Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Carlos The Jackal, The Most Wanted Man on Earth

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

In part two, we discuss Carlos the Jackal, the most wanted terrorist on the planet. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is behind the bastards podcast that is never introduced well despite the significant resources that we put into writing and producing it. Which just shatters the whole effect of the product and really it's a real shame. I know people are tuning out right now because I said syphilis. Nobody likes to think about syphilis. It's a horrible illness.

But you can't go back in time. This is how we started the episode. And so this is how we're continuing things. This is part two of our episode on the golden age of terrorism. And my guests as in part one are my friends and colleagues in getting repeatedly assaulted by police and federal agents being in a lane. Hello. Hello. So we talked about a couple of different things. Last episode we talked about jacking in the sky.

The highest of jacking. The highest of jackings. As high as you can get and still be jacking until space jackings happen. Just you wait. I have plans. I'm excited for that decade when it's legal to basically hijack a spaceship to go to space Cuba. Which is like Cuba. I'm excited for space Cuba.

Space Cuba is going to be a good time. We're all going to have fun in space Cuba. We'll all retire to the mountains of space Cuba and only half of us will come back. We talked about the Japanese Red Army too and now we're going to talk about the highlight of the golden age of terror if you're asking my opinion on the matter. Carlos the motherfucking jackal. This guy. Bad person. Real bad man.

But god damn he had some style like some panache in Carlos the jackal. This was a dude. He did some terrorism. Not like you're a Samaban law and I'm going to sit in the cave and give people money. And on dialysis. None of that shit. He was a James Bond villain. He was a I'm going to keep a machine pistol under my coat and leave out of windows and have all sorts of gadgets and shoot up OPEC.

He was just cool as hell. Really terrible to women. But cool as hell. Did he cover them in gold so that none of their skin would breathe and they'd suffix you. He was terrible to women in a really unique way that I actually think is kind of fascinating. Not your normal abuser. I'm not looking forward to hearing about that. Not really an abuser.

I mean we'll decide if we think he's an abuser. It's more complicated than that. I'm just saying that covering women in gold so their skin can't breathe and they suffocate somehow is also really unique. Yes that is unique but he did not do that. But what he did was also pretty. Let's move on here. They weren't self-criticism sessions as long as they weren't self-criticism sessions. They sure weren't.

So yeah Carlos the Jackal. Carlos was for a brief period, not a brief for like a decade or more, the most wanted man in the world. He was the most famous terrorist on a planet until again like 9-11 really fucked the curve on a lot of things. Because now like you hear about his record and it doesn't sound nearly as impressive as having a 9-11 in there. But Carlos fucked up a lot of people. He personally killed at least 83 people with his own hands. Still beats Osama bin Laden. Oh but in terms of actual people that you shot in the fucking face?

Yes. And Osama bin Laden didn't dive out a lot of windows. A significant number of them would have been his ideological allies which just tie in with the Japanese Red Army thing. Because you know the Palestinian liberation movement had to be purged of people who wanted to liberate Palestine slightly differently. You got to. Or people who I think it was more often people who were like you know working with some sort of inner polar whoever whatever. So he killed personally about 83 people and then he claims that men and women under his command killed 2,000 more. He's still alive and in prison today so like he still talks and shit.

So he's at almost a 9-11. Yeah he might he might have committed close to a 9-11 if you add it all together. That said these numbers are heavily debated and a lot of people will say that he exaggerates massively the claims of the deaths that he were tied to. And he was a consummate liar because of the whole international terrorist thing. So like who knows. But definitely like the debate between scholars and lawyers isn't like whether or not he killed a bunch of people. It's whether or not he's got like an ocean of blood or river of blood on his hands. Either way killed a shitload of folks.

So let's talk about him. Illich Ramirez Sanchez was born on August or on October 12, 1949 in Michelina, Venezuela. His Russian first name was the product of his father Ramirez Navas who was both a deeply committed Marxist and a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie. So he's he gets Lenin's first name from his dad, the rich lawyer who Lenin also famously. Yeah, not from not a poor kid at all. Lenin spent a lot of time on very nice trains. So yeah, his his mom Elba was not a Marxist though. She was Catholic and Catholic as all hell.

