‘Carlos the Jackal’ Faces Last Audience--the Court

The most wanted terrorist of all time, who always had a weight problem, has grown pudgier on prison food. From maximum-security cells where he has whiled away three years in solitary, No. 872686/X has been heard to shout his name, perhaps worried that the outside world has forgotten.

“I am Carlos! I am Carlos!” have come the prisoner’s cries in Spanish-accented French.

This afternoon in Paris, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a.k.a. “Carlos the Jackal,” will be brought before a court for the first time in a checkered, violent life that carried him from his native Venezuela to a shadowy, globe-trotting existence as the world’s most notorious combatant for “international revolution.”

It will probably be the last hurrah for the 48-year-old bespectacled South American who in France alone is blamed for five bombings that killed 14 people and wounded more than 200 in the 1970s and ‘80s.

In what may be the final irony, the man commonly known as Carlos is not being put on trial for one of the carefully plotted attacks that he became notorious for but for three impromptu murders.

A Paris jury has already found him guilty of the killings, in 1992 when he was on the run, and sentenced him to life in prison. Since hard evidence in five other pending terrorism cases is slim, sources say, confirmation of the earlier guilty verdict will probably mean the Jackal will be locked away for good--until he dies in captivity.

“He is a man alone, a man from the past,” said Roland Jacquard, one of France’s most eminent experts on terrorism and author of a new book on Carlos. “Carlos’ bad luck is that he is the only major international terrorist to allow himself to be captured.”

On June 27, 1975, using a Soviet-made 7.62-millimeter Tokarev pistol, the Marxist revolutionary allegedly killed two unarmed officers from the French security force and a Lebanese informer after they unexpectedly showed up at Carlos’ hide-out in Paris’ Latin Quarter. Cool and collected, the murderer, who had shot for the head, escaped through a window. Carlos’ fingerprints were found on a whiskey bottle at the scene.

Three years ago, the militantly Islamic government of Sudan, trying to curry favor with the West, gave up Carlos, who had been openly living there with his second wife, a young Jordanian, after converting to Islam. On Aug. 15, 1994, he was blindfolded, shoved in a sack and bound with straps, and flown by French police to a government airstrip outside Paris.

Since then, he has been kept at Sante prison in the capital, or at Fresnes in the suburbs.

The self-labeled “professional revolutionary” who planted bombs in the name of Palestinian self-determination and benefited from the connivance of governments in the now-defunct Soviet Bloc is a reminder of a vanished era. The Iron Curtain that gave him sanctuary, employers and weapons suppliers in countries including Hungary, Romania and East Germany has crumbled.

The Palestinians, on whose behalf he launched his violent career--with a bungled 1973 assassination attempt on a British millionaire who was a prominent fund-raiser for Israel--are making peace with the Jewish state.

It was in December 1975 that Carlos became a superstar of world terrorism by leading a daring armed attack on the Vienna headquarters of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. Ministers of the consortium were taken hostage and flown in a commandeered plane to Algiers.

Carlos, bearded and wearing a jaunty beret like the celebrated Latin American revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, seemed to take pains to ensure that his VIP captives knew who he was. He demanded $1 billion for their release and is believed to have received several million dollars from Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The myths that soon sprang up made him seem an even more redoubtable--or to some, glamorous--enemy of the Western democracies.

“After OPEC, there were as many Carlos sightings as there are recipes for chili,” notes Brian Jenkins, Los Angeles-based deputy chairman of Kroll Associates, an international business investigations and security firm, who is writing a history of international terrorism.

For a while, some intelligence sources detected the hand of Carlos in the 1972 slaying of 10 Israeli athletes and a coach by Palestinian guerrillas at the Munich Olympics and in the 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight by Palestinian and European commandos to Entebbe, Uganda. But he had played no part.

Even the catchy sobriquet “the Jackal,” tacked on to the nom de guerre of Carlos that he got from Palestinian guerrillas, may have been the invention of the myth-makers. Supposedly, a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s bestselling novel “The Day of the Jackal,” which recounts the tale of a British mercenary hired to kill Gen. Charles de Gaulle, was found in a London apartment where Carlos stashed firearms, explosives and phony documents. Jacquard and some other longtime trackers of Carlos think the story is a journalistic fabrication.

