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CHAPTER 3

‘CELEBRITY’ TERRORISTS

Protesting killing of Osama Bin Laden, Quetta, Pakistan, 2 May 2011.

CARLOS THE JACKAL

Tuesday, 23 December 1997

SENTENCED TO LIFE

To the end, the real Ilich Ramirez Sanchez never quite stood up.

Over the eight days of his trial, the former global Public Enemy Number One put on a series of masks: the committed "professional revolutionary"; the urbane socialite; the educated man of the world; the lawyer manque; the admirer and friend of France; the self-pitying victim of imperialist conspiracy; the gallant lady's man; the bigoted anti-Semite.

Even after hearing the verdict he merely smiled, shook his fist in the air four times and said "Viva la revolucion" before walking out of the courtroom escorted by police guards.

The nine-member jury had taken four hours before convicting him of shooting Raymond Dous, Jean Donatini and Michel Moukharbal, a Lebanese colleague of Carlos in a student apartment near the Sorbonne.

But Ramirez had given a brief glimpse of all of the faces of Carlos in his final oration yesterday, a four-hour ramble, covering everything from Lenin to General Noriega and the global war against "McDonald'sisation". The portly, sprucely dressed 48-year-old man blamed for many of the most audacious, and callous, terrorist acts of the Seventies and Eighties did not get around to the staggering revelations about his dealings with Western governments that he had promised.

In the end, the observer was left with the impression that manipulation for its own sake was all that Carlos had left; or maybe that was all that there had ever been.

Much of the speech was spoken so softly that it was inaudible. He paid tribute to the "Palestinian people" to whom he had devoted his life. He urged the world to join them in a "war, a global war, a war to the death, the war which humanity must win against McDonald'sisation". He paid tribute to his leading lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, "the daughter of an old French family, a daughter of the true France". If that made him sound like a Vichy-sympathiser or a fascist, "so be it", he said.

The crime of which he was accused - the murder of the two French secret service agents and a Lebanese informer in June 1975 - was an "ambush", he said. It was all got up by the state of Israel, the "first terrorist state in history". Besides, it was not him; he was not even present. Later, however, he said: "I have never denied the facts, I confirm or deny nothing. The truth is formed like a puzzle ... You must show the world that it is all a masquerade ... One day someone will speak."

Earlier, this defence - which flew in the face of all the evidence and Carlos's own previous admissions in the Arab press - was scornfully dismissed by a lawyer for the victims. Maitre Francis Szpiner said it was below the dignity of the great international revolutionary that Carlos purported to be to make such a defence. "You say you're not just a chicken stealer but you defend yourself like a chicken stealer, not like a revolutionary."

Olivier Maudret, a lawyer appointed to defend Carlos when Ms Coutant- Peyre made a brief, choreographed withdrawal last week, said that the jury and judges could afford to acquit Carlos because he still faced five other serious charges in France.

They should throw out the case because it had been "torpedoed by the DST to cover-up a state scandal". Carlos was being tried on the "rotten basis of an aborted argument".

After the verdict, Ms Coutant-Peyre said the defence would appeal.

"It was not a just trial. He was convicted on political grounds," she said. "I consider that the decision comes from outside interests, especially America and Israel."

John Lichfield

Tuesday, 17 October2000

MEETING CARLOS FOR ONE LAST TIME

Twenty-five years after his crime, the German urban guerrilla Hans-Joachim Klein stood in a Frankfurt courtroom yesterday, accusing his former commander, "Carlos the Jackal", of lying, and implicating Libya in state terrorism.

It is Mr Klein, though, who is in the dock, charged with complicity in the murders of three people during the infamous attack on an Opec meeting in Vienna in December 1975. He can hardly deny being there, since he was himself shot in the stomach in Vienna, but claims to have fired at no one.

The prosecution, however, has a witness up its sleeve, who is expected to testify that Mr Klein did pull the fatal trigger. The name of the witness is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez - Carlos the Jackal himself. The two former colleagues, now mortal enemies, are scheduled to confront each other on 23 November, either in Frankfurt, if the French authorities will allow, or in Paris, where Carlos is serving his long jail sentence.