And she did not like that her son wanted to name their boy after a dead Marxist revolutionary. But he refused to listen telling her the biggest man in all humanity, Vladimir Illich Ulyanov alias Lenin humanity before the bomb is divided into two periods before and after Lenin not Christ who was an ordinary run of the mill man. So that's that's like what Marxism is for his dad. It's not like it's not like I'm interested in left wing politics. It's like Lenin is my is a functionally a God whom I basically ship. Right. So that's Ramirez Navas, Illich's dad. And he's illich not Carlos at this point because at no point is his actual name Carlos, but that's a story for later.

So today Venezuela is famed for being, you know, either a communist tellhole or a glorious socialist paradise depending on like what chunk of Twitter you hang out on. But when young Ilich was born the nation's political situation was a lot more fluid. More than 150,000 of Venezuelans died in the National Wars of Independence which had occurred in the early 1800s and kind of freed them from Spain and the success of Venezuelan revolutionaries against Spain gave them a reputation for being like the best rebels in Latin America. So Venezuelans traveled across the whole region during the middle late 1800s launching like Wars of Independence in other countries. So that was kind of like that. You're a Venezuelan like our one of the things we're known for is our revolutionaries, which is the Cuba of its day. Yeah. Everyone needs to export something.

Yeah. Yeah. And if you're a government, a good thing to export is young men who want to overthrow governments. That is the thing to send out of the country. I would put it out there that the United States exported quite a few of those and it seems to have worked out okay for them. Yeah. Now they all have super fun painkiller hobbies. Yep.

Yep. So yeah, as often happens, liberation for Venezuela was followed by a series of brutal dictators who seized power and held it through horrible violence. Yeah. It tends to work that way. Ramirez Navas, Illich's father spent his early life watching a series of four dictators rise to power and be overthrown. While he initially enrolled at seminary, he changed his mind rather quickly and like Stalin declared himself an atheist while still a teenager. He spent most of his youth hanging out on the edges of Venezuela's dissident scene and he got into minor trouble for harboring a fugitive from justice. The authorities declared him a communist, although he insists he did not know what the word communist meant at the time he was arrested and imprisoned for it.

I would doubt that based on his name. No, no, he's not Illich. This is his dad. Sorry. I'm talking about, we're going into like why his dad is the way he is. Yeah. That's Ramirez Navas. I could have been a little clearer about that.

But yeah, his dad gets arrested for being a communist before he knows what communism is. And so there's an interesting arc somewhere in there where he goes from not knowing what communism is to naming his kid after line. That's the story we're going to tell before we tell the story of the fun. Yeah, it's some fun stuff here. So Ramirez learns quickly. And by the time he's out of prison, the national dictator was this guy, General Juan Gomez, who was a cattle rancher with a big terrible mustache. And yeah, he did dictator shit. He banned the people of Caracas from having a rotary club because he was afraid that it would turn into a hive of rebellion.

And at the point where you're keeping people from going to the rotary club, no chance anyone has any resentments. No, people are very happy. Yeah. It was illegal to organize as a communist or a socialist under General Gomez. So yeah, Ramirez did some time in prison and when he got out, he had converted to Soviet style communism. He was like full on at that point. He goes to prison where they put all the communists and he leaves prison a communist. I'm so surprised.

Yeah. Hey guys, anyone want to explain to me the thing I'm in prison for being? They told me that this is what I was and then they put me in prison for it and probably beat the shit out of me. And it sounds like you guys have been all over this shit. So what's that about? Yeah, anybody gets some notes. So yeah, he gets out and he gets involved in radical politics and he plays a small role in a successful revolution against the general. But he kind of hates everyone else all the time.

That's kind of this guy's thing. He doesn't get along with anybody and he doesn't. So nobody actually like he doesn't get to do anything in politics and he hates the thing that they do, which is establish another dictatorship. So he basically gives up on ever doing any work to try to make his Marxist beliefs a reality and instead makes a bunch of money as a lawyer. And he decides that he's going to his son is going to become perfect revolutionary that he's going to raise his son from childhood to be like a great Marxist revolutionary. I went to law school so that you could overthrow the government. Yeah, it's kind of bad ass actually. Also pinning better dad.

