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In 1973 he attempted his first assassination. Catching the Jewish president of the Marks & Spencer department store chain, Joseph Edward Sieff, in the bathroom, Carlos aimed his gun at his prey's face and fired one shot. Sieff was spared when the bullet ricocheted off his teeth. Later, Carlos would say his gun had jammed. "I usually fire three times around the nose. But only one bullet went off." He also botched his second mission, aiming poorly as he tossed hand grenades into an Israeli bank. "This is not a very efficient terrorist," says Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism program. "He was never as good as his reputation."
Carlos did better when the Popular Front transferred him to Paris a year later. He set off three bombs in the city and helped the Japanese Red Army plan the takeover of the French embassy in the Hague, in which 11 hostages were seized. After he took an unsuccessful shot with a bazooka at an El Al airliner parked at Orly Airport in January 1975, police rounded up Michel Moukharbel, Carlos' Lebanese adjutant. Moukharbel then led three unarmed policemen to a party where Carlos sat strumming a guitar. After chatting briefly, Carlos excused himself to go to the bathroom. He returned with a gun, killed Moukharbel and two of the police, wounding the third. Then he fled to Algeria.
That December, Carlos staged his single act of world-class terrorism: the raid on OPEC headquarters in Vienna, where 11 ministers were taken hostage and three other people were killed. He introduced himself to his captives with the words, "I am the famous Carlos. You will have heard of me." He tortured one hostage by shooting him in the hand, knee and stomach before finishing him off. Midway through the operation, Carlos canceled plans to assassinate two of the ministers when Algeria brokered a monetary deal in exchange for their lives. Haddad was furious, and their relationship cooled.
From then on, his career went into free fall. He quarreled with his other Middle East patrons and fled to Eastern Europe, where his flamboyant habits alienated his hosts. On a tape filmed with a hidden camera in Budapest in 1980, he can be seen arguing in Russian with a Hungarian security official, who told him, "Evacuate your operational base in our territory."
That message soon became a recurrent refrain. In 1982, when his latest amour, Magdalena Kopp, a German Red Army Faction member, was arrested in Paris in a car loaded with explosives, Carlos penned a letter to the French embassy at the Hague, stamped with his thumbprints. It warned, "I will take up the matter personally with the French government" unless Kopp and a fellow conspirator were released within 30 days. Two months later, the car bomb went off for which Carlos now stands trial. According to the French daily Le Monde, one of the two lawyers he retained last week for his defense, Jacques Verges, is identified in the files of the former East German Stasi secret police as the man who passed that letter to the French authorities, a role that suggests , an active participation with the terror clique. Verges dismisses the charge as "part of the Stasi program of disinformation." Former French government officials, however, confirm the report.