The Jackal
The Jackal
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Ramírez Sánchez was given the nom de guerre Carlos, when he became a member of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Carlos was called The Jackal by The Guardian when Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal was reportedly found among his belongings.
Ramírez Sánchez was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Despite his mother's pleas to give their firstborn child a Christian first name, his father, a Leninist lawyer, called him Ilich, after Lenin (two younger siblings were named "Lenin" and "Vladimir"). He attended a school in Caracas and joined the youth movement of the national communist party in 1959. After attending the Third Tricontinental Conference in January 1966 with his father, Ramírez Sánchez reportedly spent the summer at Camp Matanzas, a guerrilla warfare school run by the Cuban DGI near Havana. Later that year, his parents divorced. His mother took her children to London to study in Stafford House College in Kensington and the London School of Economics. In 1968 his father tried to enroll him and his brother at the Sorbonne, the university in Paris, but eventually opted for Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, which according to BBC was "a notorious hotbed for recruiting foreign communists to the Soviet Union" (see active measures). He was expelled from the university in 1970.
From Moscow he travelled to Beirut, Lebanon where he volunteered for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in July of 1970. He was sent to a training camp for foreign volunteers of the PFLP on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. On graduating from this he was sent to a finishing school staffed by Iraqi military, code-named H4, near the Syria-Iraq border.
On completing guerilla training Carlos played an active role for the PFLP in the north of Jordan during the Black September conflict of 1971, gaining a good reputation as a fighter. After the organisation were pushed out of Jordan he returned to Beirut before being sent off to be schooled in terrorism by Wadie Haddad. He eventually left the Middle East to attend courses at the Polytechnic of Central London and apparently continued to work for the PFLP.
In 1973 Carlos was associated with the PFLP, which had conducted a failed assassination attempt on Jewish businessman and vice-president of the British Zionist Federation Joseph Sieff. This was prompted by the Mossad assassination of Mohamed Boudia, a PFLP leader, in Paris. Carlos also admits responsibility for a failed bomb attack on the Bank Hapoalim in London and car bomb attacks on three French newspapers, which were accused of pro-Israeli leanings. He claimed to be the grenade thrower at a Parisian restaurant in an attack that killed two and injured 30. He later participated in two failed rocket propelled grenade attacks on El Al airplanes at Orly Airport near Paris on January 13 and 17, 1975.
On June 27, 1975, Carlos's PFLP contact, Lebanon-born Michel Moukharbal, was captured and successfully interrogated. When three policemen tried to apprehend Carlos at a house in Paris in the middle of a party, he shot two detectives, fled the scene, and managed to escape via Brussels to Beirut.
From Beirut, Carlos participated in the planning for the attack on the headquarters of OPEC in Vienna. On December 20, 1975, he led the six-person team (which included Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann) that assaulted the meeting of OPEC leaders and took over 60 hostages. Carlos demanded from the Austrian authorities to read a communiqué about the Palestinian cause on the Austrian radio and television networks every two hours. After negotiations, this communiqué was broadcast as requested.
On December 22, the rebels and 42 hostages were given an airplane and flown to Algiers. Ex-Royal Navy pilot Neville Atkinson, at that time the personal pilot for Libya's leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, was given the task of flying Carlos and a number of other terrorists, including Hans-Joachim Klein, a supporter of the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof group and a member of the Revolutionary Cells, and Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, from Algiers. The terrorists were finally dispatched in Baghdad. Thirty hostages were freed; the DC-9 was then flown on to Tripoli, where more hostages were freed before flying back to Algiers where the remaining hostages were freed and the rebels were granted asylum.
In the years following the OPEC raid, Abu Sharif and Klein claimed that Carlos had received a large sum of money in exchange for the safe release of the Arab hostages and had kept it for his personal use. There is still some uncertainty regarding the amount that changed hands but it is believed to be between $20m and $50m. The source of the money is also uncertain, but, according to Klein, it was from "an Arab president." Carlos later told his lawyers that the money was paid by the Saudis on behalf of the Iranians and was, "diverted en route and lost by the Revolution."
Carlos soon left Algeria for Libya and then Aden, where he attended a meeting of senior PFLP officials to justify his failure to execute two senior OPEC hostages—the finance minister of Iran, Jamshid Amuzgar, and the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Zaki Yamani. His trainer and PFLP-EO leader Wadie Haddad expelled Carlos for not shooting hostages when PFLP demands were not met thus failing his mission.