Yeah, pinning all of your hopes and dreams and expectations that you never achieved on your child has never ended badly for anyone. It tends to work out well. In this case, it ends with the guy throwing grenades instead of French shopping. So anyway, so yeah, so he decides that his son is going to fulfill all of his dreams of revolutionary Marxism so that he could just make money, which is an interesting thing for a Marxist to do. But yeah, nobody's we all make compromises when we live in a world that doesn't meet our values. So he did that. And to make up for the fact that he was giving his kid a very bougie upbringing. He raised illich on stories of great revolutionaries, including his grandfather, Elba.

In the biography, Jackal, author John Folian writes, The family hero was Elba's grandfather, a doctor who transformed a 60 strong band of followers into an army big enough to help overthrow the government of Caracas in 1899, only to lose power a few years later. But I said like Venezuela was just nothing but revolutions in this period. Unbowed, the doctor repeatedly tried to assassinate the state governor, resisting the forces sent after him in a courageous last and lone stand to give his comrades time to flee into the Andes. Elich delighted in the tales of how the doctor, after he was caught, refused to betray his companions under torture. So that's like his heroic grandpa. Your grandpa got the shit tortured out of him. Absolutely the shit.

And he never talked to the cops. I'd be proud of that guy. That's a pretty cool grandpa to have. Over through the government, didn't do a great job of being the government, but nobody does. Yeah, pretty good grandpa. My grandpa didn't ever throw any governments. I know that's what everyone says about your grandpa. Okay, so Ramirez was insistent that his boy be raised atheist and he lectured a lot about the nonexistence of God, which again, caused some conflict with his deeply Catholic wife.

Another thing that caused some conflict with his deeply Catholic wife was the fact that Ramirez cheated constantly and openly, fucking around like a sex metaphor. I can't really think of right now. Catholics hate that. It didn't go well. It was not a good marriage. One partner was like, I am a Catholic and want to be a traditional Catholic person. And another said, I'm an atheist and I'm going to fuck whoever and I'm going to raise our son to overthrow the government. And she said, could we talk about this?

And he said, fuck you. I'm fucking lots of other people. He was, it was a bad relationship. We have a marriage. It really doesn't seem like a marriage when you read about it. It kind of seems like he found someone to have his kids and then ignored her for years. I don't know. Marriage.

I mean, I've studied history. This seems like most relationships. Most marriages, really. It wasn't a great one. So young Illich and his brothers were expected by their father when he was like paying attention to them because he goes off and he's working a lot of the time. Wait, wait. So he has siblings? Yeah, he's got like a couple of brothers.

What were they raised? Were they just like, your brother's going to be a revolutionary. You guys better help make money to fund him. I don't think his dad had a super clear idea in mind, but Illich seems to have been the one that he was really hanging his wishes on. What I just want to know, though, is was he raising them all like, you get to be a revolutionary and if he falls, the number two steps up? Or was it very much this child is going to be a revolutionary? And you're a barber. I think they're all supposed to be revolutionaries, but Illich was the one, he was his first kid.

So he was like, you're the one who's really, you got the best, the best seamen. Also, how much of this informat- That's how children work. More or less. How much of this is coming from Illich and how much of this is coming? This part of it, the biographer talks to people who knew them as family. So it's not all real. Because I could absolutely see when he grows up to be the jackal being like, oh yeah, my papa always told me it was time to go overthrow some governments.

Although if this comes from his brothers who were just like, yeah, we were told to go become shoemakers. Yeah, I don't know more about how his brothers were raised, but I don't think like they all got kind of the same education. But how many thousands of people's deaths are they responsible for? None as far as I know. Oh, well, slackers. So Ramirez wrote a book for his kids that told them how they were supposed to behave, because again, he was gone being a lawyer most of the time and did not actually have the time to raise them. He was a lawyer as fuck, by the way. Here's a book I wrote for you to tell you how to behave.

