Carlos the Jackal
Carlos the Jackal, whose real name is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, owes half of his nickname to a novel on someone else's bookshelf. A correspondent for The Guardian reportedly spotted Frederick Forsyth's 1971 book The Day of the Jackal in a friend's apartment. Sánchez had stashed some weapons there. The newspaper dubbed him the Jackal. The novel actually belonged to a resident of the apartment, and Sánchez probably never read it.
The label stuck to a Venezuelan who carried out assassinations and bombings from 1973 to 1985, and who spent years among the most wanted fugitives in the world. Today he is a convict in a French prison. How does the son of a lawyer end up on that path? Which governments sheltered him, and why? And how does a man hunted for so long end up in handcuffs on a private jet? His first name was a political statement too, and his father chose it.
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was born on the 12th of October 1949 in Michelena, in the Venezuelan state of Táchira. His father, José Altagracia Ramírez Navas, was a Marxist lawyer. His mother, Elba María Sánchez, begged for a Christian first name for her firstborn. José ignored her and chose Ilich, after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Two younger brothers were named Lenin, born in 1951, and Vladimir, born in 1958.
In 1959, Ilich joined the youth movement of the Venezuelan Communist Party. He went to high school in Caracas. In January 1966 he accompanied his father to the Third Tricontinental Conference. He then reportedly spent that summer at Camp Matanzas, a guerrilla warfare school near Havana run by the Cuban DGI. His parents divorced later in the year.
After the divorce, his mother took the children to London. There she studied at Stafford House College in Kensington and at the London School of Economics. In 1968, José considered the Sorbonne in Paris for Ilich and his brother. He settled instead on the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. The BBC described that school as "a notorious hotbed for recruiting foreign communists to the Soviet Union". Ilich was expelled in 1970, and the training he sought next was of a very different kind.
In July 1970, Ramírez Sánchez volunteered for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, known as the PFLP, in Beirut, Lebanon. Recruiting officer Bassam Abu Sharif gave him the code name Carlos because of his South American roots. He was sent to a camp for foreign volunteers on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. Afterward he studied at a finishing school code-named H4, staffed by Iraqi military near the Syria-Iraq border.
During the Black September conflict of 1970, he fought for the PFLP in northern Jordan and gained a reputation as a fighter. When the organisation was pushed out of Jordan, he returned to Beirut. There he was sent to train under Wadie Haddad. He later took courses at the Polytechnic of Central London, now the University of Westminster, and apparently kept working for the PFLP.
On the 30th of December 1973, Sánchez called at the London home of Joseph Sieff on Queen's Grove in St John's Wood. Sieff was a Jewish businessman and vice president of the British Zionist Federation. Sánchez ordered the maid to lead him to Sieff, who was in his bath. He fired a single shot from a Tokarev 7.62mm pistol. The bullet bounced off Sieff between his nose and upper lip and knocked him unconscious. The gun then jammed, and Sánchez ran. The attack was announced as revenge for the Paris assassination by Mossad of Mohamed Boudia, a PFLP leader.
Sánchez later admitted responsibility for a failed bomb attack on the Bank Hapoalim in London. He also admitted car bomb attacks on three French newspapers accused of pro-Israeli leanings. He claimed to be the grenade thrower at a Parisian restaurant, in an attack that killed two people and injured 30. That attack was part of the 1974 French Embassy attack in The Hague.
On the 13th and the 17th of January 1975, he took part in two failed rocket-propelled grenade attacks on El Al airplanes at Orly Airport near Paris. The second led to a gunfight with police and a hostage standoff lasting seventeen hours. Hundreds of riot police were involved, along with French Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski. Sánchez slipped away during the shooting. The three other PFLP members were given passage to Baghdad, Iraq.
On the 26th of June 1975, the French domestic intelligence agency, the DST, captured Michel Moukharbal, a Lebanon-born PFLP contact of Sánchez. Two unarmed DST agents then questioned Sánchez at a Parisian house party, after Moukharbal revealed his identity. Sánchez shot and killed both agents and Moukharbal. He escaped through Brussels to Beirut, and from Beirut he helped plan an attack on the headquarters of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, known as OPEC.
On the 21st of December 1975, Sánchez led a six-person team, including Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, into a meeting of OPEC leaders in Vienna. The gunmen took more than 60 hostages and killed three people. The dead were an Austrian policeman, an Iraqi OPEC employee and a member of the Libyan delegation.
Sánchez demanded that Austrian radio and television read a communiqué about the Palestinian cause every two hours. He threatened to execute a hostage every 15 minutes. The Austrian government gave in, and the communiqué was broadcast as demanded.