The other actors of the drama will try to keep a lower profile. For this trial comes at an inconvenient time for several people in high places, and not just for the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the former czar of state terrorism who has lately been working hard to have himself rehabilitated in the Western world.

"My friend Joschka Fischer," received a fond mention in Mr Klein's testimony yesterday, as did Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French MEP and former revolutionary leader known in his youthful days as Danny the Red. When the two worlds - urban terrorism and anarchic but legal parliamentary politics - parted in the late 70s, Mr Klein was stranded in the middle. He now represents the missing link between those that ended up shot or in jail - such as Carlos - or successfully cleansed their murky past and climbed the greasy pole of politics.

Now the trial brings it all back, much to the dismay of Germany's Foreign Minister.

The country's current political masters can be excused for striving to focus exclusively on the events in Vienna. "We are not concerned with the roles of people who are still politically active today," the Presiding Judge, Heinrich Gehrke, declared at the outset.

But Mr Klein was keen to illuminate the road that led him to Vienna three days before Christmas Eve 1975. He and Mr Fischer and Mr Cohn-Bendit belonged to the revolutionary "community" in Frankfurt. Mr Klein was all washed out, having failed to complete his apprenticeship as a car mechanic. He joined the Reds, many of whom would later become the Greens. "In the group I found solidarity and a bit of love," he told the court.

In 1974 the Red Army Faction terrorist Holger Meins died after a hunger strike in jail. Mr Klein was outraged and decided then that demonstrating was not enough. "It became clear to me that we must do something more than support people in prison. In an emergency, we had to participate in armed actions ourselves," he said. He switched to the Red Cells, a rival to the RAF.

In his testimony, Mr Klein claimed to have been recruited for the Vienna job by the co-defendant, Rudolf Schindler, a 57-year old man who insists he is the victim of mistaken identity. What is beyond dispute is that Mr Klein was a member of the six-strong commando unit that stormed into the Opec headquarters, killing a local employee, an Iraqi bodyguard and an Austrian policeman.

Two of the three fatal bullets have been traced. Carlos himself fired the first one, and Gabriela Tiedemann, alias "Nada", is believed to have fired the second. She died of cancer five years ago. Carlos says Mr Klein is responsible for the third.

After receiving emergency treatment, Mr Klein and the rest of the group were allowed to fly to Algiers with 35 hostages. The latter were freed, the perpetrators vanished.

Carlos went in one direction, Mr Klein in another. Two years after the Opec attack, the German magazine Spiegel received a parcel in the post, containing Mr Klein's handgun and a letter announcing his retirement from the urban guerrilla scene. The armed struggle, he confessed, had become "senseless". The package contained a list of Jewish targets that Carlos was allegedly planning to attack.

In 1979 came the full mea culpa. In a book entitled Return to Humanity, Mr Klein denounced Carlos as a "megalomaniac murderer" and spoke of his sorrow over his past actions.

But to humanity, he could not come back on his own terms. Living under a false name, in fear of Carlos's revenge and the long arm of the law, he wound up in France, dependent on Mr Cohn-Bendit's moral and financial support.

Mr Klein had conducted protracted negotiations with German agents over an orderly home-coming. The talks looked promising, yet two years ago French gendarmes abruptly picked him up from his hide-out and extradited him to Germany, perhaps to help discredit Mr Klein's friends, who were then in opposition. But at least this way he will get the chance to meet Carlos for one last time.

Imre Karacs

Sunday, 6 November 2011

ON TRIAL FOR TERRORISM

The "celebrity terrorist" Ilich Ramirez Sanchez – known as "Carlos the Jackal" – will go on trial for terrorist activities for the first time in Paris today.

The Venezuelan-born Sanchez, 62, who became a symbol of the "cruel but cool" international terrorism of the 1970s, is already serving life sentences in France for murdering two policemen and an informer.

Now, for six weeks from today, he will be tried for his alleged role in organising four terror attacks in France in 1982 and 1983, including an explosion aboard an express train in which five people died. It will be the first time that Sanchez, a self-styled "professional international revolutionary", has been tried for terror activities in an alleged 20-year career that began with the wounding of the Marks & Spencer boss, Joseph Sieff, in London in December 1973.