No, it was called Social Moral and Civic Formulation. Oh, dad. And it was a guide to manhood written by a man who wanted his kids to become revolutionaries, which for that included some really bad advice that makes you maybe think he didn't know what it took to be revolutionary. Because one of his core tenets for them was, I tell anybody the truth to his face, which is a bad thing to do if you might be trying to overthrow the government. Are you trying to overthrow the government? I need to consult my book. So when their dad was out of town, which was a lot of the time, the illich and his brothers were like real mama's boys because his mom wasn't a giant piece of shit. Yeah, he was raised, kind of like, he was able to kind of like relax and play and stuff when he was with his mom, when he was with his dad.

Like all of the boys were expected to behave like soldiers. And you can kind of see him, he was kind of raised like John Connor, only like in this, I guess. Only his mom was like, yeah. Not ignoring him because she was falsely imprisoned in a mental asylum, but fucking a mistress and making shitloads of money. Right. Yeah, slightly different from John Connor. Sarah Connor comes off better in that comparison. She sure does, probably better at pull-ups too.

Yeah, it was good to say, better upper body strength, absolutely. So other kids bullied illich for his weight, calling him El Gordo or Fatso. Whenever he was mocked, illich would burst into tears and scream back, the whole world will hear of me, which is not a thing that kids who go on to not shoot lots of people say. I was going to say, having never listened to your podcast before, I imagine that the fat kid who we're talking about in the middle of the Golden Age of Terrorism episode, who screams that the whole world will know his name, goes on to not carry that resentment in his heart for the rest of his life. He gets some therapy, he finds someone nice, he settles down. And that's the end of the episode. Yep.

Cool. So anyway. Yeah, continuing on. So fortunately, since he got bullied a lot, his direct contact with his peers was limited. Ramirez's wealth meant that he was able to hire expensive communist teachers for illich and his brothers. I'm also just sorry, I'm just going to put it out there real quick. I was bullied a lot in junior high and high school. I think a lot of people were.

We sure were. I think all of us here were. Yeah. Did you not? I don't think I'm responsible for the deaths of any thousands of people. Well, shut up. Aren't you so fucking special? You get some time.

I don't know what Elaine's been up to. So, yeah, so he gets special communist teachers hired by his dad to train him. Because his dad's so rich. Because his dad's so rich and communist. Fine. Communist teachers give him private lessons at home where he learns history and mathematics and biology through a Marxist lens and the palatial comfort of his family mansion. Which is an interesting way to learn Marxism. So capitalism is bad because it's hard to explain when you think about, but.

See how shitty life is for these people outside of our mansion. That's why this system's a problem. I'm going to go make more money and abandon your mother again for several weeks. Remember, you got to stop this. I tried. You know, in the last episode, we talked a little bit about good house cleaning beginning at home. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, this kept him very isolated. He later recalled somewhat mournfully, we studied at home, we had a private instructor, that's not normal. Which it's not. His communist education would have indicated to him that that was not normal. It is weird to be instructed in communism alone. In a political mansion. Yes.

So Ramirez was insistent that his son would be trained to be a great revolutionary. And it turns out that raising a kid that way doesn't make them very personable. As one friend later recalled, when there was a game to be organized, Ilitch was always the one who would do it. He was the leader. He would decide, but not in an authoritarian manner. He was the most organized, the one who took the initiative and made the rules. The same friend noted that Ilitch's favorite game was hide and seek. Ilitch liked to play at goodies and baddies with plastic weapons.

In her group, he was the strongest and most aggressive. So, you know, he was full of ideas on how to hurt living things. He taught his friends how to coat the tips of their toy arrows with metal in order to kill birds better. He was full of ideas in how to hurt living things. Yeah. This guy doesn't go on to be an assassin or a terrorist or anything, does he? Kind of both. Huh.

Pretty good at both. Weird. After some steps. Yeah. I mean, if you're not allowed to have friends and you live alone and you live with just your siblings in a palatial mansion, like... You spend a lot of time thinking about how to kill birds. And that's why we shouldn't have mansions. In 1961, when Ilitch was 12, his parents finally divorced.