On the 22nd of December, the government supplied an airplane for the PFLP team and 42 hostages, bound for Algiers. The pilot of the next leg was Neville Atkinson, an ex-Royal Navy flyer then working as the personal pilot of Libya's leader Muammar al-Gaddafi. He flew Sánchez and others out of Algiers, including Kröcher-Tiedemann and Hans-Joachim Klein. Klein supported the imprisoned Red Army Faction and belonged to the Revolutionary Cells. Atkinson took the DC-9 to Tripoli, where more hostages were freed, and then returned to Algiers. The last hostages were released there, and some of the raiders were granted asylum.
In the following years, Abu Sharif and Klein claimed that Sánchez had pocketed a large payment for the safe release of the Arab hostages. The claimed sum ranged from 20 million to 50 million US dollars. Klein said the money came from "an Arab president". Sánchez told his lawyers that the Saudis paid it on behalf of the Iranians and that it was "diverted en route and lost by the Revolution".
Sánchez left Algeria for Libya and then Aden, where senior PFLP officials met. He had to explain why he had not executed two senior hostages, Iran's finance minister Jamshid Amuzgar and Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani. Wadie Haddad, his trainer and the leader of the PFLP-EO, expelled him for failing the mission. Sánchez would soon find sponsors elsewhere.
In 1976, Manuel Contreras, Gerhard Mertins, Sergio Arredondo and an unidentified Brazilian general traveled to Tehran. They offered the Shah's regime a collaboration to kill Carlos in exchange for a large sum of money. What happened in those meetings is not known.
In September 1976, Carlos was arrested in Yugoslavia, detained, and flown to Baghdad. He chose to settle in Aden and tried to found his own Organization of Armed Struggle, made up of Syrian, Lebanese and German rebels.
East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, gave him an office and safe houses in East Berlin. They also provided a support staff of 75 and a service car, and let him carry a pistol in public. From there, he is believed to have planned attacks on several European targets. These included the bombing of the Radio Free Europe offices in Munich in February 1981.
Several journalists claim that the Romanian government of Nicolae Ceaușescu also backed his group with a base, weapons and passports. The author Alfred S. Regnery claimed Romania commissioned the Munich bombing as part of an unsuccessful hunt for a defector, former General Ion Mihai Pacepa. Romanian authorities denied ever sponsoring Carlos. As of 2021, no relevant documents had been found in Romanian archives.
Stasi files, open to historians after German reunification, show a link between Carlos and the KGB through the East German police. When Leonid Brezhnev visited West Germany in 1981, Carlos carried out no attacks, at the KGB's request. Western intelligence had expected some. The Stasi also asked him to use his influence on the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, known as ASALA, to tone down its anti-Soviet activity.
His group's first attack may have been a failed rocket strike on the Superphénix French nuclear power station on the 18th of January 1982. Then, on the 16th of February 1982, Paris police arrested two members of his circle, the Swiss militant Bruno Breguet and Carlos's wife, Magdalena Kopp. Their car held explosives. A letter to the French embassy in The Hague demanded their immediate release, and Carlos lobbied the French government without success.
A wave of attacks followed in France. On the 29th of March 1982, a bomb on the Paris-Toulouse TGV train Le Capitole killed five and injured 77. On the 22nd of April 1982, a car bomb at the newspaper Al-Watan al-Arabi in Paris killed one and injured 63. In August 1983, an attack on the Maison de France in West Berlin killed one man and injured twenty-two. On the 31st of December 1983, a bomb at the Gare Saint-Charles in Marseille killed two and injured 33. A bomb on a Marseille-Paris TGV the same day killed three and injured 12.
Within days of the bombings, Carlos sent letters to three news agencies claiming responsibility. He called the attacks revenge for a French air strike on a PFLP training camp in Lebanon the previous month.
The attacks brought international pressure on the Eastern European states that harboured him. For over two years he lived in Budapest's second district, in Hungary. Hungary expelled him in late 1985. Iraq, Libya and Cuba refused him sanctuary, and he found limited support in Syria. He settled in Damascus with Kopp and their daughter, Elba Rosa. The Syrian government forced him to stay inactive. Iraq approached him for work in 1990, and in September 1991 Syria expelled him because it had supported the American response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. After that, he had to find a country willing to take him.
After more than two years of searching for a refuge, and a short stay in Jordan, Carlos reached the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. There he lived under the protection of Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi, a powerful Muslim fundamentalist leader.
