Carlos Caged

By Jill Smolowe

He went by a rich variety of aliases: Salim. Andres Martinez. Taurus. Glen Gebhard. Hector Hevodidbon. Michel Assaf. During an infamous career that spanned two decades, Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez used all those names. But the public knew him as Carlos the Jackal, the moniker that best evoked his ruthless, predatory spirit. As he boldly declared in 1975 while holding 11 OPEC ministers hostage in Vienna: "To get anywhere, you have to walk over the corpses." His image is frozen in time in crude black-and-white photos of a pudgy face that seemed menacing in its banality and came to symbolize the world of mercenary terror. But last week as Carlos was arrested in Sudan and whisked to France to face charges that threaten to jail him for life, his most vaunted exploits were exposed as largely fictitious.

To be sure, Carlos had an evil career. The French charge him with 15 deaths locally; Carlos himself claims 83 victims worldwide. But the legend that credits him with the most notorious terror acts of the past two decades and links him to violent groups in France, Germany, Japan and especially the Middle East is diminished by bungled missions, unimpressively soft targets and years of dissipation from high living and alcohol consumption. While Carlos hid out in the Middle East over the past 10 years, intelligence forces often cleared their blotters by blaming the elusive mastermind for their unsolved cases. Now that he is safely lodged in cell 258187 of Paris' La Sante prison, a less-than-breathless truth is rapidly emerging.

As the manacled prisoner came face-to-face with justice for the first time, he strove to uphold the swaggering image he had so carefully cultivated through decades of actual and exaggerated derring-do. "This man is a star," Carlos said by way of greeting the investigating magistrate, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, in his bunker-like quarters at the Palais de Justice. "We are both professionals. We'll get along together." Gesturing toward the assault rifles carried by his four police escorts, Carlos bantered, "Ah! The FA-MAS. We had those in Lebanon. They're good." Though it was a display of insouciance for a man about to be charged with complicity in a 1982 car bombing that killed a pregnant woman and wounded 63 others, there was no masking the tired image Carlos cut as he stood in white pants, his mauve pullover stretched taut by mid-life paunch, his short hair a muddy gray. At 44, he looked like a washed- up playboy.

It was the French who got him, because they never gave up. While other intelligence agencies had long since ceased their manhunts for Carlos, the French hunger to bring him to justice had gnawed quietly since 1975, when he murdered two French agents. "We practically never lost track of Carlos," French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua said last week. "It was always a question of cooperation."

But with whom -- and where? The precise nature of the cooperation that led Sudan to hand over Europe's most-wanted terrorist remains sorely disputed. In Washington the CIA claimed that steady Western pressure had flushed Carlos out of Syria, where he had been given sanctuary for much of the past decade. By the time he was traced to Khartoum earlier this year, he had run out of havens. France's daily Liberation reported that France had cut a deal giving Sudan's Islamist government some satellite photos of Christian rebel positions in the countryside in exchange for Carlos' extradition. France, which has a reputation for horse trading in the Middle East, denied there was any payoff.

Yet the most popular theory was coldly practical: Carlos was expendable. Sudan saw more to gain by turning him over to the West than by harboring him. Barely 24 hours after Carlos was placed in French custody, Khartoum officials trumpeted their cooperation and called on the U.S. to remove Sudan from its blacklist of terrorist-sponsori ng nations. Unimpressed, Washington demurred. Carlos, it seemed, was no longer much of a catch. With communism discredited and the Middle East bent on peace, his revolutionary credentials had outlived their usefulness. His penchant for whiskey, women and penthouse suites had earned him a reputation for being more trouble than he was worth.

Once upon a time, though, the world was his terrified playground. Navigating his way with fluency in six languages, Carlos was an elegant chameleon who prided himself on breaking hearts and heads. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, he was the son of an affluent Marxist lawyer who named his three sons Ilyich, Vladimir and Lenin in honor of the Russian revolutionary. His home life had the sparkle of "champagne radicalism," according to Christopher Dobson, one of his biographers.

When the teenage Carlos fell afoul of the Caracas police by joining the communist student movement, his father packed him off to London. The young man soon moved on to Patrice Lumumba University, Moscow's school for grooming Third World revolutionaries. There he proved a lazy chemistry student whose rich-kid antics prompted party officials to ask his father to cut young Ilyich's allowance. He fell in love with a Cuban woman, with whom he had a daughter. He lost touch with them, yet often referred to the woman as his "greatest love." In 1970 he was expelled for "anti-Soviet agitation" after throwing an inkpot at the Iranian embassy. By some accounts, this was a cover for his recruitment by the KGB. True or not, Carlos used his university days to form close friendships with Third World radicals.

