DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. For decades now, we've become accustomed to living with the threat of terrorist attacks. We're scanned by magnetometers and wait through security lines at airports, concerts and ballgames. Our guest today, veteran national security correspondent Joby Warrick, has a new book that takes us back to the early days of modern terrorism in the 1970s, when hijacking airplanes was relatively easy and airlines and governments would often simply give in to terrorist demands. Warrick's book focuses on a man who in his day was the world's most famous terrorist, a man of many aliases who came to be known as Carlos the Jackal.
While leaving a trail of victims across Europe and the Middle East, he managed to enjoy the lifestyle of a wealthy playboy, wearing designer clothes, frequenting nightclubs and luxury hotels and having multiple affairs with women. Tabloid journalists were fascinated, and Carlos became such a cult figure that during one hijacking, a British pilot asked for his autograph. He would also inspire fictionalized villains in novels and films, including Robert Ludlum's "Bourne Identity" series and Tom Clancy's "Rainbow Six."
Last year, Joby Warrick spoke with a now elderly Carlos at the French prison where he's lived for decades. Joby Warrick spent three decades at The Washington Post. He was last on FRESH AIR to talk about his Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Black Flags: The Rise Of ISIS." His new book is "The Jackal: The Rise And Fall of Carlos, The World's First Super-Terrorist."
Joby Warrick, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
JOBY WARRICK: It's so great to be back. Thanks, Dave.
DAVIES: You know, you've been writing about contemporary national security issues for a long time. You did that great book on the origins of ISIS. What made you want to go back and cover this figure from an earlier era?
WARRICK: I think maybe it has something to do with my age. And I'm in my 60s now, so I can remember a time before al-Qaida, before 9/11, when terrorism meant something else. Al-Qaida redefined terrorism for our generation, but there was this earlier wave that you described - a time when any flight anywhere in the world could potentially be hijacked by people demanding all kinds of things. And this was an error that in many ways kind of created templates for the terrorism that we came to know later on, but it also had many incredibly fascinating individuals and characters on both the terrorism side, but also on the law enforcement side - people who spent their careers chasing these guys. It was a very different era, and I thought it was instructive really to get back into that and remind people what happened before and how in some ways it set a precedent for what we came to know later as modern terrorism.
DAVIES: Now, this guy, Carlos, he would have a long career of terrorism in Europe and the Middle East, really at a pretty young age - at, like, college age - but he actually came from South America. Tell us something about his background.
WARRICK: Yeah. And this is really extraordinary because you have someone who became essentially the face of the Palestinian militant movement at that time, but he wasn't a Palestinian at all. He was from Venezuela. He was the son of a devout Marxist. His father kind of, you know, brought up his kids in an environment where they worshipped Lenin. The man actually named three of his kids after Lenin using various names, including Ilich, which became the real name of the man who became Carlos the Jackal. But from that early age, he saw himself as having a destiny, as being someone who was going to be a swashbuckling international revolutionary.
DAVIES: So he leaves college and he heads to the Middle East to join a Palestinian resistance group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - no longer exists, right? This was a Marxist, very radical Palestinian group. And he came to work with a leader there, Wadie Haddad (ph). This is an interesting moment in the Palestinian movement. This is 1970 or so - right? - just three years after the 1967 war at which Israel defeated its Arab adversaries, expanded its territory. And the Palestinian movement was really new. Most of the world didn't really know about it. Give us a sense of what this group did and what the ambitions of this leader, Wadie Haddad, were.
WARRICK: So it can be easy for us to imagine what that moment was like because there are similarities now. I think of the conditions we see in the Middle East. What you had is a moment when Israel had defeated a coalition of Arab armies. It had seized control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and it just seemed unstoppable. There was no pathway for a - toward a Palestinian state. Nobody was even talking about it at the time. There was, you know, a large, you know, massive dislocation of millions of Palestinian citizens.
And within that environment and that - sort of the stress and the rage that I think many young Palestinians in particular felt there arose these groups that saw the only possible recourse for them - who believed the only way for them to fight back in the world was through terrorism. And so they developed a model which really was the origins of modern international terrorism. It was the idea that you don't just attack your foe. You go outside your territory and you bring the rest of the world into your struggle. And you do that by attacking airports or hijacking planes and essentially forcing the world to pay attention, forcing TV stations and radio stations to cover whatever you're doing.
