The Threat Podcast
The Threat podcast will analyze and discuss the most pressing, yet not always so visible, threats to global security and the movements and ideologies that fuel extremism and terrorism. We’ll take listeners to the frontlines of these battles, both at home and abroad, and we’ll talk with the key players in law enforcement, intelligence, diplomacy, and academia who are working to counter these threats.
The Threat Podcast
Carlos the Jackal: Anatomy of the World's Most Famous Terrorist
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Three decades ago, the CIA and French intelligence secretly collaborated to arrest and render Carlos the Jackal — the Venezuelan-born Marxist who became the world's most notorious terrorist — from his villa in Khartoum. He's been in a French prison ever since. Now, drawing on newly obtained intelligence files from the US, Europe, and the former communist bloc — and a rare face-to-face prison interview with Carlos himself — one of America's premier investigative journalists tells the full story of his rise and fall.
Jay Solomon and Hagar Chemali are joined by Joby Warrick, veteran Washington Post investigative reporter and author of the new book The Jackal, whose previous work includes the Pulitzer-winning Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS.
They discuss how a kid from Venezuela named after Lenin latched onto the Palestinian cause and helped internationalize terrorism through made-for-TV spectacles like the 1975 OPEC ministers' kidnapping; the "Red-Green Alliance" between the secular far left and Arab militants, and why it's resurfacing on today's campuses; the extraordinary multi-country operation that finally captured him; and Warrick's own surreal encounter with a 75-year-old Carlos — still an incorrigible showman who bragged of killing 83 people and said his only regret was not killing more. Plus: why Iran and Russia are reviving the Cold War playbook of harnessing radical rage through hired proxies, and where the line runs between radicalization and mass violence.
Find Joby Warrick's books, including The Jackal, at jobywarrick.com, and follow him on X @jobywarrick.
Have a question or tip for the show? Reach us at thethreatpod@gwu.email.edu
Welcome to the Threat Podcast. I'm Jay Solomon.
SPEAKER_01And I'm Hagar Shimali.
SPEAKER_03Over three decades ago, the CIA and French intelligence secretly collaborated to arrest and render the famed Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal from his villa in Khartoum, Sudan. The militant who was born Elich Ramirez Sanchez has been sitting in a French prison cell ever since. Last month, the Washington Post's veteran investigative journalist Joby Work published a new account of the radicals' rise and fall, derived from new intelligence files he obtained from the U.S., Europe, and the former communist bloc, and the author's own face-to-face with Carlos at Paris's Poise Central Prison. The Jackal, which is the name of Joby's new book, offers rare insights into how a self-proc-proclaimed Latin American Marxist took to the Palestinian cause and executed some of the world's most spectacular terrorist attacks, including the 1975 kidnapping of OPEC's oil ministers. The Jackal's career also led him to work with a who's who of the Middle East's radicals and rogues, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Libya's Muam Gaddafi, Sudan's Islamist government, and the henchmen of Damascus, Hafez al-Assad. Warwick's work is particularly well-timed as Hamas's war with Israel in the Gaza Strip has rekindled the radical left's embrace of the Palestinian cause in ways that mirror Carlos's. Some American and European student groups and members of the surging democratic socialists of America see the dismantling of Israel as a crucial step in their anti-imperial struggle and believe violence should be employed to get there. Joby, it's great to have you with us. And let me start by saying how much I love the book.
SPEAKER_02Me too. Oh, fantastic. You guys are both old friends. It's really a fun opportunity for me to be with you.
SPEAKER_03So, for starters, can you tell our readers exactly who Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was and why his legacy and name have lived on for so long?
SPEAKER_02You know, it helps if you have a colorful nickname. If you'd gone through life as Ilich, we probably never would have heard of the geheim. But he had an incredible sense of timing. He has a really unusual, I think maybe one-of-a-kind background that allows a young man who, as you mentioned, was radicalized at home with a father who was a devout Marxist, who's named after the middle name of the founder of the Soviet Union, you know, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, who sort of steeped in that sort of revolutionary fervor that was part of Latin America in the 60s and 70s, and ends up thinking that his calling in life is to be an international revolutionary. And the place where you can potentially do that, where you can join an organization, is with the Palestinian, uh, violent Palestinian movement in the early 60s and 70s, which was coming along and doing things that nobody had ever done before, such as you just did mass hijackings of planes and sort of made-for-TV spectacles with terrorism in a way that sort of internationalizing terrorism in a way that had never been done before. And by kind of latching on to that movement, uh, he ensured his own fame over time and became, you know, one of their star uh, you know, agents, even though he wasn't Palestinian, it had nothing to do with the Arab cause.
