Carlos the Jackal — born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez in Venezuela — was a militant active through the 1970s and 1980s. Per John Kiriakou, Carlos was “the Osama bin Laden of the 70s and 80s” — a benchmark Kiriakou uses when teaching the history of terrorism, with the recurrent observation that his students “look at me like they’ve never ever heard this name before.”[1][2]
The Greek connection: Athens, the middleman, and London
Carlos’s link to Greek terrorism was Kiriakou’s own portfolio for years. Assigned to Athens, he was tasked with tracing the connection between Carlos and Revolutionary Organization 17 November: “What I was trying to do was figure out who the middleman was between Carlos the Jackal and the Greek terrorist group revolutionary organization 17 November. So I got a tip about a guy who was the middleman back in the day. And I found him and he’s living in a housing project in London.”[2][3] He later described becoming, over these years, the CIA’s in-house “master of the old files on Greek terrorism” — an obsession so consuming it cost him his first marriage, and one that eventually drew a Greek assassination attempt against him in Athens.[4][5]
MI6 routed the London side of the operation to MI5 — Kiriakou’s first working encounter with the British domestic service. He flew to London every few weeks for six months pursuing the lead. It was on this case that he learned MI5 has no arrest powers and is, per its charter, the British service that “spies on Britons.”[3][6] Headquarters eventually told him the middleman had converted to Christianity, married an Englishwoman, and was living openly in London.[5]
By Kiriakou’s later analysis, the connection ran the other way from what Western intelligence originally suspected: Carlos did not arm 17 November itself, but he did supply weapons to a separate Greek group, Popular Revolutionary Struggle, and he is the identified link the CIA had spent years trying to nail down.[7] Kiriakou’s account of the exact nature of the Carlos–17 November relationship has varied across interviews. In one telling, he says CIA sourcing consistently traced back to Carlos as the middleman arranging both training and weapons for the European and Middle Eastern terrorist groups it tracked, 17 November included.[8] In another, he says 17 November obtained its weapons from Carlos but, unlike Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigades, Action Directe, the IRA, and the PFLP groups, was never trained at the Libyan camps — its tradecraft, he says, was developed entirely in-house.[9] The University of Salamanca in Spain, where Kiriakou teaches a graduate course in intelligence studies, devotes a core part of its terrorism-history unit to Carlos.[10]
Name and nickname
Kiriakou explains the “Jackal” nickname’s origin: during a Brussels police raid on an apartment used by the still-unidentified Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a French photojournalist photographed the interior and noticed a copy of the novel The Day of the Jackal on a side table, left there by a Belgian associate who had been reading it. The journalist simply began calling the unnamed terrorist “the Jackal.”[11][12][13]
The OPEC kidnapping and the training network
In 1975, Carlos and his team raided an OPEC oil ministers’ meeting in Vienna, killed three people, and kidnapped every minister present, flying the hostages to Libya. The Saudis alone paid roughly a billion dollars in ransom to secure the release of the group.[14][15][16] In a separate telling, Kiriakou puts the total ransom at roughly $100 million.[17]
With that financing, Carlos partnered with Muammar Gaddafi to establish terrorist training camps in the Libyan desert and in Lebanon, simultaneously training the IRA, Greece’s Revolutionary Organization 17 November and Popular Revolutionary Struggle, the PFLP, the PFLP-GC, the DFLP, the Abu Nidal Organization, Italy’s Red Brigades, and France’s Action Directe — with Carlos handling both funding and weapons sourcing.[15][18][19] Kiriakou described him as a “true believing communist” who wanted to bring down the West.[20]
The Khartoum capture
The operational capture of Carlos originated with a chance sighting by CIA contractor Billy Waugh — recounted by Kiriakou and independently confirmed, he notes, by Cofer Black, then CIA station chief in Khartoum. Waugh, whom Kiriakou describes as a bona fide American hero who had fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam and earned 17 Purple Hearts (one short of the U.S. record), was doing CIA contract work in Khartoum when, on a day off, he went to the vegetable market and spotted Carlos — the only other white man he’d ever seen in the city.[21] Waugh ran to tell Black, who was on an elliptical machine in his office at the time and initially dismissed him — “get the hell out of here” — before sending him back out to determine where Carlos lived.[22] Over the following month, Waugh returned to the souk daily to confirm the sighting. To photograph Carlos without alerting him, the CIA paid two Sudanese men to stage a public fistfight; as a crowd gathered to watch, Carlos craned his neck in with everyone else, giving Waugh a clean, repeated shot to photograph him for headquarters.[23][24][25][26][27]
In one telling, Kiriakou says the precise operational mechanics of the capture itself remain “still classified,” offering only that the CIA arranged for a dentist to summon Carlos in for a supposed checkup and sedate him with gas, after which he woke up on a French military plane bound for Paris to face murder charges.[28][29][30][31] In a more detailed telling, Kiriakou fills in the mechanism: the CIA could not simply raid Carlos’s house directly, since he lived in a heavily populated area as the only white man there and any stakeout would tip off the Sudanese government, so the agency instead recruited his dentist, broke into his house, and put ground glass into his tube of toothpaste so that his gums began to bleed every time he brushed his teeth. Believing he had gum disease, Carlos made a dentist’s appointment; the dentist tipped off the CIA, gassed him during the visit, and he woke up on the French Air Force plane. He was tried for the murder of seven French policemen and is serving a sentence of life without parole.[32][33] He was captured in 1994 and has since been imprisoned in France, serving multiple life sentences.[20]
Prison meeting, 2000
Kiriakou personally met Carlos in a French prison around 2000, roughly a 40-minute drive outside the city. He introduced himself, invoked the 25-year-old promise to Mrs. Welch to find her husband’s killers, and asked Carlos only for the names of the Greeks involved in the Richard Welch assassination. Carlos — by then in his 70s, unrepentant — replied with an obscenity and walked away, giving up nothing.[34]
Kiriakou describes the run-up to that meeting at greater length elsewhere: it took him nearly a year of requesting permission through the CIA’s own chain of command before he could even approach the French. He first tracked down and contacted Carlos’s wife, Magdalena Kopp — with whom Carlos had a daughter — then living quietly in a small town in Germany, to ask her to help arrange the interview; she agreed to reach out to Carlos on his behalf. Kiriakou then had to submit a formal request to French authorities, who repeatedly stalled before finally granting access. When Kiriakou entered the room, he found Carlos reduced to, in his words, “a little tiny old man.” Told that Kiriakou wanted to know which Greeks Carlos had dealt with over the years, Carlos smiled and told him to go f*** himself — leaving the CIA, per Kiriakou, never able to establish the genesis of the Carlos–17 November relationship, even though multiple sources had independently confirmed that Carlos supplied the weapons.[35][36]