DAVIES: So Carlos, he was then a young man - Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. He had worked with this Palestinian movement, and then when it was purged by King Hussein of Jordan, he hung with them and fought for a while there, but essentially took up their cause, moved back to England, lived in his mom's apartment for a while. But he ended up getting assignments - right? - from the leader of this Palestinian group.
WARRICK: This was a man with some interesting capabilities as far as the Palestinians were concerned. They saw a young man who was brave and willing to do anything, willing to risk his life, and that he also had talents. He spoke multiple languages. He didn't look like a Palestinian because he wasn't. He was a man of the West. He could travel anywhere without attracting suspicion. And so they decided to create a situation where he was a bit of a sleeper agent.
DAVIES: And his first assignment was - well, you tell us about it.
WARRICK: So this is 1973. It's between Christmas and New Year's that year. And Carlos was just begging for a chance to do something, and then finally he got his chance. His boss said, OK, well, we're going to give you assignment. You need to kill this one individual. And the person they identified happened to be a wealthy, Jewish British citizen who was a president of a department store chain. The assignment was to go into that man's house, confront him in person and shoot him. And it was as simple as that. Because the Palestinians didn't quite know if Carlos was up to the task, they gave him an old gun and five bullets. It's all he had, so he essentially had a - one chance at this. But Carlos accepted the job, and in late December 1973, he found the address and walked inside and confronted the man in person with his gun.
DAVIES: And?
WARRICK: He found this man - his name was Joseph Sieff - in his bathroom, in his house, and without saying a word, he lifts the revolver and shoots him once in the face. And as it turns out, very luckily for the victim, the bullet strikes him in his teeth and is deflected by his teeth, and so he's wounded but he's not mortally wounded. The second one jammed. And so that was the point when he panicked and decided to run away. So it was an attempted assassination that didn't actually work, but in a way, Carlos was able to prove himself and showed his Palestinian bosses that he was a man who could look someone else in the face and pull the trigger.
DAVIES: Right. But he passed his first test as far as the Palestinian leaders thought.
WARRICK: Yeah. The tough part was to actually do the shooting. And as Carlos would say later, it's not that easy to snuff out a human life if you're looking into the eyes of your victim, even for someone like Carlos, who, I must say, having met the guy, is - seems to have no ability to empathize with other human beings. He describes it as a difficult moment, but he did carry it out. He did shoot the man.
DAVIES: All right. We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We're speaking with Joby Warrick. He spent decades covering national security issues for The Washington Post. His new book is "The Jackal: The Rise And Fall Of Carlos, The World's First Super-Terrorist." We'll talk more in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with veteran national security correspondent Joby Warrick. His new book profiles a man who was the world's most famous terrorist in the '70s and '80s, known for his daring assaults on many governments in Europe and an extravagant playboy lifestyle funded by ransom payments from his kidnappings. Warrick's new book is "The Jackal: The Rise And Fall Of Carlos, The World's First Super-Terrorist."
So this guy who would be known as Carlos, he's a young man. And he's working with this Palestinian group which also connected with revolutionaries from many other countries, particularly German, and also the Japanese Red Army. And I wanted to focus on a moment in 1974, when a group of these terrorists, particularly the Japanese Red Army, was supposed to kidnap the French ambassador to The Hague. And Carlos, who was in Europe, was supposed to be a part of this operation.
The plans went a bit awry. And the group ended up shooting their way into the French embassy, taking the ambassador and others hostage and demanding the release of a prisoner and $1 million, and a plane. But there was a standoff. Carlos wasn't there. And while the negotiations are happening, on his own, he decides to support this operation with some initiative. What did he do?
WARRICK: So here is a moment that it seems a standoff has developed between these hostage-takers. Carlos sees it going nowhere. He thinks he needs to do something to pressure the French government into caving in. And his idea was to go to what was essentially a shopping center, a fairly, you know, affluent part of Paris. He walks in wearing a suit, goes up to a balcony on the second floor. And he's looking down at ordinary people going about their lives. There's children. There are, you know, people coming and going from work. And he takes out of his pocket a small hand grenade and just drops it into the crowd and then stands there and watches as the explosion takes place. And bedlam results.
You know, people are killed. There's great chaos. There are, you know, many people wounded, a child who loses a hand. So it's atrocious scene. And what's remarkable was you kind of - the camera pans through all this terror and horror that's been created - is this young man, Carlos, just turns and walks away. He's wearing a suit. He looks like he could be French or European. And he's able just to walk straight through the chaos that he created and out into the street and slips away.