SPEAKER_01And Joby, can you tell us what drew you to a book on Carlos at this time? Um, because we know other journalists have certainly taken their shots at him, and he's been glamorized in film. What were you looking to find that hasn't been revealed before?
SPEAKER_02There's a lot about the guy's story that that is new, and there's, you know, a lot of it's because archival material that was long buried, you know, some things that existed in the former Soviet bloc countries that they, you know, they had tons and tons of intelligence on him. The CIA officers who were involved in the sort of search for him, that was all new. But there was also a kind of a bigger story to tell in my point of view. Uh, my second book was called Uh Rise of Black Flags, Rise of ISIS, and it was essentially an origin story. It takes you back to the very early days before we knew of ISIS, but kind of describes the characters and the events that led to the rise of this vicious group. And I wanted to do the same thing here. I've got a wonderfully colorful central character, uh, you know, whose whose biography is just fascinating, but it also allows you to tell a story of an earlier age of terrorism when there was, as you say, a kind of a marriage of extreme left, uh, these Marxist groups, uh not just in the Middle East, but also in Europe, end up kind of finding common cause and doing a lot of bad things together under situations geopolitically that are quite uh evocative of today's time. And they're just it felt like a story that's relevant to tell right now. And that's I think that's why this comes together, because it's just not a not a story about a bad guy, but about a time and about um a strange convergence of ideologies that happened back in those days.
SPEAKER_03Joby, as an investigative journalist myself, I'm really interested on how you approached reporting the story. Like, as you mentioned, you got access to a lot of files that seem to be sitting there gathering dust over the decades. You also got, you know, access to a lot of people who were hunting for Carlos. Was were some of these guys sort of aching to tell their story after so many years chasing the guy? I mean, I just found the reporting of this is really impressive.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, thanks for that. And it means a lot coming from you. Um, but but yeah, I mean, one sort of reason that my interest became piqued in the first place is because I would run into intelligence officials in the US, but also in the Middle East, who knew all about Carlos, who had been on his trail and told just, you know, stories over a glass of of uh you know lager or something, just you know, oh, you know, Carlos was here with us for a while, or we knew Carlos, or we debriefed Carlos, or we chased Carlos. And I kept hearing these stories. And so that's my first way into this, you know, investigation is through the sort of anecdotes by guys who were contemporaries and spent much of their careers chasing him down. And they were all fascinating, and they were, as you said, stories that have not people have not been asking about Carlos for a while because after 9-11, basically Al-Qaeda eclipsed Carlos and his generation, and people stopped talking about him. But these guys knew those stories, and I wanted to try to get as deep as I could uh from their memories while they were still able to talk about things.
SPEAKER_01And I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind shedding a little bit more detail into it, without giving away your book, of course, because Carlos and his comrades in the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, conducted some of the most radical terrorist attacks in history, including the hijacking of airliners and the targeting of civilians. Can you describe how Carlos's operations had an impact on future terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. So in the in up until the late 60s, of course you had terrorism. Terrorism has been with us forever. But typically terrorists attack, you know, the country that they feel that the grievances against. So you're you're attacking your enemies. If you're Palestinians and you want to hurt the Israelis, you attack Israeli soldiers or checkpoints or buses or whatever, but you've got a very specific target. This was a moment when terrorist groups and terrorist leaders, particularly the PFLP, decide that this should be a global struggle. And the way to get the world to care about these issues, because they realize that most of the world tuned out Middle East violence and didn't really pay attention, but to get people to care, you kind of bring it home to them, bring it to their capitals, bring it into their living rooms on television. And so there was a very deliberate campaign to create these sort of moments of horror in Europe particularly, so they could get people to care. Wadi Haddad was the PFL leader, sort of the mastermind of many of the terrorist attacks at the time. And he came up with things like hijacking multiple planes at once in a choreographed fashion, having all the planes land at the same place and taking all the passengers as hostage, you know, very, very evocative of what happened later with Al-Qaeda. But the idea, and he kept saying this to his followers, this is we're gonna become a bacillus that gets under the skin of the West, and they're going to be forced to confront us. They may not like us, they may you know despise us, but we're gonna force the world to pay attention. That was the model that developed from the time. This is what Carlos's generation was all about. And you could see sort of the echoes of that in subsequent waves of terrorism that happened later on, including you know very recently in our time.