Sanchez was kidnapped from Sudan in 1994 by French intelligence agents and jailed for life in 1997 for three murders committed in Paris in 1975. The trial beginning today is the result of a ponderous investigation by French anti-terrorism magistrates, which included getting hard-won access to the archives of former Soviet bloc intelligence agencies.

A special assize court in Paris, with seven judges sitting instead of a jury, will hear evidence that Sanchez planned four terrorist attacks on French soil in 1982-83 in which 11 people were killed.

Prosecutors will say that Sanchez masterminded the four attacks as part of an attempt to blackmail France into releasing his German wife, Magdalena Kopp, and a Swiss associate, Bruno Bréguet, who were arrested in Paris in 1982 for possessing weapons and explosives. The hearings are expected to reveal publicly for the first time evidence of links between Sanchez and Soviet bloc intelligence.

The round face and the Che Guevara beret of Carlos the Jackal became the symbol of a kind of rootless, international terrorism linked to the Palestinian cause from the mid-1970s. On 21 December, 1975, he led the attack on a meeting in Vienna of the oil producing cartel Opec in which 70 senior politicians and officials were taken hostage. This operation is now believed to have been sponsored by the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi. An attempt by Austria to extradite Sanchez from France to face charges for the Opec attack was refused by a French court of appeal in 1999.

The true motivation and ideology of "Carlos" has always been open to doubt – a confusion encouraged by Sanchez himself. Leaders of the radical Palestinian cause are reported to have lost patience with his jet-set lifestyle in the late 1980s. He spent some years in the eastern bloc before taking refuge in Syria and then Sudan.

Even from prison in France over the past 17 years, he has managed to keep alive his image as an enigmatic charmer. In 2001 he "married" his lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, 58, in an Islamic ceremony which has no status under French law. Ms Coutant-Peyre will be one of two defence lawyers at his trial. His lawyers are expected to argue that evidence of his involvement in the French attacks is sparse and based on "unreliable" archives of Soviet intelligence.

John Lichfield

Friday, 29 October 2010

EAST GERMANY SANCTUARY

In the West he was for decades one of the world's most wanted leftist terrorists, but in communist East Berlin, Carlos the Jackal was given a headquarters with 75 support staff and allowed to walk the streets with an automatic pistol slung from his belt.

The extraordinary life of Illich Ramirez Sanchez – the internationally renowned terrorist now serving a life sentence in Paris for triple murder – behind the Iron Curtain began to emerge yesterday from a mass of torn East German Stasi files that are slowly being put back together by the German authorities.

Sanchez, who was nicknamed "Carlos the Jackal" when it became known that police once found a copy of Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal among his belongings, is reported to be responsible for the deaths of at least 80 people during a terrorist career spanning 25 years. Carlos, an acclaimed film about his life, went on general release this week.

For decades he worked as a hit man for the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leading a murderous if spectacular raid on the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries' Vienna headquarters in 1975. Sixty hostages were taken and three people were shot dead.

But a year later the Venezuelan-born Sanchez, who was given his first name Illich by his Leninist lawyer father, found himself expelled from the PFLP and tyring to form his own guerrilla group, the Organisation of Armed Struggle. It was then that Sanchez turned to East Germany. As the Stasi's reconstituted secret police files revealed yesterday, the hardline communist regime afforded Carlos hitherto unimagined levels of assistance.

According to Germany's Focus magazine, which gained access to the files, Sanchez formed a pact with East Germany in the late 1970s. The communist authorities allowed him to run a headquarters in East Berlin which was staffed by 75 helpers hand-picked by the Stasi.

"While the West's security forces were feverishly trying to track down and arrest him, Sanchez remained completely at ease in East Berlin," said one of the Focus journalists. "His Stasi minders wrote reports about how he used to ride around in West German cars with his friends and walk across the city's main square with a pistol attached to his belt," he added.

Sanchez's support staff included East German university lecturers, actors, trade union functionaries, nurses, mechanics and even a doctor. They helped furnish him with safe houses, apartments for conspiratorial meetings, "secure" telephone lines and ensured that his car, always a West German model, was kept in perfect running order.