DAVIES: Yeah. I wonder what insight you have into the psychological makeup of this guy, this casual willingness to inflict terrible damage on civilians, including children. What permits him to do this? Did you ever feel like you got to read on him?
WARRICK: I tried to press him on that later on. But even without meeting him, you pick up this pattern throughout his life. Here's someone who can take life without flinching. And he can do it in part because his entire world is himself. He's the classic definition of a narcissistic criminal who can inflict violence, who can do terrible things to other people and seemingly not feel any kind of remorse or empathy. And he's able to do this again and again. And it's partly why he is someone who's so attractive to the people that hire him, because they know that, yeah, you assign Carlos to kill someone, he can do it. He will not flinch. He'll carry out the command. And that turns out to be true throughout his life.
DAVIES: You know, it's interesting because people who become revolutionaries, they can get there a lot of different ways. And sometimes they're simply intellectuals who are, you know, convinced of the unfairness of the existing system and the unfairness of the capitalist system, and that only a socialist revolution can change that. It doesn't seem that Carlos had any particular contact with the oppressed people his revolutionary efforts were supposed to help. Did he?
WARRICK: Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. You can't point to a single thing that he actually did to help the Palestinians that he professed to care about. He never, you know, met them personally, except for the other terrorists that he was involved with. And so it's a very sort of shallow kind of ideological crusade.
And some people do care so deeply about a cause that they're willing to commit acts of violence or do something quite risky in the name of this cause that they're fighting for. With Carlos, it just seems to be different. He wanted to impress his superiors, the people who were his bosses at the time. But more than that, he wanted to kind of create this aura about himself that he was a daredevil, that he was a guy who would do anything and just show ultimate commitment to a cause that really, intellectually he didn't really care that much about.
DAVIES: Another attack I wanted to talk about was sometime - this is in the mid-'70s, And there was a decision to try and take down an Israeli airliner taking off at the Orly airport outside of Paris. And what's remarkable about this is the way they were going to do this was to bring rocket-powered grenade launchers and try and actually hit the plane as it took off. They were able to get right next to the runway and fire a shot. Didn't take the plane down. It did, I think, do damage elsewhere on the airfield.
And then six days later, they come back to try again. And there are police around the runway. But they are able to take these grenade launchers, inside their trenchcoats, into the airport terminal to try again. Again failed. I mean, it's just so striking how little security there was.
WARRICK: It is such a different world. And in relating these stories to friends and colleagues, there's this shock and surprise how lax the security was at the time. There weren't metal detectors, as we have them. In those days, they didn't exist. And so you have hijackings with Carlos' colleagues, where a woman walks into a plane with two hand grenades concealed inside her bra.
Any, you know, metal detector, a pat-down, you know, any, you know, very basic security precautions might've stopped that attack. But she was able to walk onto this plane with the grenades without being searched. And it was the same, you know, again and again during this period, where Carlos and his colleagues would attempt something, would walk in, you know, to an airfield or drive onto an airfield with a very dangerous weapon and not be searched. And no one even detects them or notices them until they've actually fired their weapon.
DAVIES: Carlos had gotten a start in this business in the mid-'70s. And he was still working with this Palestinian group. In June of 1975, there would be an incident which would really cement his fame. I mean, he was anonymous - an anonymous guy to law enforcement at the time. And this - it began with a shootout in a Paris apartment. Carlos' boss within the Palestinian group he was work (ph) with - a guy who was sort of the director of their European operations, who went by the name of Andre - had been identified by French authorities and arrested. And under interrogation, he told them too much and led them to the apartment of one of Carlos' many girlfriends. As it happened, there was a party going on. Carlos was there. And so three French policemen coming in - remarkably, none of them armed. Tell us what happened.
WARRICK: So yeah. It's a party. It's kind of after hours. Things are settling down a little bit. The partygoers are pretty drunk. Carlos has had a lot to drink. And suddenly, you - there's a rap on the door, and there's these police officers standing there. Two of them walk in. They demand identification, and they single out Carlos as someone who's interesting to them. He looks like a person who's been described by Carlos' boss as an operative, someone who's working with the Palestinians. And they begin to question him. They show him pictures of who they think he might be.
And Carlos is resistant. He kind of - oh, I don't know what you're talking about. But then he excuses himself, goes to the bathroom, comes out slicking back his hair. The conversation continues, and then there's another knock on the door. And this time, it's a third police officer, bringing in Carlos' boss, the man who apparently had betrayed him.
