Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [114]
At this stage, Abu Nidal was a minor figure, temporarily eclipsed by the more exotic and publicity-hungry celebrity terrorist Carlos the Jackal (Illich Ramirez Sanchez). Sanchez was born in Caracas in October 1949, the spoilt son of a millionaire Stalinist who would bask in the son’s exploits. Never straying far from the paternal tree, Sanchez attended a guerrilla training camp run by the Cuban secret service - the Dirección General de Inteligencia - and then the Lumumba university in Moscow, where the KGB identified future guerrillas, saboteurs and terrorists from among its twenty-thousand-strong corps of foreign students. Always the ladies’ man, despite the corpulence that since childhood had earned him the nickname ‘El Gordo’ or ‘the Fat One’, Carlos was expelled for ostentatious skirt-chasing among the earnest comrades. He seems to have gone to the Middle East to fight against the Jordanians, gradually being accepted as an associate of Habash’s PFLP. By the early 1970s he was living near his mother in London, ostensibly studying at the London School of Economics - even then notorious for welcoming any foreigner with an open chequebook - but in one reality living the life of a Latin American playboy, whose fashionable revolutionary chat-up lines appealed to the credulous young women he gathered around him, using their homes as arms stores and safe houses. The other reality surfaced when on 30 December 1973 Carlos forced his way into the St John’s Wood home of the president of Marks and Spencer, and shot Joseph Sieff in the face. A month later, the same elusive figure opened the door of the Israeli Hapoalim bank in Cheapside and threw a bomb into the lobby injuring a typist. El Gordo had mutated into ‘the Jackal’, a name given to him by journalists familiar with Frederick Forsyth’s 1970 bestseller. Carlos resurfaced in Paris. In August 1974 bombs exploded at the offices of papers deemed sympathetic to Israel. The next month a hand grenade was thrown into the Drugstore nightclub, this being an attempt to add extra pressure on the French government to release a Japanese Red Army operative, at a time when JRA terrorists had taken the French ambassador to the Netherlands hostage with the aid of guns and grenades supplied by Carlos. In January 1975 there were two successive attacks, using Russian-made rockets, against El Al flights leaving Orly airport. All of these attacks were the handiwork of Carlos.
His luck temporarily ran out when Lebanese security police detained Michel Moukharbel in Beirut, for he was responsible for administering the logistics of Carlos’s outrages in Paris. They kept him for five days before allowing him to leave for France, where the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (or DST) kept an eye on him and eventually arrested him. Moukharbel eventually volunteered the address of the fat youth the DST had photographed him with, although he insisted that the man was of no importance. Three DST agents took Moukharbel to the address, a flat on the Left Bank’s Rue Toullier, although as their shift was about to end they checked in their weapons before leaving, a time-saving gesture that proved mistaken. The sound of guitar music and the Mexican song ‘Give Thanks for Life’ drew them to a small flat where the lead DST officer entered, leaving Moukharbel with his two colleagues along the hall. The DST agent chatted amiably with the fat young man in sunglasses who was the life and soul of a small party for his fellow Latin Americans.