Ramirez later explained, this is his dad, I got divorced because in my house I thought I was the only one who did anything right. Oddly enough, his parents continued to live together largely because Ramirez needed his ex-wife's unpaid labor to handle child rearing. And he was the only one who did anything right. And also a great communist. Yeah. Uh, yep. Yeah.

I'm going to quote next from the biography, Jackal. In 1962, just as she had lost the battle over her children's first names, so Elba failed to stop her husband from sending Ilitch to the sprawling Ferman Toro Lysi in Caracas, which was a nursery to budding radicals at the time when the capital streets often resounded with violent left-wing demonstrations. The more enterprising students skipped classes to march in protest at the Liberal government's ban on the Communist Party. The school wasn't renowned. All the revolutionaries had studied there, Ilitch recalled. It was my father's decision. As for my mother, she was hardly enthusiastic about the choice.

Did my father choose the school on purpose to annoy my mother? By his own testimony, it was in January 1964 when he was 14 that Ilitch defied authority for the first time. He joined an organization banned by the authorities, the Venezuelan Communist Youth. That's where I made my debut in the revolutionary movement. I was one of those in charge of the organization at Lysi in Caracas. In 1965 to 1966, that young flock counted some 200 members, and Ilitch claims that he helped to organize anti-government street marches, which scared the president. The protest also taught Ilitch how to make Molotov cocktails and set cars on fire. Well, visits to the shanty towns on the outskirts of Caracas, he later claimed, revealed to him the plight of the poor.

Wait, wait, so it's like your debutante ball, but instead you like come out, organize a march for the first time and everyone presents you with instructions on bomb making and a fancy tour of all of the slums that you're probably semi-responsible for because of the types of labor that your dad does. That's exactly how this guy, a liar, described his birth as a communist, or his birth as a revolutionary. So we're into this is what the liar and terrorist says. The liar and terrorist says, by the time I was 17, I was learning how to light cars on fire. Which I gotta say also, sure maybe. That sounds like teenagers in Portland today. It does sound like, well, not cars, that was the police. True, every car that has lit on fire was the police.

Also, I gotta say, like, I've heard a lot of absurd drifters talk about things that they think will sound very impressive. Yes. And things like trained to make Molotov cocktails. Kind of one of those things, because Molotov cocktails famously not that hard to make. I was trained on how to make grease fires and that time I burnt my friend's kitchen. When Illich was 15 in 1966, his father sent him off to Cuba to complete the education his weird, private communism tutors had begun. And this is like one of those weird, private communism tutors. Yeah, people talk a lot about, and they should, and we should talk more.

We talk about them a bit in the Border Patrol, how there's all those like sketchy US academies where we would like take cops from other countries and train them and how to like murder dissidents. School of the Americas. Yeah, yeah, that kind of shit. And how terrible it is. And how many governments and millions of people's deaths can be traced to things that started there. And just unspeakable things. Really tremendous, tremendous evil. There were equivalents of that stuff, though, in the USSR during the Civil War or during the Cold War and whatever.

And the kind of Cuban equivalent to the School of the Americas was Camp Montanzas. And yeah, it was like, yeah, where you trained people to go to other countries to like foment revolution and stuff. And so Illich goes there and he learns how to like commit acts of sabotage and start revolutionary cells and do all that good stuff. Or he doesn't, and that's all a lie. Because the CIA, when this guy becomes a big deal, really wants to tie him more to the USSR than he was already tied. And so they lied about it. But then later one of the CIA guys was like, there's actually no evidence this happened. But also it might have happened.

So who the fuck knows? And probably Illich is not going to be like, no, no, no, I was not trained in an elite communist carousel. My life is less cool than you think. Yeah, he's not that kind of dude. So who knows? Yeah, so his family sent him to London later that year, which does kind of make you think maybe he didn't go to elite communist guerrilla school. Because that does seem like it would take some time. Maybe he just took the...