Carlos, in a flash, pulls out the pistol that's behind his waistband, shoots his boss in the head, kills him and then is able to shoot all three of the other - the French police officers. Kills two of the police officers, plus his boss. The third police officer survives. But there's this moment of carnage and panic in this apartment which allows Carlos, once again, as he has all so often done - is to just slip out the back door, walk down the street. Nobody gives him a second look. And he's now, you know, a mass killer of police officers, and he's able to get away.
DAVIES: Right. And the deaths of those officers would follow him for the rest of his career, but it was a remarkable moment. But as things unfolded, this is the incident that made him famous, or led to his fame. You want to explain how that happened?
WARRICK: Right. Up until this time, police were searching for someone. They had this suspect who had thrown a hand grenade into a shopping center. They knew about a man who resembled Carlos who had launched, you know, rocket-propelled grenades at airplanes. They didn't know the person's name or identity or anything about him. Now, in this apartment, they had - this crime had taken place that was clearly connected to this person that was being sought, but they didn't know his real name. They didn't know he was Ilich from Venezuela. All they had was a passport that had a face on it and a name in Spanish, which was Carlos Martinez.
So this suspect - the person who was now internationally sought - was known suddenly as Carlos. That was the name that police had. There was a photograph in the passport that was just really a fake photo that Carlos had made for a fake passport, and that was the photo that the police had. But this becomes the identity of Carlos, and he's this man with the tinted sunglasses, a bit of a jolly face. But that's the photo that becomes most associated with Carlos the Jackal, even now.
DAVIES: But the other crazy thing was one of Carlos' other girlfriends, at a different apartment, had - they had an apartment where he had stored a lot of stuff, right? Weapons, I think. I don't know what else. Passports. You know, all kinds of information. And explain how that comes to light and leads to his fame and reputation.
WARRICK: Carlos was a guy who had a couple girlfriends in Paris. He also had women that he stayed with in London when he was there. And when the story broke about this incredible shooting in Paris with police officers being killed, once the identity of this man was established, they discovered that he had these other hideouts in other places in the world, including in London.
So police raid this apartment in London where he stored all these weapons. He had grenades. He had, you know, explosives, you know, handguns. And it becomes a big, sensational story for the British press. Soon reporters are crawling all over this apartment and doing their own investigations.
And during one of those kind of casual tours of the apartment by a reporter from The Guardian, the reporter notices a book on the bookshelf. And it's a fairly famous novel at the time, called "The Day Of The Jackal" by an author named Frederick Forsyth. And the reporter just mentions in the article that on a shelf near the guns that Carlos had was this novel, "Day Of The Jackal."
The next day, that book title gets attached to Carlos' name as a new nickname. So the next day, tabloids are running stories about Carlos the Jackal. He now has an entirely new identity, has this really colorful nickname that was totally by accident, had nothing to do with a real person, but it sounded good in a tabloid headline. And so that becomes the name of Carlos for all time.
DAVIES: Let's take another break here. We are speaking with Joby Warrick. His new book is "The Jackal: The Rise And Fall Of Carlos, The World's First Super-Terrorist." He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. Our guest is veteran national security correspondent Joby Warrick, whose new book profiles a terrorist of the 1970s and '80s who became so famous for his brazen attacks and playboy lifestyle that once, when he was releasing hostages from a hijacked airplane, several asked him for his autograph. Warrick, whose last book about the origins of ISIS earned a Pulitzer Prize, believes there are lessons to learn from the life and crimes of his new subject, a notorious figure from the early days of modern terrorism. His new book is "The Jackal: The Rise And Fall Of Carlos, The World's First Super-Terrorist."
We can't talk about all of the crimes that Carlos had a hand in. There are just too many. But there's one that we should get - mention, and that is the 1975 assault in Vienna at a meeting of officials of OPEC - the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Carlos had a band of six people. This was financed by Muammar Gaddafi, right? He had a grudge against OPEC - wanted them to keep their prices higher.
And so Carlos organizes this group. He has a band of six people from three different countries - two Palestinians and one German who - those three only spoke a few words of English. And so, on a snowy day, they travel to the headquarters of OPEC on a city streetcar, carrying these big duffel bags full of munitions - again, you can just see how lax security was - walked right into the building and started shooting.
Now, your book is - this is a fascinating episode. I think it's 40 pages to describe the whole thing. It's amazing the detail you got here. You want to just kind of give us a general sense of what happened and where it left Carlos?