SPEAKER_03Can you talk a bit more about the ideology? Because that's something that really fascinated me about the book. Carlos, like you said, and many of the supporters of the Palestinian cause back then were leftists. They weren't Islamists. Like many of the leaders of the PFLP were Christians. And like you there was this convergence between the far left and the Islamists and the Arab nationalists that took place. It seems on the one hand pretty unique, but it also seems like it's it's recycling itself. Yeah. It's happening again. I just remember all those interesting groups from the 70s and the 80s, the Red Brigades, the Japanese Red Army, which you write about in the book. In the US, you had the Sibyanese Liberation Army, you had the um weather underground. The ideology is really seems really unique in this book. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about this kind of convergence. So I'll call it the Red-Green Alliance.
SPEAKER_01Joby, if you could really emphasize, because this is not well understood by the broader public, even though it has lasted for decades, this convergence between the far left and Islamists, because on its surface it doesn't seem like it would be a natural, um, a natural alliance, given some of the more radical liberal ideas that the far left pushes, but it has been a constant over the decades. Yeah, so really explain if you could really explain it for the for a public that really doesn't know why why they are often allied together.
SPEAKER_02The reason this convergence, this sort of ideological convergence takes place, there's several reasons, but one is the this was not a religious fight. This was purely a secular fight at the time, for the most part. The Palestinian groups may you know may have included some religious individuals, but they saw this as a secular struggle. And some of the individual groups within the PLO umbrella at the time were dedicated Marxists. Wadi Hadad, this uh terrorist planner of the PFLP, was in fact a paid Soviet agent. He had a Soviet codename. He met with Yuri Andropov, who later on became head of the KGB and then later premier of the Soviet Union. Very, very deep ties with sort of the global far left, with the Marxist of the world, in fact. And so there was this kind of ideological kinship that took place at a fundamental level. But also what was happening at the time, this is you know, post-1968, uh, you know, riots in in Europe, and uh there was uh a surge of you know far-left ideology that was fueled by the war in Vietnam, uh, a belief that uh that this sort of capitalism was a corrosive force that needed to be checked. And within that you know, larger worldview, Israel was was seen as an enemy because it was supported by the Western powers. It was viewed as colonialist, it was viewed as oppressive and uh you know depriving Palestinians of their rights in their homelands. So it was a very attractive issue for many on the left, and many not just supported uh you know the Palestinian cause, but felt they were permitted or felt permission to uh become violent supporters, to sort of join in the violent crusade, to try to defeat the Israelis and their adversaries, to kind of bloody the nose of the West as a way of protesting against the mistreatment of Palestinians. So there's all this was happening, all this kind of united some very, very disparate groups that should be, as on paper, seem to have nothing in common. But it's why somebody like Carlos, a kid from Venezuela, could you know move himself to the Middle East not just because he wanted military training, because he really, really liked what they were saying. He liked this idea of you know reclaiming Palestinian lands and defeating the Israelis, and that what that's what motivated him and many others like him to move to the Middle East in the 70s.
SPEAKER_03Can you talk a bit about Carlos's kind of flip side? Because on the one hand, he's deeply ideological. On the other hand, he likes fine wines, he likes chasing women across Europe, he likes good clothes. He kind of seems to represent an early example of radical chic in some ways. You know, that famous Thomas Wolfe essay. But yeah, give a little bit more about the flip side, because I think you see that in kids today. They like they're they're they're entranced by the revolutionary cause, but they also like you know their upper west side apartment.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. And if if Carlos is around today, he would he'd be an influencer, he'd have an Instagram account, he'd be on TikTok. Um he he he loved projecting himself as this kind of you know scary but also very glamorous character. I mean, very deliberately set out to create this aura for himself, and he just loved living like a rock star. And he it the contradictions are are are pretty striking because this is someone who does claim to be Marxist and egalitarian and for the rights of working men, and none of that mattered to him as far as his lifestyle because he wanted to live, have the finest, and he wanted you know beautiful women around him. And so you'd see these really awkward scenes where where Carlos and some of his Palestinian comrades would get together to do a to do a terrorist attack. The Palestinians would stay in a hostel somewhere or in some guest house. Carlos insisted on being at the Hilton. And he insisted on finding the best restaurants. And when they went out together, he knew that these guys are eating street food. Oh no, no, no, we gotta we gotta have like a five-course meal with really great wine, because that was just Carlos' lifestyle. Totally contradictory. It infuriated some of his friends and colleagues and eventually drove some of them away from him because he just couldn't tolerate the sort of hypocrisy but for so long. But that was sort of central to Carlos's character. And what is what makes him fascinating to me because it was everything about him is just contradictory and makes no sense, but they end up with this very unique character that uh managed to pull pull off all these crimes and to get away with them for 20 years.
SPEAKER_01And your book had some really incredible details on Carlos's capture in Sudan and the collaboration between the United States, France, and even Sudan in doing so. Do you uh can you talk a little bit about that? And do you think there's enough trust in, you know, given given what you witnessed in that in your own writing and your studies, do you think there's enough trust between the US and its allies these days to pull something like that off again?