In 1993, Billy Waugh was tasked with finding him. Waugh was a CIA contractor and a former senior NCO with the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam Studies and Observations Group. His team spent about four months in Khartoum that year. They identified a man who worked as a bodyguard for Carlos and followed him. On the 8th of February 1994, he led them to the apartment. The team set up an observation post in an abandoned hospital across the street and watched for four months. Then they handed their intelligence to the French DST.
The French DST and the foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, courted the Sudanese government. They offered much-needed communications equipment and supplied satellite pictures of Sudan's enemy positions. Al-Turabi was invited to Paris to discuss extradition. He insisted that his culture forbade handing over a guest. French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua then offered to speak to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on Sudan's behalf. Pasqua promised help in securing loans that could eventually erase Sudan's foreign debt.
Al-Turabi was also shown surveillance videos of Carlos partying, drinking and carousing with women. These offended his Muslim faith. He had agreed to protect Carlos as a "combatant, someone who fought for the Palestinian cause". Now he considered Carlos a "hoodlum", and he agreed to give him up.
Carlos had left his first wife, who took their daughter to Venezuela. He wanted to father a child with his second wife, Lana Jarrar. For that reason he entered a Khartoum hospital for a varicocelectomy, a procedure to correct a low sperm count. After the operation, a Sudanese police officer told him of a plot to kill him. An armed escort moved him and his bodyguards to a villa near al-Turabi's home. His wife went back to their house to fetch belongings and never returned.
At 3 a.m. on the 14th of August 1994, several men woke Carlos by pinning him to the bed. They put him in hand and leg cuffs, and a doctor tranquilized him. He was carried to a private jet and flown to Paris to face trial.
A French judge had issued a national arrest warrant over the murders of two Paris policemen at Rue Toullier. The warrant let the French government skip the lengthy process of requesting an extradition order through Interpol. Carlos was sent to the maximum-security La Santé Prison to await trial.
In 1996, a majority of the European Commission of Human Rights rejected Carlos's application for release based on how he was captured. This was despite the fact that the French had violated international law by removing him from Sudan by force. His trial began on the 12th of December 1997. He unsuccessfully demanded release on the grounds of illegal arrest. He argued with his original lawyers, replaced them, and eventually dismissed them all.
He denied the 1975 murders and said Mossad had orchestrated them. He condemned Israel as a terrorist state. He told the court, "When one wages war for 30 years, there is a lot of blood spilled." He added, "we never killed anyone for money, but for a cause", the liberation of Palestine. He defended himself over the remaining eight days and gave a rambling closing statement lasting four hours. The jury deliberated for three hours and forty-eight minutes. On the 23rd of December, it found him guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
In 2001, after converting to Islam, Carlos married his lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, in a Muslim ceremony. He was still married to his second wife at the time. In June 2003 he published a collection of writings from his cell, titled Revolutionary Islam. The book seeks to defend violence in terms of class conflict. In it he wrote, "Today, confronted by the threat to Civilization, there is a response: revolutionary Islam!" He also voiced support for Osama bin Laden, and called the September 11 attacks a "lofty feat".
In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights heard his complaint that years of solitary confinement amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment. In 2006 the court ruled that Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights had not been violated. It found, however, that Article 13, the right to an effective remedy, had been. He was awarded €10,000 for costs and expenses. That year he was moved from La Santé to Clairvaux Prison.
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez kept up a sporadic correspondence with him. One letter addressed him as a "distinguished compatriot". On the 1st of June 2006, at an OPEC meeting in Caracas, Chávez called him his "good friend". On the 20th of November 2009, Chávez publicly defended him as wrongly considered "a bad guy". He called Carlos "one of the great fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organisation". France summoned the Venezuelan ambassador, but Chávez declined to retract his comments.
In May 2007, anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguière ordered a new trial over bombings in France in 1982 and 1983, many aimed at trains. They killed 11 people and injured nearly 150. The trial opened on the 7th of November 2011 in Paris. Three other members of his organization, Johannes Weinrich, Christa Margot Fröhlich and Ali Kamal Al-Issawi, were tried in absentia. Carlos denied any connection and staged a nine-day hunger strike over his prison conditions. On the 15th of December 2011, he, Weinrich and Al-Issawi were sentenced to life. Fröhlich was acquitted. He lost his appeal on the 26th of June 2013.
In October 2014, he was charged over a grenade attack on the Drugstore Publicis in Paris in September 1974, which killed two and wounded 34. In 1979, the magazine Al Watan Al-Arabi had published an interview in which he admitted responsibility. He denied the interview ever took place. The grenade was traced to a US army base, from which it was stolen in 1972. Another was found at the Paris home of his mistress. His trial opened in March 2017, and on the 28th of March 2017 he received an additional life term.
