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But with whom -- and where? The precise nature of the cooperation that led Sudan to hand over Europe's most-wanted terrorist remains sorely disputed. In Washington the CIA claimed that steady Western pressure had flushed Carlos out of Syria, where he had been given sanctuary for much of the past decade. By the time he was traced to Khartoum earlier this year, he had run out of havens. France's daily Liberation reported that France had cut a deal giving Sudan's Islamist government some satellite photos of Christian rebel positions in the countryside in exchange for Carlos' extradition. France, which has a reputation for horse trading in the Middle East, denied there was any payoff.
Yet the most popular theory was coldly practical: Carlos was expendable. Sudan saw more to gain by turning him over to the West than by harboring him. Barely 24 hours after Carlos was placed in French custody, Khartoum officials trumpeted their cooperation and called on the U.S. to remove Sudan from its blacklist of terrorist-sponsori ng nations. Unimpressed, Washington demurred. Carlos, it seemed, was no longer much of a catch. With communism discredited and the Middle East bent on peace, his revolutionary credentials had outlived their usefulness. His penchant for whiskey, women and penthouse suites had earned him a reputation for being more trouble than he was worth.
Once upon a time, though, the world was his terrified playground. Navigating his way with fluency in six languages, Carlos was an elegant chameleon who prided himself on breaking hearts and heads. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, he was the son of an affluent Marxist lawyer who named his three sons Ilyich, Vladimir and Lenin in honor of the Russian revolutionary. His home life had the sparkle of "champagne radicalism," according to Christopher Dobson, one of his biographers.
When the teenage Carlos fell afoul of the Caracas police by joining the communist student movement, his father packed him off to London. The young man soon moved on to Patrice Lumumba University, Moscow's school for grooming Third World revolutionaries. There he proved a lazy chemistry student whose rich-kid antics prompted party officials to ask his father to cut young Ilyich's allowance. He fell in love with a Cuban woman, with whom he had a daughter. He lost touch with them, yet often referred to the woman as his "greatest love." In 1970 he was expelled for "anti-Soviet agitation" after throwing an inkpot at the Iranian embassy. By some accounts, this was a cover for his recruitment by the KGB. True or not, Carlos used his university days to form close friendships with Third World radicals.
Carlos moved next to Jordan, where he was trained as a hit man for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and impressed the group's co- leader Wadi Haddad. Contrary to myth, he did not take part in the Black September attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics that left 11 Israeli athletes dead. Instead, he was dispatched to London, where he hid behind the guise of an irresponsible Lothario as he established safe houses and arms caches.