SPEAKER_02You know, the the this was a very collaborative operation, you know, much more than I think the CIA wanted or expected in the beginning, but but it really did take uh allies to roll up Carlos. It took the French and then also ultimately took the Sudanese, which were the last partners that you'd expect to have. And if I could sort of tell the story a bit, so you know, Carlos has been on the run for 20 years. He's lived, you know, in great style in all these East Bloc countries and in the Middle Eastern countries. Eventually everybody kicks him out. Eventually everybody gets tired of Carlos and he's set packing, ends up in Sudan. Uh the CIA has a very small but robust station in Sudan uh because they're tracking all the terrorist groups that are there. At the time, this was sort of the terrorist capital of the world. Al-Qaeda was there, Osama bin Laden had a compound there, Hamas, a relatively new organization, Hezbollah, Abu Nudal, who was this kind of bloodthirsty Palestinian terrorist at the time. They all kind of were collated, co-located in this one spot. And the CIA was having a field day, essentially just collecting information, doing surveillance, getting photographs of all the individuals they were hunting around the world. And into this crazy environment drops the world's most notorious terrorist. Carlos Ajackal moves himself there. The CIA figures out that he's in the country. Um, this the book tells this story of this really elaborate process where they're trying to find him and they've got the name of a bodyguard, and there's these chases, and they're they're trying to track down his location. Eventually they find him and they really find him. They're in a situation where they can watch him 24-7. They've got cameras from apartments nearby, kind of pointing down to his courtyards. They're watching him all the time. But then the CIA discovers, to its great horror, that no paperwork exists in Washington for arresting that guy. Of all the crimes that Carlos committed, there'd never been a warrant uh for his arrest, no indictment, no grand jury had ever sat to look at evidence about Carlos. So they had no legal paperwork to arrest him and bring him to the United States. So they had to look out, look around for uh for allies. The French were, you know, had just reams and reams of um you know documented evidence of Carlos's crime. They'd convicted him in an absentia for killing uh members of the security community there. So they really wanted to catch up. So once the CIA said, well, let's do this together, the French were all in. And then eventually it was decided to alert the Sudanese as well and pay them off. This gets really murky and controversial because the French don't like to talk about the fact that they essentially bribed the Sudanese uh to cooperate in their mission to collect to get Carlos. But it was a really interesting coordinated uh operation to bring Carlos to justice. And it did require really good relations and bringing in three countries uh uh that often have not gotten along so well, particularly the Sudanese, deciding to work together in this. And so it does kind of prove the value of alliances and the and and shows that Americans can't um always do it on their own. And sometimes it's very, very helpful to have friends that you can call and say, hey, let's let's do this together because it's in both our interests.
SPEAKER_01That is so fascinating. Can you you mentioned that you said that there was that there wasn't exactly the legal paperwork to go after him? Is can you explain why that might be the case? Like how was he able to live in so many countries before Sudan and never get arrested or um or caught? And and and so why was that the case? And is it because you know he had numerous patrons? Uh could you just yeah, explain that a little bit to us?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he had lots of sanctuaries that he could go to, but the other thing that's striking and and very kind of um another lesson learned from the story is governments in the West, the democracies, gave in to Carlos again and again and just let him get away and let these others get away. It was almost, you know, I remember writing chapters of my my book and sending them to my editor, and he would send notes back of just disbelief. You know, what was wrong with people in the 70s? Because, you know, Carlos could expect to hijack, you know, OPEC as he did, and we can talk about that if you want, but this extraordinary, outdays, just crazy plan to kidnap an entire international organization with all their aides and ministers, and could count on the fact that if he pulled it off, the Austrian government, where this thing took place, would let him go. And they would actually give him a plane and pilots and a tank full of fuel and let him head off to the desert or wherever he wanted to go. And almost every incident he was involved in before that, it was the same ending. That the terrorists essentially got their way. It sometimes got millions of dollars in payoffs. It took a long time for the democracies to learn the lesson that if you get into these groups, you know, it might be you know short-term pain and perhaps some really terrible events, you know, killing of innocent people, which would no doubt happen anyway. But if you give them money or if you allow them to escape, they will come back and do it again. And that was one of the reasons Carlos got away with his deeds for so long.