The unadorned facts are troubling enough. His first wife, Magdalena Kopp of Germany, who served a prison term in France for possession of weapons and explosives, called her former husband and revolutionary comrade “a megalomaniacal kook” in an interview with a German magazine and said he “can kill people without batting an eye.”

“Carlos wasn’t in any camp, unless it was his own,” Kopp, who has an 11-year-old daughter who was fathered by the terrorist and lives with her in Germany, told Stern this week. “I’d love to see the Carlos myth collapse.”

Even in captivity, the Venezuelan has the power to frighten. When he is brought for trial in central Paris, there will be police sharpshooters on the roofs. An extra, 75-member police detail has been ordered in to guard the Palace of Justice. Judges and jurors will be given round-the-clock police protection, an extreme rarity in French trials, and everyone entering the courtroom, lawyers included, will have to pass through metal detectors.

For defense attorneys, the trial, forecast to last one week, is a “Stalinist” farce. As resolute as a “lion,” Carlos will claim that the two slain policemen, Raymond Dous, 55, and Jean Donatini, 32, and Lebanese informer Michel Moukarbal died in an ambush engineered by agents of the Israeli Mossad, lead counsel Isabelle Coutant Peyre said.

She said her client will also not be squeamish about exploiting the “bourgeois” legal system he once tried to overthrow. Carlos will argue that the circumstances of his arrest in Sudan were illegal under French law and that there is no proof he killed anyone, Coutant Peyre said.

“In a war, there are dead,” the Paris attorney said. “Carlos is a soldier. He fought a war he believed in and that he still believes in.”

That may be true. But so may a report purportedly dug from the archives of the former East German secret police, the Stasi, that says of Carlos: “He speaks much of communism and world revolution, but has no deep knowledge in those fields.”

While awaiting trial, prisoner No. 872686/X has been devouring Fortune, Forbes and scores of other periodicals and watching cable television. He writes many letters, which he signs “Carlos.” According to Coutant Peyre, he needs a new pair of glasses. Though virtually a model prisoner, he got in trouble last year for calling a prison guard a gnu, a word no more insulting in French than in English.

Carlos recently wrote a cigar lovers’ magazine that he smokes two cigars a day when he can get them and that he prefers Havanas. Even behind bars, he has kept intact his reputation as a lady-killer. Guards one day entered a visitors’ room where he was supposed to be conferring with a member of his defense team . . . and found the woman in his lap.

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Trail of a Terrorist

Profile

Given name: Ilich Ramirez Sanchez

Born: Oct. 12, 1949, in Venezuela

Education: Patrice Lumumba University, Moscow

Identities: Carlos Martinez, among others. Dubbed “the Jackal” after the assassin in Frederick Forsyth’s “The Day of the Jackal.”

Career: After college, joins the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; creates own terrorist group. Believed to have had links with intelligence agencies of the ex-Soviet bloc and Syria, the former South Yemen and Algeria.

Criminal record: Sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by French court for role in 1975 killing of two French agents and an informer. In August 1994, the Sudanese government turns him over to French authorities.

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Terrorism

Carlos was linked to some of the deadliest terrorist events in the 1970s and 1980s:

1973: Wounding of British millionaire Edward Sieff, prominent fund-raiser for Israel.

1974: Grenade attack on Israeli bank in London; triple car-bombing outside Paris offices of three newspapers; takeover of French embassy at The Hague; grenade attack on Paris drugstore.

1975: Grenade and bazooka attacks on El-Al planes at Orly Airport in Paris; the killing of two French intelligence agents investigating the attacks; attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna and kidnapping of oil ministers to Algiers.

1981: Bomb attack on Radio Free Europe in Munich, Germany.

1982: Bombing of French train; bombing near the Champs Elysees in Paris.

1983: Bombing of French cultural center in West Berlin; bombings in Marseilles’ main railroad terminal and on the Paris-Marseilles express.

Source: Times staff and wire reports.

Compiled by JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG and JULIA FRANCO / Los Angeles Times