Carlos moved next to Jordan, where he was trained as a hit man for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and impressed the group's co- leader Wadi Haddad. Contrary to myth, he did not take part in the Black September attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics that left 11 Israeli athletes dead. Instead, he was dispatched to London, where he hid behind the guise of an irresponsible Lothario as he established safe houses and arms caches.

In 1973 he attempted his first assassination. Catching the Jewish president of the Marks & Spencer department store chain, Joseph Edward Sieff, in the bathroom, Carlos aimed his gun at his prey's face and fired one shot. Sieff was spared when the bullet ricocheted off his teeth. Later, Carlos would say his gun had jammed. "I usually fire three times around the nose. But only one bullet went off." He also botched his second mission, aiming poorly as he tossed hand grenades into an Israeli bank. "This is not a very efficient terrorist," says Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism program. "He was never as good as his reputation."

Carlos did better when the Popular Front transferred him to Paris a year later. He set off three bombs in the city and helped the Japanese Red Army plan the takeover of the French embassy in the Hague, in which 11 hostages were seized. After he took an unsuccessful shot with a bazooka at an El Al airliner parked at Orly Airport in January 1975, police rounded up Michel Moukharbel, Carlos' Lebanese adjutant. Moukharbel then led three unarmed policemen to a party where Carlos sat strumming a guitar. After chatting briefly, Carlos excused himself to go to the bathroom. He returned with a gun, killed Moukharbel and two of the police, wounding the third. Then he fled to Algeria.

That December, Carlos staged his single act of world-class terrorism: the raid on OPEC headquarters in Vienna, where 11 ministers were taken hostage and three other people were killed. He introduced himself to his captives with the words, "I am the famous Carlos. You will have heard of me." He tortured one hostage by shooting him in the hand, knee and stomach before finishing him off. Midway through the operation, Carlos canceled plans to assassinate two of the ministers when Algeria brokered a monetary deal in exchange for their lives. Haddad was furious, and their relationship cooled.

From then on, his career went into free fall. He quarreled with his other Middle East patrons and fled to Eastern Europe, where his flamboyant habits alienated his hosts. On a tape filmed with a hidden camera in Budapest in 1980, he can be seen arguing in Russian with a Hungarian security official, who told him, "Evacuate your operational base in our territory."

That message soon became a recurrent refrain. In 1982, when his latest amour, Magdalena Kopp, a German Red Army Faction member, was arrested in Paris in a car loaded with explosives, Carlos penned a letter to the French embassy at the Hague, stamped with his thumbprints. It warned, "I will take up the matter personally with the French government" unless Kopp and a fellow conspirator were released within 30 days. Two months later, the car bomb went off for which Carlos now stands trial. According to the French daily Le Monde, one of the two lawyers he retained last week for his defense, Jacques Verges, is identified in the files of the former East German Stasi secret police as the man who passed that letter to the French authorities, a role that suggests , an active participation with the terror clique. Verges dismisses the charge as "part of the Stasi program of disinformation." Former French government officials, however, confirm the report.

Between April 1982 and January 1984, Carlos' name was linked with attacks in Germany and France, including the bombing of a high-speed train outside Paris and the French Cultural Center in Germany, many in an effort to gain Kopp's freedom. She eventually joined him in Syria after she was released from prison in May 1985. Their sojourn in Damascus, which included a wedding and the birth of a daughter, was finally cut short in 1991, after newspapers publicized his whereabouts and an embarrassed Syria evicted him.

Carlos bounced around to Yemen and Jordan, falling deeper into disfavor. Somewhere along the way he lost his wife and child. "The marriage was a mistake," says an Arab friend. "He never trusted women." That same friend says, "He didn't trust the governments he worked for. This is why he was often depressed." It also explains why Carlos always carried a Russian pistol and never slept two nights in the same place.

Now Carlos can count on the same bed for many nights to come as he waits to stand trial. He has ordered his lawyers to file suit against French agents, whom he claims drugged, bound and abducted him from Sudan. In Paris the Justice Ministry is vowing to open old files that could compel Carlos to stand trial at least four times. Meanwhile, Berlin's attorney general is threatening to seek extradition for a 1983 bombing. In the Middle East, Arabs are bracing for shocking disclosures, since Carlos is "a walking encyclopedia of terrorism," says investigating magistrate Bruguiere. An East European diplomat in Beirut admits that "a lot of people would like him to have a heart attack very quickly in his French prison. If he talks, it will create scandals all over the world."

Until then, the graying Jackal sits in his underground cell, where he is barred access to television, radio and newspapers. Perhaps that is a kindness. If Carlos knew how the world is dismissing him as an overrated has-been, it might strike him as the cruelest fate of all.

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London, Lara Marlowe/Beirut, William Rademaekers/Paris and Bruce van Voorst/Bonn