SPEAKER_03Joby, can you talk a bit more about his like narrative arc? Because one thing that was really interesting is he starts off as kind of this foot soldier for the PFLP in this war against Israel or even against the Jordanians, but then he kind of gets passed on, like you were saying, from the PFLP to the Libyans, from the Libyans to the Syrians. He's doing some stuff from for the Iraqis, but it feels like in this narrative arc he goes from sort of a committed revolutionary soldier to almost just being a hitman and settling intra-Arab scores rather than sort of advancing the revolution. Is that kind of an accurate way to look at his narrative arc from glorified revolutionary to contracted killer?
SPEAKER_02There is a uh a quote, sort of the opening quote, the uh uh epigram at the beginning of the book is from I think I'm I'm blanking, I think it's Sartre, who says something like all revolutionaries end up either as heretics or or uh basically become. Betrayers of their cause. And it certainly was true with Carlos, who certainly talked the talk of being a, you know, a loyal Palestinian revolutionary, you know, committed to Marxism. In the end, he gets kicked out of the Palestinian movement, mostly because of his showboating style. He just got to be too much. He would announce himself in the middle of a terrorist operation. I am Carlos. You don't, you know, that's not typically done by terrorist groups. They typically individually like to be anonymous and you know, maybe put out uh statements on behalf of their group. Carlos liked to make it about him. And so that got to be tiresome to the Palestinians and they ended up booting him out. But that was a moment for Carlos when he was had to decide what was he really about. Was he an international revolutionary? Was he a Marxist fighter? Was he like Che Guevara, Che Guevara, his hero? And in the end, it was he decided it was about whatever, yeah, the money, whatever the market would bear. Whoever would sponsor him to do bad things, he would switch allegiances, he would help them, he would join their side. And so, yeah, you get this strange arc where he goes from being a uh revolutionary, maybe idealist, to becoming, you know, a terrorist for hire, a mercenary terrorist that anybody could potentially uh, you know, purchase his services. Anyone from Walmart Gaddafi who hires him for things, to the leader of communist Romania, Nikolai Chocescu, at the time, who decided that Carlos was the perfect guy to go after his number one target in the world, which is Radio Free Europe. And this is how Carlos made a living for the last 15 years of his life or of his of his career, was just, you know, his being able to attack the enemies of wealthy dictators and and help them, you know, punish their foes without taking any blowback for themselves. It was a good model, and it worked for him as long as, you know, until finally the money ran out and his uh his host got tired of him.
SPEAKER_01Joby, you actually met Carlos at his prison during the reporting of your book, um, which I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned until now into the podcast. Can you explain what he's like? What it what was it like for you to meet him? Did he maintain his famous bravado and good looks? Or did he just come across as an old man? How old was he when you when you met him? And did he have any regrets, most importantly?
SPEAKER_02All good questions. So, yeah, I writing a book about Carlos, he's still alive. You know, I think a lot of people are surprised to hear that. But he's been in prison for 30 plus years. When I met him, he was 75. I absolutely wanted to do my best to try to meet him. I didn't know how hard it would be, but I was going to try. Um, turns out that Carlos is very eager to have any publicity that he can. Um so writing a letter to his lawyer and saying, Hey, can I speak to Carlos? You get a pretty quick reply, sure, sure. Yeah, Carlos says, you know, bring it, you know, I'd love to talk to you. But the French are a tougher sell because they're very controlling. They don't want him off, you know, blabbing on interviews all the time. So I had to kind of make the case. This was a serious book. Certainly not going to give Carlos an opportunity to spend stories about himself. This was, I just wanted a chance to meet him face to face and and you know, hear essential, you know, elements of the story. So I got got permission to meet him. This was March 2025. I fly to Paris, drive out to this little town called Poissy, about 20 miles outside Paris, and into one of the strangest prisons I've ever seen. So it's a maximum security prison, but you could walk around it and not know that you were beside a prison. It just doesn't look like one. It used to be a convent years ago, and then was used by the Nazis to uh this Gestapo to torture French partisans. Now it's a prison for you know for serious convicts for murderers. And you go into the place, there's a little visitor's room, you know, about the size of a big closet. And I'm at a table waiting to see if he'll actually show up. And in walks the man. Here comes Carlos, who is old now. So it's a little, a little bit shocking at first when you see in this man with thinning white hair and a kind of a grisly beard. But but there's flashes of the old, you know, glamorous Carlos. In prison, he's still wearing, you know, pretty natty clothes. He's got this little leather cabbie hat on. Um he's carries a little brown handbag with him with his stuff. Uh he's charming. He walks over, sits down at the table, smiles politely. You know, what are you up to? Like what, you know, uh, what would you like to talk about? And then, you know, again, as he talks, little little bits of his personality come out. There's a woman in the room. There's a woman from the French Prisons Ministry, the only woman in the room. Carlos is just an incorrigible womanizer. He can't help himself. I suppose he's been locked up for a while, which doesn't help matters. He could not keep his eyes off of the woman. Every question I asked, he would look over to see what she was doing, and sometimes he would kind of ask an unrelated question to her. So this was kind of part of the handicap of of or the sort of challenge of interviewing this guy. Um, but you know, and and also the bravado, because he he volunteered to me that he killed 83 people with his own hand. It's almost certainly an exaggeration, but pretty typical of Carlos to make things like that up. Um and also just, you know, the regrets, I asked and asked again, like, what are you what are you sorry about? I mean, you you killed some innocent. You in 1974 uh 40 threw a hand grenade into a shopping center and children were maimed and two people were killed. It was just a horrific uh bloodbath in a in a just a just a civilian, you know, everyday shopping mall. And you know, asked him, you know, are you sorry about that? And he would not admit to any mistakes, you know, no collateral damage happened as far as he was concerned. These were nobody's innocent. It was a significant, it was a real war as far as he was concerned, so casualties happened. And the only regret that I could get him to confess to was he wished he would have killed a few more people. And I pressed him on that. What do you mean? It's well, those bastards in Sudan, that those CIA guys, those French guys, I should have been quicker on my gun, I should have shot a few more people. That's the only thing he would say that he was sorry about.