Ramírez Sánchez was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Despite his mother's pleas to give their firstborn child a Christian first name, his father, a Leninist lawyer, called him Ilich, after Lenin (two younger siblings were named "Lenin" and "Vladimir"). He attended a school in Caracas and joined the youth movement of the national communist party in 1959. After attending the Third Tricontinental Conference in January 1966 with his father, Ramírez Sánchez reportedly spent the summer at Camp Matanzas, a guerrilla warfare school run by the Cuban DGI near Havana. Later that year, his parents divorced. His mother took her children to London to study in Stafford House College in Kensington and the London School of Economics. In 1968 his father tried to enroll him and his brother at the Sorbonne, the university in Paris, but eventually opted for Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, which according to BBC was "a notorious hotbed for recruiting foreign communists to the Soviet Union" (see active measures). He was expelled from the university in 1970.
From Moscow he travelled to Beirut, Lebanon where he volunteered for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in July of 1970. He was sent to a training camp for foreign volunteers of the PFLP on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. On graduating from this he was sent to a finishing school staffed by Iraqi military, code-named H4, near the Syria-Iraq border.
On completing guerilla training Carlos played an active role for the PFLP in the north of Jordan during the Black September conflict of 1971, gaining a good reputation as a fighter. After the organisation were pushed out of Jordan he returned to Beirut before being sent off to be schooled in terrorism by Wadie Haddad. He eventually left the Middle East to attend courses at the Polytechnic of Central London and apparently continued to work for the PFLP.
In 1973 Carlos was associated with the PFLP, which had conducted a failed assassination attempt on Jewish businessman and vice-president of the British Zionist Federation Joseph Sieff. This was prompted by the Mossad assassination of Mohamed Boudia, a PFLP leader, in Paris. Carlos also admits responsibility for a failed bomb attack on the Bank Hapoalim in London and car bomb attacks on three French newspapers, which were accused of pro-Israeli leanings. He claimed to be the grenade thrower at a Parisian restaurant in an attack that killed two and injured 30. He later participated in two failed rocket propelled grenade attacks on El Al airplanes at Orly Airport near Paris on January 13 and 17, 1975.
On June 27, 1975, Carlos's PFLP contact, Lebanon-born Michel Moukharbal, was captured and successfully interrogated. When three policemen tried to apprehend Carlos at a house in Paris in the middle of a party, he shot two detectives, fled the scene, and managed to escape via Brussels to Beirut.
From Beirut, Carlos participated in the planning for the attack on the headquarters of OPEC in Vienna. On December 20, 1975, he led the six-person team (which included Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann) that assaulted the meeting of OPEC leaders and took over 60 hostages. Carlos demanded from the Austrian authorities to read a communiqué about the Palestinian cause on the Austrian radio and television networks every two hours. After negotiations, this communiqué was broadcast as requested.
On December 22, the rebels and 42 hostages were given an airplane and flown to Algiers. Ex-Royal Navy pilot Neville Atkinson, at that time the personal pilot for Libya's leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, was given the task of flying Carlos and a number of other terrorists, including Hans-Joachim Klein, a supporter of the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof group and a member of the Revolutionary Cells, and Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, from Algiers. The terrorists were finally dispatched in Baghdad. Thirty hostages were freed; the DC-9 was then flown on to Tripoli, where more hostages were freed before flying back to Algiers where the remaining hostages were freed and the rebels were granted asylum.
In the years following the OPEC raid, Abu Sharif and Klein claimed that Carlos had received a large sum of money in exchange for the safe release of the Arab hostages and had kept it for his personal use. There is still some uncertainty regarding the amount that changed hands but it is believed to be between $20m and $50m. The source of the money is also uncertain, but, according to Klein, it was from "an Arab president." Carlos later told his lawyers that the money was paid by the Saudis on behalf of the Iranians and was, "diverted en route and lost by the Revolution."
Carlos soon left Algeria for Libya and then Aden, where he attended a meeting of senior PFLP officials to justify his failure to execute two senior OPEC hostages—the finance minister of Iran, Jamshid Amuzgar, and the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Zaki Yamani. His trainer and PFLP-EO leader Wadie Haddad expelled Carlos for not shooting hostages when PFLP demands were not met thus failing his mission.
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