That same year, Carlos claimed responsibility for 80 deaths. He boasted that "no one in the Palestinian resistance has executed more people than I have."
The Countess of Romanones, born Aline Griffith, wrote three memoirs about her wartime work with the OSS before turning to fiction. In 1994 she published the novel The Well Mannered Assassin about Carlos. She had known him in the 1970s as a charming playboy.
Robert Ludlum made Carlos the antagonist of the first and third books of his Bourne trilogy. In those novels he is the world's most dangerous assassin, with international contacts that let him strike anywhere. Jason Bourne is sent to trap him. The 1988 television adaptation of The Bourne Identity, starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith, also casts Carlos as its main villain. In Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, from 1998, Basque terrorists attack an amusement park in Spain to bargain for Carlos's release. Carlos appears as a character, planning from his cell.
Nonfiction took a harder look. Colin Smith, a reporter for the Observer, wrote the biography Carlos: Portrait of a Terrorist in 1976. David Yallop's To the Ends of the Earth, from 1993, recounts his attempts through the 1980s to unearth the true story and win an interview. Billy Waugh's Hunting the Jackal, published in 2004, describes the CIA operation in Sudan.
The jokes arrived too. In the 1985 comedy Gotcha!, Nick Corri plays Manolo, who hints to women that he is a terrorist named Carlos on the run. In the 1994 film True Lies, a car dealer played by Bill Paxton is falsely accused of being Carlos. In the video game 007: Agent Under Fire, Bond faces an assassin called Carla the Jackal on a mission named Night of the Jackal. Carlos's face also appears on the cover of the 1995 Black Grape album It's Great When You're Straight... Yeah.
Olivier Assayas directed the 2010 miniseries Carlos, which won the Golden Globe Award for Best Miniseries or Television Movie. The lead was played by Édgar Ramírez, a Venezuelan actor from the same home state as Carlos. In 2025, the BBC Storyville documentary The Jackal Speaks, by Yaron Niski and Danny Liber, let Carlos tell his story from inside a French high-security prison.
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Common questions
Who is Carlos the Jackal?
Carlos the Jackal is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a Venezuelan convict born on the 12th of October 1949. He carried out assassinations and terrorist bombings from 1973 to 1985 and is serving life sentences in France.
Why is Carlos the Jackal called the Jackal?
The Guardian dubbed him the Jackal after one of its correspondents reportedly spotted Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal in a friend's apartment where he had stashed weapons. The book belonged to a resident, and he probably never read it.
What was the Carlos the Jackal OPEC raid in Vienna?
On the 21st of December 1975, Carlos led a six-person team that attacked an OPEC meeting in Vienna, took more than 60 hostages and killed three people. Austria broadcast his communiqué, and the group flew with hostages to Algiers and Tripoli.
How was Carlos the Jackal captured?
Carlos was seized in Khartoum, Sudan, at 3 a.m. on the 14th of August 1994 and flown to Paris on a private jet. CIA contractor Billy Waugh's team had located him, and Sudan's Hassan al-Turabi agreed to give him up.
Which countries supported Carlos the Jackal?
The Stasi in East Germany gave him an office, safe houses and a support staff of 75 in East Berlin. Hungary hosted him for over two years, and Syria later gave him limited refuge, while claims of Romanian backing were denied.
Where is Carlos the Jackal now and what sentences is he serving?
Carlos is held in a French prison, having been moved from La Santé to Clairvaux Prison in 2006. He is serving three life sentences, the first handed down in 1997, the second on the 15th of December 2011 and the third on the 28th of March 2017.
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76 references cited across the entry
- 1NewsIlich Ramírez (Carlos the Jackal) SánchezNicola Clark
- 2Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (Carlos the Jackal) 1949Historyofwar.org
- 3NewsFeared Terrorist Mastermind Goes On Trial6 November 2011
- 4Carlos the Jackal's Parisian trail of destruction4 November 2010
- 5NewsCarlos the Jackal Receives a Third Life Sentence in FranceBenoît Morenne — 28 March 2017
- 6NewsVenezuela's Hugo Chavez defends 'Carlos the Jackal'21 November 2009
- 8NewsCarlos the Jackal convicted for 1980s French terrorist attacks16 December 2011
- 9NewsCarlos the Jackal given another life sentence for 1980s terror attack15 December 2011
- 11BookJackal: The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist, Carlos the JackalJohn Follain — Arcade Publishing — 1998
- 12Follain (1998), p. 4.