Did like a semester. It was like a crash course. Yeah, like a mini-master, like a month and a half. Yeah. I mean, you know, you take a five-week course over the summer and then you go to London. You could learn a lot about overthrowing the government in five weeks. To get your mail. Yeah.

Yeah. Correspondence scores. Sure. There's options. So his dad sends the family to London. And his main reason for this is because he wants his kids to learn English and he wants them to experience a new culture. So again, his Marxist dad takes him out of communism, fight in school and sends him to London to hang out in nightclubs flirting with European women. Because again, Ramirez Navas, incredible Marxist.

I mean, like just an amazing Marxist. On the other hand, I don't feel like that's a bad call. Yeah. I'm not saying it's a bad call. If you can, in one summer, do communism fighting overthrowing the government school and hanging out in nightclubs in London? Yeah. Do both of those. I'm saying if it was correspondence course, maybe he did both at the same time.

I think it's hard to do a bomb-making correspondence course. Then you could like outline the bomb on like the back of the society. I think when you send your final project in the mail, you get in trouble. That's my impression. Or I mean, you know, you have a wonderful career until it's cut cruelly short by the FBI for some reason. Are we talking about Kazinsky? We're talking about Teddy. Yeah.

So yeah, Ramirez got his son admitted to a fancy British boy school, which is basically the opposite of having private communism tutors. Is it though? Kind of. I think the opposite of having private communism tutors is something that doesn't involve huge amounts of money. Okay. Yeah, fair enough. He was not popular among his teachers and was generally seen as being a lazy smartass. One teacher recalled he was a snide little blighter.

He was quite convinced he was God's gift to everyone. He was Pajie and pasty, but was always incredibly elegantly and expensively dressed. He was a cheat and would avoid doing work whenever he could. So yeah, he was also though really smart and he did great on his exams. So he kept stayed in school. 1968 was, of course, one of the more revolutionary years in modern memory. Kind of not all that different from this year, except for the internet and all of the additional guns and all of the additional fascism and all of the additional environmental degradation. But anyway, very revolutionary year.

A lot of protests and movements and shit going on all over the damn world. And in that year, Illich and his dad were in Paris because again, yeah. Some shit was going down in Paris and they saw none of it because his dad was like, this seems scary. Let's go to Moscow. Oh, shit. Okay, hold on communism, dad. Communism lawyer, dad. You go and take your kid out of communism fighting school and bring him to fucking hang out in nightclubs.

And then you're going to go to Paris in 1968. Yeah, when all the students rebelling in the state. There is nothing to learn here, kid, who I have exposed to the nightclubs of London and communism fighting school. No, actually, if you are a communist in the idea of like, status communism. Yeah, the situation is don't really scratch your edge, do they? But also as a child of the 90s, when like, everything from the 60s was very, very like interesting and kind of cool again and they were making all of the documentaries about the Beatles and everything else. Like 1968, very weirdly, like as a middle schooler was the one thing that I read about like all like stuff in the U.S. And France, I had like, wow, if I could have gone back in time to one place.

And so hearing that. Yeah, no, his dad is like, no, we're not going to take it. You know, I'm not enrolling you at the Sorbonne. This shit's like scary. Let's go to Moscow. I mean, how do you see him get to board? Which Moscow, notably in 1968, one of the places where absolutely fuck all was happening. Yeah, not a goddamn thing.

Whereas they're pulling up fucking paving stones, throwing them at cops in Paris and also making funny comics about it. They also didn't go to Hungary. None of these things. Yeah, that does happen. So Patrice Lumumba University is where the Soviet Union is where he goes, like that's the college he goes to. And Patrice Lumumba, if you remember our episode about the Congo, he was the democratically elected socialist leader of the Congo, who was very quickly murdered for the pro U.S. dictator who looted the country for like 40 years. Which I got to say, you know, this is this is in Moscow.

Yeah. Kudos to Moscow for naming a university after Patrice Lumumba. I'm sure that that was pretty much where any engagement with, you know, progressive socialist politics from the Congo stopped. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, it was a stab. So yeah, that's where the Soviet Union sent its foreign exchange students and communists from outside of Russia would go there to like learn Marxism, so they could bring their nations of origin better and step with the USSR or like lead revolution. So anyway, Ilich did terribly here.