WARRICK: As you mentioned at the beginning, I've been covering terrorism for a long time. And obviously, there's - very big, very ambitious attacks happened in our country in 2001. The - this incident - this OPEC attack in 1975 - it's as audacious as anything I've come across in my career. And if you think about it, you've got a 26-year-old with a band of - sort of international band of commandos from different countries who don't know each other converge in Vienna, Austria, in late December 1975 and proceed to walk into the headquarters of the world's largest oil cartel and then take the entire thing hostage.
This was the international conference of OPEC's. It was not just their staff. But it's all the ministers from all the big oil-producing countries around the world gathered in Vienna for their annual meeting. So there are dozens of people there. There are - some of the wealthiest oil barons on Earth are there. And Carlos' assignment is, I'm going to take the entire thing hostage. And he does that. And that's the start of this really, you must say, sensational incident in 1975.
DAVIES: And tell us how he announces himself to his hostages.
WARRICK: So a few moments pass while the commandos are consolidating control. They're putting explosives around the room. You know, the hostages are obviously scared to death. And in the middle of all this, this young man wearing a black beret, looking very stylish with a leather coat, decides to announce himself to the group. And he does it by saying, I am the famous Carlos. Maybe you've heard of me. So not, you know, I am this - the Palestinian group. I'm this other fighting unit. I am Carlos. So he presents himself and makes himself the star of the entire episode.
DAVIES: Right. Sixty-two people taken hostage altogether. He would release some, particularly, like, clerical people who were Austrians. But he took a lot of these wealthy oil barons with him and was given an airplane and he went to several different countries over the next two or three days. And in the end - well, how did it end?
WARRICK: Well, not the way that he had been instructed. Carlos had gotten very specific orders from Muammar Gaddafi, who was bankrolling the whole operation, whose idea it was to try to strike out at OPEC and sort of take Gaddafi's vengeance on the organization. But Gaddafi really wanted him, above all, to kill two of his archenemies. There was a Saudi oil minister and an Iranian minister who were present in Vienna, and Gaddafi, just frankly, wanted those two executed. Well, Carlos never got around to doing that.
So there's this - a period of kind of back-and-forth where this plane full of hostages is bouncing from North - one North African country to another. And eventually, the Saudis and the Iranians are able to convince him to give up his hostages and not to execute his two prisoners in exchange for a lot of money. And Carlos thinks about it. He looks at his options, and he thinks, yeah. A few million dollars sounds great to me. So in the end, it becomes a ransom operation. Carlos frees his hostages, including the two people he was supposed to kill. He got a bunch of money for letting the hostages ultimately go free.
DAVIES: As they were releasing the hostages, some of them actually asked for his autograph?
WARRICK: It's an extraordinary scene because he's such a showman. And he's not - you know, he's doing more than just, you know, bragging about himself and, you know, kind of wallowing in his kind of showmanship. But he - he's a charmer, and he's even charming as a hostage-taker. He befriends people. He kind of gets into discussions, tells jokes. He sets his gun down, hands out cigarettes. So he's playing it all like he's a game-show host instead of a terrorist. And it's just the most remarkable thing that any of these individuals, any of these hostages, has ever seen.
And so, you know, one guy kind of picks up bullet casings as souvenirs. Others, as they're leaving the plane, as they're being allowed to go home, literally ask Carlos for his autograph, and he happily complies. And as you mentioned earlier, even the pilot of the plane that later flies Carlos away from Algeria, which is where this incident ended, wants his autograph and kind of shows it off for years afterward as, here's my personally inscribed book from Carlos the Jackal.
DAVIES: But in the end, I mean, this guy coming in with six people, riding a streetcar with, you know, bags full of weapons, successfully kidnaps 62 people, flies around all over and gets away with it and gets rich. The problem is that he had orders. And when he gets back to Wadie Haddad, the - you know, the mastermind who plans these terrorist attacks, he was furious. And in fact, as a result of this, Carlos was expelled from the organization, right?
WARRICK: Yeah. That's right. It is - Carlos had committed two offenses. One was he had failed an order. So he had been told to execute two of his hostages, and he didn't. And the other is he had become the story. This is supposed to be a - you know, a terrorist operation with a point. They were trying to pressure OPEC internationally. They were doing it in the name of the Palestinian people. Carlos made it all about him. He had to announce to everyone that he was the famous Carlos. I'm the guy in charge here.
