort’ (licence to kill) for his service. The President may have de facto lost his right over life and death with the abolition of the death penalty, Silberzahn reflected, but the intelligence agency enjoyed the ‘privilege’ of killing certain murderers, notably terrorists, which should be exercised only on foreign lands. On French territory, guerrillas should not be eliminated because they could be captured.5
In shying away from a public accusation of the régimes that protected and used Carlos, Western secret services deprived themselves of an effective means of putting pressure on his sponsors. In 1986 the CIA had decided to adopt just such a tactic against Carlos's rival Abu Nidal. The agency's publication of The Abu Nidal Handbook, which included an organisational chart and listed members, accomplices and crimes, led several European governments, including East Germany, to break off relations with Abu Nidal. The files of Eastern European intelligence services show that the fear of being revealed as a haven for Carlos played a large part in the decision to expel him.
Much of the blame for Carlos being free to wreak havoc for so long must be laid at the door both of Western secret services and of Western governments. Counter-orders by French leaders led to the scuppering of several attempts to seize him. President Mitterrand's abrupt creation of an ill-prepared counter-terrorism unit under his personal authority sowed confusion among established security forces, and set the clock back considerably as far as France's fight against terrorism was concerned. A few years later, the directors of the DGSE and the DST attempted separately to negotiate an end to Syrian-backed attacks in France, but both French intelligence services had failed to discover that Carlos was among those under Syria's protective wing. The fact that two Iranians accused of murder were released as part of the price for catching Carlos in 1994, and that he was abducted in violation of international laws, is no credit to the French state.
That Carlos was able to harness his personal cause to that of totalitarian regimes must rank as one of his greatest achievements in ensuring the survival of his private army for so long. As a military commander, he showed loyalty to his soldiers and attempted to free those held by the authorities: Hans-Joachim Klein, Magdalena Kopp, Bruno Bréguet and Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann. In contrast to Haddad, Carlos did not lose any members of his organisation during operations. As the Stasi noted, Carlos ran his group with an iron hand, successfully resisting an attempt by the East Germans to infiltrate the organisation, and he suffered only one defection.
Several of the operations that Carlos launched did not fulfil their objectives: the failed murder of Joseph Edward Sieff, the failed murders of the OPEC Oil Ministers, the failure to obtain the release of his imprisoned subordinates. But on a wider level he severely jolted several governments of Western and Eastern Europe and ensured that one state (France) attempted to negotiate a truce with his emissary. And it is because of the likes of Carlos that heavier security has had to be deployed at airports, government buildings, embassies and other potential targets worldwide. But on the organisation's own terms, and as highlighted by the often gleeful tone of Weinrich's reports to Carlos, the mere fact of killing and maiming civilians, or destroying buildings, made for the success of an operation. Violence became an end in itself – Carlos and his group are responsible for the deaths of twenty-four people, and the wounding of another 257.
Carlos's era was that of state-sponsored terrorism, a practice that suffered a knock when the Cold War ended. As Sir Colin McColl, for five years the head of MI6, noted: ‘State-sponsored terrorism is one of the things that suffered from the end of the Cold War, during which several states involved in terrorism had support from the Soviet Union or their allies. That stopped so they became exposed. They were worried about military attacks and also about whether they would qualify for financial support and investment in the new world that followed financial and economic deregulation.’6
But Carlos does not represent a bygone era. True, the fall of Communism tore to shreds the left-wing banners waved by Carlos's colleagues in the Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades, and the Japanese Red Army. But they have to a large extent been supplanted by religiously motivated groups – Moslem fundamentalists in Algeria and Egypt, the Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Middle East — or by autonomous groups such as those responsible for the Sarin poison gas attack on the Japanese underground, the Oklahoma bombing, or the siege of the Japanese embassy in Peru. The scale of these crimes make Carlos's car or train bombings appear modest in comparison. He did not massacre sixty tourists at an Egyptian temple, blow up a Manhattan skyscraper or gas tens of thousands of people in the Tokyo underground. It is too early, however, to write the epitaph of state terrorism as espoused by Carlos. The suicide-bombers of the Hezbollah have Iran to thank for the explosives that enable them to accomplish their missions.
Carlos has told his lawyers that he has already written his memoirs, that he had finished them in 1992, two years before he was caught. They have been sold, he revealed, to a publisher for an undisclosed sum. But he is in no hurry to publish pages that he has said contained ‘many disturbing things’. ‘They are publishable only after my death,’ he confided to one attorney of a work which is probably marred by the ego of the author, and by his failure to grasp the magnitude of the changes that have curtailed his life's ambitions.
That Carlos should prefer to think about the past rather than the future was understandable. Ahead lay at least five years of trials for the crimes he is accused of committing in France: the first rocket attack on an El Al plane at Orly airport, the bombings of the Rue Marbeuf and the Capitole express train, the bombings of the TGV train and of the Marseille railway station. Although he is likely to collect several life sentences, there is no guarantee that Carlos will spend the rest of his life behind bars. His crimes were committed long before France passed a law allowing judges to cast their sentences in stone, with no possibility of early remission. The norm is for life sentences to translate into some twenty years of detention. Perhaps he will emerge blinking in the sunlight at the age of seventy around the year 2020. He might stand a chance of release even earlier if he did ever decide to betray his former employers. His lawyers still talk of a ‘solution’ to the Carlos case.
Today Carlos's greatest fear is that his own end will be a violent one. More than spending the rest of his life behind bars, it is death by poisoning that he most fears.7 To one of his lawyers he has declared: ‘I will stay in jail for ever or I will be shot dead if I get out. I will not get out of France alive.’ Much earlier in his life as a fugitive he had confided to a friend that he feared being murdered: ‘Listen, my friend, I love life. I love living at full speed because I don't know when I will be assassinated. I only know that I will be assassinated one day. That's why you notice my fanatical desire to live.’8 Perhaps he dreamed of a death that would crown the myth spawned in his lifetime, and freeze it as execution without trial did for Che Guevara, the guerrillero heroico.
Fate will surely be less kind to the Jackal.