SPEAKER_01And Joby, just very quickly, is he in prison for life? And is there any risk there that the French are considering releasing him? They released, for example, um, another Marxist Lebanese citizen last year, George Adabla, uh, who went back to Lebanon and has, of course, quickly returned to his uh pro-Palestinian, uh pro-resistant ways and causes. So is there any risk of that with with Carlos?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he he certainly thinks there is. I mean, it's funny because he's 75, 76 now, and he's actually, I must say, as we're recording this, there are stories I'm hearing back from Paris is that he's he's actually his mental capacity is diminished further. He's really starting to fade. Um But he's when I met him, he was convinced that eventually the French would decide to let him go. There'd be a swap with the Venezuelans. I guess that would be harder now given the political realities in Vienna than Venezuela, but he's just really felt that uh some some lawyer would would would kind of prove his case, that he was illegally captured, and eventually he would get out. The French are absolutely determined that he won't because he's uh he's had three, you know, he has three life sentences. Uh he killed a lot of French people, and the one thing that's unforgivable as far as the security establishment, he killed two uh officers with the DST, which essentially was the was the French FBI in the 70s and 80s. And they they remember that those killings as if they happened yesterday. I talked to guys who were part of that team, and it's very, very personal to them. And I think there would be the entire security establishment in Paris would be up in arms if anybody even talks seriously about letting him go. So I do think he's he's gonna spend the rest of his life in prison. It's not a bad deal as prisons go. Um, you wouldn't want to be there as opposed to living in the Hyatt, but you know, it's it's France of Paris or you know, landing in France as opposed to another country that might have captured him in 1994 was a relief to Carlos because once he realized that he was in a country of laws, as he said, that he wasn't going to be tortured, he wasn't gonna suffer, uh, he was gonna be detained. But you know, there are worse things that happened to guys like him. So he was actually kind of relieved to be there.
SPEAKER_03Joby, when you I mean, this book I think it's so well-timed because it it feels like history is repeating itself in some ways. You have, you know, since the October 7th attacks in Israel by Hamas, this kind of surge of support for the Palestinian cause and university campuses across the US and Europe. You know, you've we've seen like flags of Hamas or Hezbollah raised. And it's interesting. Some of the some PFLP figures are are now sort of cited as heroes. Lila Khalid, someone who appears in your book, the who hijacked the airplane. You there's some you know campuses that have asked her to come and speak.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But at the same time, we haven't seen kind of the spectacular types of violence um that happened in the late 70s. Although, you know, just last year, uh a pro-Palestinian young man shot two Israeli diplomats in DC screaming, free Palestine. So there there fear there feels like there's an element could go in that direction. I just from your study of Carlos, what parallels do you see to today? And is there a do you have a fear that this type of radicalism could accelerate?