And, you know, his leaders, his bosses just didn't take well to that. This is not about you. You're not a movie star. We don't need people like you in our business. So they kicked him out, and they almost killed him. They talked about, maybe we should just knock this guy off. Instead, they just told him, you know, we don't want anything else to do with you. You're on your own. And the Palestinians go their way. Carlos goes his.
DAVIES: Right. So he became a hunted man, but a very rich hunted man. And it was interesting. This is an interesting transition in his life because he's no longer with this Palestinian group that had kind of defined his career. He - but he decides he's going to collect his own band of revolutionaries and do what, exactly?
WARRICK: Yeah. So there's this moment where, OK, the Palestinians don't want anything to do with him. He has no real constituency anymore. He doesn't have - he can't, you know, logically claim to be representing Palestinians in any way. So what do you do if you're Carlos? You want to stay famous. You want to stay in the game, and you want people to talk about you. So you remain a terrorist, but you need new sponsors.
So Carlos goes out looking for people who will pay him to do what he does. And not surprisingly, he finds lots of takers, people who can appreciate the mystique, the aura that this young kid has - this Carlos the Jackal, the international terrorist, somebody that they can hire to do bad things that they don't want to take responsibility for.
So, for example, if you're Muammar Gaddafi and you want to strike out against, you know, the Egyptian president Sadat or whoever your enemy of the day is, you can use someone like Carlos to do the dirty deed. And that way, you don't get blamed for it. Your mission or your objective gets accomplished. Carlos takes the responsibility for it, so it kind of works out well for everybody. So that becomes really the template for the rest of Carlos' life. He will be what you could essentially call a mercenary terrorist. I'm a terrorist for hire. Give me some money, and I'll make things happen.
DAVIES: We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Joby Warrick. He has spent decades covering national security issues for The Washington Post. His new book is "The Jackal: The Rise And Fall Of Carlos, The World's First Super-Terrorist." He'll talk more in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with national security correspondent Joby Warrick. His new book profiles a man who was the world's most famous terrorist in the 1970s and '80s, known for his daring assaults on many governments in Europe and an extravagant playboy lifestyle. Warrick's new book is "The Jackal: The Rise And Fall Of Carlos, The World's First Super-Terrorist."
We can't tell the whole story, and I do want to leave some for people who want to look at the book. There are so many fascinating descriptions of what happens with Carlos. But I do want to talk about your own personal conversation with him. You got an interview with him - I guess this was last year - right? - in a...
WARRICK: Yeah. March of 2025.
DAVIES: ...In the prison - in a prison in France, where he'd been held for just about 30 years, I guess. I sense that, as a journalist, this was somewhat of a disappointing encounter, right?
WARRICK: Well, you have all these anticipation when you're studying someone so carefully and exhaustively. And you're wondering, what would it be like to meet him? He's still alive. And that actually, I think, is a fact that surprises a lot of people. So I wanted to meet him. I felt it was important to kind of get a sense of the guy. And I tried for a long time to get permission to do that.
And as it turned out, Carlos was very happy to do an interview. He's - he never shies away from publicity. But it was the French government that was a little less eager to let him speak because, understandably, the French suffered quite a bit at Carlos' hand. I mean, police officers were killed. Trains were bombed. There was, you know, quite a bit of carnage that was attributed to Carlos.
And so it - he almost never is allowed to give interviews. And the - on the few occasions, such as the one that I had, when he's - the - a prison meeting is allowed to take place, there are all kinds of restrictions in terms of, you know, no recording equipment of any kind, no cameras and some rules about what can and can't be done in the interview. But for me, it was a chance to sit next to the man that I'd been studying for so long.
And he walks in. He's 75 at the time. Now he's 76. And he's become an old man in prison. He is a bit frail - his gravelly voice, a bit of a stoop and a mind that is clearly not what it once was. He's forgetful. He repeats himself. He loses his train of thought. But there was this moment to be able to sit with - almost with our knees touching and ask him anything I wanted to and see what he would say.
DAVIES: Did he express any remorse or regret about killing people?
WARRICK: Not about killing people. And in fact - and I was - I really tried to press him on this. I - like, what - how do you feel about the innocents that were killed? How do you feel about those - you know, the children who were in that shopping center who got killed or maimed that day you threw your grenade out? And there is no remorse. And if you can take him at his word, like, just studying his body language, he seems to feel completely justified in everything he did. There was - there's no such thing as an innocent victim, in his view. His actions were correct. His ideology was correct. So there were no mistakes made.