Because again, he's been raised to be a revolutionary. And the one thing that they hate in the Soviet Union is a revolutionary. When you're outside the Soviet Union, they might like you, but not inside. Not in Moscow. That was a love story. Right. So the fundamental problem is that Ilich had been raised from birth to like, yeah, fight the state. And yeah, that doesn't that doesn't send them over.

Well, this is actually the year that he moves to Moscow is the year that the Soviet Union sent tanks to the Czechoslovakia to brutally suppress a popular uprising. Famously, not just where we get tanking. I was going to say, you know, that's people who think that everything the Soviet Union did was cool as a cucumber. So they have to justify crushing people with tanks. Yeah, they're like, they're like the people who are they're like, they're like most Americans. But for communism, like half of Americans. Sorry. So revolutionaries were still occasionally useful to the USSR, but mainly like in terms of, you know, fighting this whole Cold War thing.

So one of what so Ilich gets here and like he has a lot of trouble immediately. The people at the school don't like him. The government doesn't like him. But he does have a couple of friends and one of his friends is a guy named Privolov, who years later described a 19 year old Ilich this way. Ilich was not at all the typical students sent by his country's Communist Party, nothing to do with the good little soldier of Mao who labored in the fields every summer. He was a handsome young man, although his cheeks look swollen and he was a great bon-vivure. I don't know. I don't know French. In the biography, Jack O'John Filane goes on to write, flesh with cash sent by his parents.

Ilich could afford to spend lavishly on whiskey and champagne in the special stores that only accepted payment and hard currencies and which were off limits to most people. A lot of folks don't know the USSR had those. Oh, elite stores that only rich people could buy stuff at? In the Marxist? In the Marxist Utopia. They really got it right. More Russian than the Russians, the privileged student and his friends would throw glasses over their shoulders, not only empty glasses, but bottles as well. The university authorities frustrated in their attempts to oppose discipline on Ilich.

Reason that his freedom of action would be drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him were reduced. But when they asked Ramirez Navas to be less generous, the father, peaked, retorted that his son had never wanted for anything. Great Communists, unbelievably good Communists here. We think your child's behavior would be improved if he wasn't so entitled and constantly flesh with cash. And the rebuttal is, but I have always given my child everything he wants. Yes, that's the criticism here. And also, another decision being made is the USSR saying, it's a shame that this kid is getting drunk and misbehaving so much because of all the money he has, but we can't stop selling him expensive liquor. Also, it's a shame he doesn't, you know, go quietly along with what the government wants at Patrice Lumumba University.

This is the birth of actually luxury communism. Yeah. Yeah. Just for him, though. Yeah. I think that's called capitalism. So like, like Liberty University here in the United States, Patrice Lumumba College had a vice squad, which searched students at night to try to stop them from having fun things to go with their liquor and whatever. Patrice Lumumba would not be down with that. I don't think he would. I think Patrice Lumumba would start some shit over that. I think Patrice Lumumba would overthrow the administration of Patrice Lumumba University.

I think he might. That was kind of his deal. So continuing my reading from Jackal, quote, one night, the patrol entered Illich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and glasses on the table, but he was apparently alone. The squad opened the cupboard door and a girl who was completely drunk fell out. She was naked and was clutching her clothes into her hands. They asked her what she was doing there and she answered, I feel pity for the oppressed. She was obviously a prostitute. Another time, and with another girl, Illich didn't bother to hide her in the cupboard.

He threw her out of the window. You know, there's better ways to hide your date. This one was fully dressed and landed in two meters of snow, a floor or two below. She got up unhurt and shouted abuse at him. That is something you can do when there's that much snow. I think it's also... I would throw some people out of some windows is all I'm saying. I would yell abuse at people who threw me out of windows.

And that's why we're friends. Yeah, we have compatible attitudes towards defenestration. A naked lady falls out of a cupboard and they're like, what the fuck are you doing here? And her defense is, I feel sympathy with the oppressed. Yeah. I mean, honestly, that's a great cover story. That's a great cover story. Yeah, she's a revolutionary.