SPEAKER_02I'm surprised it hasn't so far, to be honest, because there you know two two factors. One is the sort of the rage on the ground in in the region, and it's not just the the Palestinians, and they're they feel obviously very aggrieved by what's happened in Gaza, uh, also by what's happening with the settler issues in the West Bank. So there's there's a lot of lot of rage. And I've I I know this is the case because in my conversations, you know, speaking not just to Palestinians, but to people in the region, Jordanians and Syrians and others who are watching what's going on, and they're just they're just furious. So there's this this this fury becomes fuel for terrorism, and eventually you get someone who's who's committed enough and has the opportunity to commit an act of violence. And it's also another parallel that from that time, there is, you know, there sort of the the horizon where people can imagine a uh a solution, some kind of settlement, you know, Palestinian state, you know, some self-rule, you know, that is kind of at a lower ebb than I think it's been uh you know, or or and sort of more diminished than it's been in in decades. Just there's nobody in is seriously talking about you know, two-state solution anymore. So there's um there's a hopelessness, which which uh also kind of fuels the rage. And then you have, you know, globally, um, in the United States and in Europe in particular, um, you know, young people who are caught up in this and feel it's their cause as well, and see it in a very black and flight white way. There's no new no nuance about it. They there's a there's a bad guy as far as many of these people are concerned, it's and it's the Israelis and it's the Western countries that support them. And that that's very very parallel, very similar to what what existed in in the 60s and 70s. And if anything, it feels that that governments as well, you know, have become, you know, at least in the 60s and 70s, you know, the Western governments were basically on Israel's side. Uh you know, this the United States closely allied in supporting Israel militarily. There were complexities to it as always. But but now there's, you know, there's there's this almost feels like there's a almost a universal uh uh anger against the the at least the the the Netanyahu government. And and that so this is an explosive convergence as far as I can see. And and having witnessed explosions in the past in the region, there's all the elements are there for some very bad things to happen. And the only real surprise about any of this and the trajectory of it is that it hasn't erupted in a in a in a truly tragic way already. Uh, and there's the only reason is I think we've been lucky. Um our security establishment in this country is it's gotten very good. Um so measures have been taken to try to calm things down or keep some of the worst elements from from lashing out, but it's not sustainable. I just have a feeling that there's there's enough rage there and just enough opportunity that that somebody's gonna decide to lash out in a in a very destructive way.
SPEAKER_01Joby, I just want to draw you out a little bit on that point a bit more because um as because the podcast is called The Threat. And so we really try to highlight what are threats that we're not seeing and that might be out there or lingering and that are growing that people might not take very seriously. And so you've drawn these parallels very way, uh, very well. And I wanted to ask, I guess, um, I well, I guess two things, because you, you know, you're in a unique position because we're in this time now, and you did this, you you wrote this book researching and and writing about you know decades in the past up till up till now. Um and so just from your own, you know, sitting where you're sitting and watching what's happening. And I know you've already mentioned this, but if you could draw it out a little bit more, when you do you think that there's always just gonna be some kind of undercurrent like this? Is and and it'll go in phases up and down, and right now it's a little bit up because, as you said, is it is a reaction to BB and the war in Gaza? Or do you see things taking a particularly menacing turn right now? And to add to that, do you is there a risk that Carlos or others like him influence these young kids further, right? Do they become kind of like a, I don't want to think cause célèbre is the right word, but um, you know, a hero to them?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, I do feel there's there isn't an another element in this. And if you look back to the 60s and 70s, you can see the role that it played. That element was the was state actors who found ways to harness this rage and to kind of propel people to put people in motion. And in the 60s and 70s, it started with Soviets who saw it to saw it to their advantage uh to create these little terrorism fires uh that would disrupt and distract the United States and its allies. So you see them literally shipping boatloads of of ammunition and rocket propelled gunades and machine guns and talking with the with the PFLP operatives about their plans and basically signing off of them. So there was that, there was obviously uh Muammar Gaddafi got heavily involved in supporting Palestinian causes, and was that extra bit of infrastructural support uh that could help people who wanted to attack, give them sort of facilitate those their ideas, help them give them a platform, give them weapons and means and sometimes passports and things like that. That is happening in a way now, and and it's almost it really is a throwback to Carlos's time because what you see by both Iran and Russia in different ways, both are looking to instigate um by using proxies and not just their typical proxies, their traditional proxies like Hezbollah or FSB agents that might be overseas, but hiring, you know, you know, hiring criminals uh or or or providing you know opportunities for for people that that might want to be sort of operationalize but haven't really seen an opportunity. I'll give you one example. This is as well known to us in the United States. In 2024, there was a well-known Iranian dissident in New York who was thorn in the side to the Iranian regime. They wanted a silencer, they didn't want to send their own people and kind of risk getting um smacked by the United States with sanctions or attacks. So they recruited an American, a pipe fitter from Brooklyn who was serving his sentence in prison for murder, and contracted the killing to him, paid him money, you know, he had no ideological connection to any of this, but was willing to accept a big cash payment from Iran to go out and kill this woman. Uh the plot was exposed, he was stopped, you know, he's in prison again, uh, and the woman was was not harmed. But this seems to be a new model. And I feel that you know there is enough incentive now with both the Russians and the Iranians looking at sort of long-term um conflicts in which they're, you know, you know, they it's you know stalemated in both cases, but there's there's there's a sense that they need to shake things up a bit. I am surprised that that these two countries have not figured out more ways to support uh you know nascent terrorist causes or provide wherewithal to individuals to to commit acts of terrorism. And and you know, the tools are, if anything, uh, you know, more available than before, not just the bombs and the guns, but you know, using AI to create a biological weapon or a chemical weapon. There are ways that you can strike out in in really destructive ways, and states have the means to help people who have the motivation and intention to do these bad things.