The one thing that I was surprised to hear that he does regret is - he told me straight out that, I should have killed more people. There are a few specific people, and particularly those who were tracking him, the French and the Americans who captured him in 1994. I should have been faster with my gun, and I should have taken them out. That's the only regret that he would admit to.
DAVIES: You know, was it Hannah Arendt that coined the phrase the banality of evil? And, you know, when I've read books and articles and talked to journalists who've, you know, had a moment with cruel dictators and despots, they're often just not very impressive - kind of shallow. Did you get that feeling about him?
WARRICK: Absolutely. Because of my - the direction of my career, I've spent time with people who've done some very bad things. And I've spent years studying the Islamic State and its leadership and its early rise. And sometimes you see in these terrorist figures a rage, you know, extreme views, maybe a religious zealotry that sort of drives them or helps motivate their violence.
With Carlos, what was unimpressive or what kind of I saw as just extraordinarily weak is all of that violence, all those atrocities, were committed not in the service of an idea, which would be bad enough, but really in the service of an ego. And the fact that he had no ability to have introspection about that, to be able to reflect on the harm and the suffering that he caused. His inability to do that just showed - you know, pointed to a very deep flaw in his personality.
DAVIES: You know, he's kind of unique in his fame and his lifestyle. Is he unique among the terrorists you've interviewed or studied over the years? Or is he another one of the bunch?
WARRICK: I think there is something unique about him. And part of it is, you know, as bad as he was, he was, you know, in equal measures lucky. He just kept getting breaks and another break and lived to tell the tale. Here's someone that, you know, there were 1 million opportunities for people to either kill him or arrest him.
And he just manages to slip through the net again and again and again, and was on the run for 20 years, which is just remarkable - by himself - for someone who was, at the time, the most wanted criminal in the world. Somebody that every country was looking for, except for the places that he sought refuge. And only after just a lucky break by the CIA in the 1990s was he eventually found and captured. And if it had not been for that break, he perhaps would be out there in the world still living like a king.
DAVIES: You know, a lot's changed since the days when Carlos was doing his thing. I mean, governments now take terrorism much more seriously and have, you know, great resources devoted to it and digital investigative techniques and all of that. It's also interesting that a lot of the terrorism that we've come to know in the last 20 years has been motivated by religious fundamentalism, you know, al-Qaida, ISIS, the Taliban. Do you think we'll see a return to the Carlos approach of working for cash, funded by whoever needs them?
WARRICK: I absolutely do believe that. And as someone who's followed the Jihadi groups for a long time, I see them certainly being down right now. Their numbers are down. Their reach has been diminished. We'll always see people, you know, committing acts of violence and claiming that it's being done in the name of ISIS or al-Qaida, even though those groups often have absolutely nothing to do with the person or the deed.
But what you're seeing - I think what we're witnessing in the last few years is a return to a more secular or geopolitical terrorism, where the target is - you know, so the target is political. Where it's, you know, dissident figures that are living in - you know, Iranian dissidents that are living in America. Or, you know, Jewish interests in Europe that the Iranians or the Russians, for whatever reason, decide to go after. And what we've seen in the last couple of years in particular is a rise in mercenary terrorism again, where the Iranians will hire a local gangster or a drug smuggler or somebody involved in drug trafficking to do things that they don't want to have to take responsibility for. And there's a sense among terrorism officials that I speak to that Carlos-style mercenary terrorism is having a comeback right now. And it seems to be the wave of the future.
DAVIES: I guess the difference is that you don't have to call yourself a revolutionary anymore.
WARRICK: You don't have to pretend. And in fact, a lot of these sort of contractual arrangements are made using encrypted platforms like Telegram. People are wired money to do bad things. And some people call it the violent gig economy that you can, you know, get online, apply for a job, carry out an act of violence, you know, on behalf of somebody that you don't even know. And that seems to be the trend at the moment.
DAVIES: Well, Joby Warrick, thank you so much for speaking with us again.
WARRICK: Very much enjoyed it. Thank you, Dave.
DAVIES: Joby Warrick is a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security correspondent who spent three decades at The Washington Post. His new book is "The Jackal: The Rise And Fall Of Carlos, The World's First Super-Terrorist." Coming up, Maureen Corrigan has some suggestions for your beach bag, three new books of great suspense fiction. This is FRESH AIR.
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