He went by a rich variety of aliases: Salim. Andres Martinez. Taurus. Glen Gebhard. Hector Hevodidbon. Michel Assaf. During an infamous career that spanned two decades, Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez used all those names. But the public knew him as Carlos the Jackal, the moniker that best evoked his ruthless, predatory spirit. As he boldly declared in 1975 while holding 11 OPEC ministers hostage in Vienna: "To get anywhere, you have to walk over the corpses." His image is frozen in time in crude black-and-white photos of a pudgy face that seemed menacing in its banality and came to symbolize the world of mercenary terror. But last week as Carlos was arrested in Sudan and whisked to France to face charges that threaten to jail him for life, his most vaunted exploits were exposed as largely fictitious.
To be sure, Carlos had an evil career. The French charge him with 15 deaths locally; Carlos himself claims 83 victims worldwide. But the legend that credits him with the most notorious terror acts of the past two decades and links him to violent groups in France, Germany, Japan and especially the Middle East is diminished by bungled missions, unimpressively soft targets and years of dissipation from high living and alcohol consumption. While Carlos hid out in the Middle East over the past 10 years, intelligence forces often cleared their blotters by blaming the elusive mastermind for their unsolved cases. Now that he is safely lodged in cell 258187 of Paris' La Sante prison, a less-than-breathless truth is rapidly emerging.
As the manacled prisoner came face-to-face with justice for the first time, he strove to uphold the swaggering image he had so carefully cultivated through decades of actual and exaggerated derring-do. "This man is a star," Carlos said by way of greeting the investigating magistrate, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, in his bunker-like quarters at the Palais de Justice. "We are both professionals. We'll get along together." Gesturing toward the assault rifles carried by his four police escorts, Carlos bantered, "Ah! The FA-MAS. We had those in Lebanon. They're good." Though it was a display of insouciance for a man about to be charged with complicity in a 1982 car bombing that killed a pregnant woman and wounded 63 others, there was no masking the tired image Carlos cut as he stood in white pants, his mauve pullover stretched taut by mid-life paunch, his short hair a muddy gray. At 44, he looked like a washed- up playboy.
It was the French who got him, because they never gave up. While other intelligence agencies had long since ceased their manhunts for Carlos, the French hunger to bring him to justice had gnawed quietly since 1975, when he murdered two French agents. "We practically never lost track of Carlos," French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua said last week. "It was always a question of cooperation."