- 13Follain (1998), p. 9.
- 14New York Magazine – 7 November 1977
- 15Encyclopedia of Terrorism, Harvey W. Kushner, p. 321
- 17Bassam Abu-Sharif and Uzi Mahnaimi. The Best of Enemies: The Memoirs of Bassam Abu-Sharif and Uzi Mahnaimi, 1995. pp 78–79
- 18Bassam Abu-Sharif and Uzi Mahnaimi. The Best of Enemies: The Memoirs of Bassam Abu-Sharif and Uzi Mahnaimi, 1995.
- 19NewsCarlos director Olivier Assayas on the terrorist who became a pop culture iconSteve Rose — 23 October 2010
- 20Bassam Abu-Sharif and Uzi Mahnaimi. The Best of Enemies, p 89
- 21NewsHouse where Carlos the Jackal first struck faces the bulldozerValentine Low — 12 February 2008
- 22BookThe Defence of the RealmChristopher Andrew — Penguin — 2009
- 23NewsElizabeth Sieff's mission to put a low price on the high lifeWilliam Cash — 8 January 2010
- 24NewsTerrorist Incidents against Jewish Communities and Israeli Citizens Abroad, 1968-2003International Institute for Counter-Terrorism — 20 December 2003
- 25BookMiddle Eastern terrorism: from Black September to September 11Mark Ensalaco — University of Pennsylvania Press — 2008
- 26El día en que Manuel Contreras le ofreció al Sha de Irán matar a "Carlos, El Chacal"Mónica González — CIPER — 6 August 2009
- 28Cable: 1976BOGOTA11856_b26 November 1976
- 29Death on Small Wings, .
- 30BookJackal: The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist, Carlos the JackalJohn Follain — Arcade Publishing — 1998
- 31Bassam Abu-Sharif and Uzi Mahnaimi. The Best of Enemies, p. 164.
- 33Regnery, Alfred S. "Book Inspired Counter-Revolution", published in Human Events, 22 October 2001
- 34NewsRevealed: the terrorist hired by the CIA to catch Carlos the JackalJason Burke — 9 April 2023
- 36Ion Mihai Pacepa obituary2021-04-29
- 37JournalCarlos Şacalul şi politica antiteroristă a României în anii '70Valentin Gheonea — Institutul National pentru Studiul Totalitarismului — 2021
- 39BookCold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989Richard H. Cummings — McFarland — 22 April 2009
- 40Carlos the Jacket: Trail of TerrorCourtroom Television Network
- 41JournalIASCP Special Feature: An Interview with a True Legend in the Special Operations and Counterterrorism Community, Author of Hunting the JackelJ. M. Peterson — 2005
- 42Mayer, Jane, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, 2008. p. 37.
- 43Follain (1998), pp. 274–276.
- 46NewsCarlos the Jackal gets third life sentence after conviction for 1974 Paris attackChine Labbe — 28 March 2017
- 48News'Carlos the Jackal' goes on trial in FranceKim Willsher — 7 November 2011
- 50Press releaseGrand Chamber judgment Ramirez Sanchez v. FranceEuropean Court of Human Rights — 4 July 2006
- 57NewsCarlos the Jackal was 'revolutionary': ChavezAgence France-Presse — 28 November 2009
- 58News'Carlos the Jackal' jailed over 1974 Paris grenade attack28 March 2017
- 60NewsCold War Mastermind Carlos the Jackal on Trial in France7 November 2011
- 65NewsGlobe-hopping former extremist 'Carlos the Jackal' is on trial again in FrancePierre Rochiccioli
- 69NewsThe Counter-ThinkerRichard Wolin — The New Republic — 21 July 2010
- 70'Jackal' book praises Bin Laden26 June 2003
- 71BookEl PalestinoAntonio Salas — 2010
- 72BBC Four – Storyville – Episode GuideBBC — 21 March 2015
- 73BookJackal: The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist, Carlos The JackalJohn Follain — Arcade Publishing — 1998
- 74BookCarlos: Portrait of a TerroristColin Smith — Deutsch, Brand: Deutsch — 1976
- 75Sánchez, Ilich RamírezColleen Sullivan — SAGE Publications, Incorporated — 2012
- 76BookThe Jackal : The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super-TerroristJoby Warrick — Scribner — 2026
- 77BookTracking the Jackal: The Search for Carlos, the World's Most Wanted ManDavid A. Yallop — Random House — 1993