SPEAKER_03Joby, I'm curious. I mean, at its heart, this book is sort of a psychological profile of Carlos. What do you think? Did you get a sense of where the line is between someone who's a radical or a revolutionary to someone who actually is willing to conduct mass terrorist attacks? We were talking offline about a woman I profiled earlier this year called Calla Wall. She was, you know, quit democratic politics and moved to the Middle East and calls for violence, but there's no sort of evidence that she's actually engaged in it. Do you get a sense of where that line is, where someone just goes from being radicalized to actually engaged in terrorism?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I think, and this is again, this is kind of armchair psychology here, perhaps, but there is always an element of some mental condition, a neurosis, a psychosis. I think in the case of Carlos, he was a classic criminal narcissist who was really unable to empathize with his victims or with anybody that is harmed by his deeds, is able to look someone in the face and shoot them at the point-blank range, which even Carlos acknowledges is not that easy to do, but he was willing to do it again and again. And that takes a certain psychosis, I think, but it's not an uncommon one. And there are people within a sort of this big circle of the folks who have been radicalized. There is a subset that have also, you know, the mental issues or the kind of emotional problems. Um, just as we've seen with people who become lone wolves and strike on behalf of ISIS, most of them have are people with very disturbed backgrounds uh who have struggled or failed in their lives and they're looking to do something dramatic, uh, kind of to almost to redeem their life, to make their life about something. And that is a for a lot of people in this world, that's a very short walk. And, you know, so that subset of people who are motivated, radicalized, uh, want to see bad things happen to the people they think are the enemies, and have enough, you know, mental, emotional distress in their life that they're they're willing to cross that line, that is not an insignificant number of people. And I feel like that's that's the population that's going to eventually end up being you know operationalized.
SPEAKER_03Wow. Well, this has been a great chat, Joby. Um, I'm curious if you can tell us what might be your next project. You've you've written about the rise of ISIS, an al-Qaeda triple agent, Syria's chemical weapons, and the efforts to get a hold of them. And and and now Carlos, which is maybe the ultimate sort of study of a terrorist. But can you tell us what what might be uh interesting you next?
SPEAKER_02Well, you know, my my family would love to see me retire from writing about terrorism because uh it is it's you know it's draining after a while, and you get really close to these guys and you you understand their their pathology, and particularly with ISIS, which was just so disturbed. I mean, it still have nightmares about it. It's it's just really just shocking and horrible. Um, I I love this space though, and I feel like there are there are some good stories to tell. There's some um wonderful people in in the in the CT space, people who have saved us some things that we don't even realize that that we were in that the threat existed. And and a lot of those stories have not been told. And so I feel like that maybe the next one will be more helpful and and give us a reason to think that, yeah, you know, we've got we've got threats, and this is why podcasts like this have to exist. But there are also people that are looking after our well-being, and some of them are just really heroic people. And I feel like maybe that should be the next thing.
SPEAKER_01Hopefully, I love that idea. Um, Joby, it's been wonderful. We are so appreciative of your time. Thank you so much for joining us and for sharing this story. It's fascinating. Before we go, uh can you tell our listeners where they can find you and learn more about your work and obviously your book?
SPEAKER_02Right. So I've got a website, it's just jobywarwick.com, and uh it feels weird to say that. But you can uh see all my books, all four of them, including the latest. And I also have links to journalism. So I'm uh still looking to be active and relevant in uh in this very crazy world that we're in. And I appreciate people checking in also on Twitter at jobywarwick.com, or excuse me, at Joby Warwick.
SPEAKER_01That is amazing. I think a lot of people would aspire to say that they have a website where they have all of their books.
SPEAKER_02Well, people have an unusual name, is that you know there's not going to be another one. There's not another handle just like that. So it's one of this, one of the good things about having a strange name.
SPEAKER_01That's right. And I will be looking forward for the hopeful book that comes next. Um, for our listeners, if you've made it this far, please consider leaving us a review, preferably a good one. It really makes a significant difference in helping people find us organically. And if you have an idea or question for us, or you just want to say hi, send us a note at thethreatpod at gwu.emil.edu. Bye.