The Stasi helped not only Sanchez, but also arranged doctors' appointments for his then girlfriend, Magdalena Kopp, and her colleague, the West German terrorist Johannes Weinrich.

East Germany's support for Sanchez was apparently far greater than the assistance given by the regime to West Germany's Red Army Faction. The terrorist group carried out a string of bombing, kidnappings and murders in 1970s and 80s. Its members were given safe houses in East Germany when they were on the run from the West German authorities. East Germany also had close links with Palestinian groups and Libya.

From East Berlin, Sanchez is believed to have planned attacks on Radio Free Europe's office in Munich and a 1983 attack on West Berlin's Maison de France, a French cultural centre, which killed one man and injured 22 others. Bomb attacks on two French TGV trains which killed four and injured dozens followed in the same year. According to the files, Sanchez's close links with the Stasi enabled the secret police to put pressure on him to refrain from carrying out terrorist attacks at sensitive moments. When the former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev visited West Germany in November 1981, the files show that the KGB submitted a request to the Stasi to intervene to "prevent any activities" by Sanchez during the visit. The request apparently worked, because, although western intelligence was aware that the group was planning an imminent West German attack, the visit passed off without incident.

The revelations about Sanchez have emerged from some 15,500 rubbish sacks stuffed with torn or shredded secret police files that Stasi officers frantically tried to destroy in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The sacks were meant to be taken to rubbish dumps and burned, but protesters occupied East Berlin's Stasi headquarters and prevented their removal.

However it was not until 1995 that reunited Germany began attempting to reconstitute the damaged files using archivists to do the painstaking work by hand. Two years ago staff at the government office which oversees the files reported that they had managed to put together 900,000 Stasi file pages from 400 of the sacks. The contents have helped further to expose the iniquities of a secret police system in a state in which around every fourth citizen was an informer. A computer is now being used in a pilot study designed to rebuild the files electronically.

French and US intelligence eventually persuaded the authorities in Sudan, where Sanchez eventually lived, to arrest him. He was captured and tranquilised by his own bodyguards after undergoing a minor operation on a testicle in 1994. He was then handed to French intelligence agents and flown to Paris to stand trial.

In 1997 he was sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of the 1975 murder of two French policemen and a former PFLP guerrilla-turned-informant. Sanchez, who married his trial lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre in jail in 2001, has published a collection of his writings from prison in which he expresses his support for Osama bin Laden and heaps praise on Saddam Hussein, calling him the "last Arabic knight".

Tony Paterson

Monday, 13 May 2013

APPEALING LIFE IMPRISONMENT

The 1970s “celebrity terrorist” Ilich Ramirez Sanchez – better known as “Carlos the Jackal” – complained on Monday that the Venezuelan government was trying to sabotage his appeal against life imprisonment in France.

Sanchez, 63, had counted on the late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, to finance his six weeks long appeal hearing which has begun in Paris. He told the court that he had no money and he had been forced to order his large defence team to stay at home.

Sanchez, the symbol of a “cool but cruel” middle class international terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, has been in jail in France since he was kidnapped by French agents in Sudan in 1994. He was convicted in 1997 of killing two French policemen and an informer. He was given a second life sentence in 2011 for organising four terrorist attacks in France in the early 1980s in which 11 people died.

On the first day of his appeal hearing on Monday, he asked the court to appoint “duty lawyers” at the expense of the French taxpayer. “They won’t know the arguments but I know them well,” he said. “It won’t help my defence but we will muddle along.”

After a brief adjournment, the court accepted his request. Sanchez nodded and said: “A blonde and a brunette, please”.

In 2001 he “married” one of his French lawyers Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, in an Islamic ceremony which has no status under French law. Ms Coutant-Peyre complained on Monday that the new government in Venezuela was taking an obstructive approach since President Chavez – a publicly declared Jackal admirer – had died in March.

From the early 1970s, Sanchez, the son of wealthy, left-wing Venezuelan family, became the symbol of rootless, middle class terrorism, allied to the Palestinian cause and allegedly sponsored by the Soviet Union.

John Lichfield