I mean, this cupboard almost passed out drunk for reasons. Revolutionary reasons. This was kind of, as a young man, Illich, was great at attracting women, because he was very good looking, very charming. And he's Venezuelan, right? He was what you might call a user, though. And the only deep relationship he ever had was with a young Cuban woman he bonded with while in Moscow.

She was older than him, with a marriage under her belt already. And so she was like, kind of more experienced than him, which was not common for his relationships. Years later, Illich would admit that her greater life experience was an anomaly in his love life. Quote, I like girls very much, but I like to be in control. With Sonia, I wasn't a ruler. We were one.

Sonia taught him how to smoke cigars. And Illich got her pregnant. They broke up shortly after that, and she flew back to Havana to give birth. And it's very unclear what happened to them, but this is actually, oddly enough, not a deadbeat dad story on Illich's part. She went back home pregnant, cut off all contact with him,

and had their kid. He wrote her letters repeatedly, just begging to know the kid's name, and she never responded. And we have no idea what went down between them. Presumably, there is a story there that we don't know, especially given the kind of man that he turned into. But it's a very sad story based on the details we have, which is that she left, and he never learned his kid's name.

But you have to assume he did something horrible because he's Carlos the Jackal. Possibly. Or else it was just a total power move. You're kind of a user, a little bit of a dick. I'm going to have this one thing over you that you will never control for the rest of your life. And also, somebody who has explicitly said,

I like to be in control of everybody I'm in relationships with. This is the person he couldn't do that to, which means she was hard as fuck. Yeah. And also, he's going to have feelings about it forever. Yeah. No, I think it fucked him up for forever. But, you know, whatever.

In 1970, Patrice Lumumba University expelled Illich and 13 other members of the Venezuelan communist youth for anti-Soviet provocation and in discipline. Now, there's rumors that this is also untrue and that he was a secret KGB agent from this point forward and that they just faked kicking him out of the school. And that might be true. Like, it's fucking KGB. Who knows?

But as cover goes, hey, you went to Cuban communism fighting school and then you went to Patrice Lumumba. Here's how to bring communism to your country university. And we kicked you out so you can be a secret KGB agent. That's right up there with, we're not trying to kidnap the prime minister. We're just building bombs in the mountains. I think the thing that we're all learning about the 60s and 70s

is that you could get away with a lot. I mean, historically, if they really hadn't liked him that much and he had gone to Cuban revolutionary school, they could have just called him a Trotskyist. Yeah. Because Trotsky had been in Cuba. We are talking the late 60s, early 70s. So there's not as much of that going on.

The fourth international was in 1964. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. You probably know more about what he was likely to, I don't know, they didn't do anything to him. He just gets kicked out of the country. Which probably just means his dad was a real rich communist and they were like, you're kind of a spoiled dick communist kid.

And he wasn't like a Soviet citizen, right? Like he hadn't done anything other than be a drunk asshole and not be a good communist. And so in the style of college administrations for time and memorial, they said, you're a drunk asshole and you're kind of fucking up all of our shit. So we just want you to go to a different school now. Well, they just wanted him out of the USSR.

Or he left the USSR to go fight in Lebanon and then they wouldn't let him back in. Again, who knows, kind of some debate around this. But whatever happens or whatever happened, the kind of thing that happens next is that Ilitch winds up in Lebanon. Because while he was at Patrice Lumumba University, he did meet some real revolutionaries,

a bunch of young Palestinian dudes who were affiliated with the popular front. So the popular front, a little bit of a brief history. The early 1970s, pretty rough time to be a Palestinian liberation activist. Not that there's ever been a good time. No, it hasn't been great. Kind of always been a hard, hard, hard gig. But the Six Day War had happened in June of 1967 and it ended with every Arab military force a raid against Israel being like, you know, it didn't go well for everybody else.

Palestine lost like a lot of Palestine. And the failure, the total massive failure of traditional military tactics on behalf of all of the Arab forces led to an increasing embrace in irregular warfare. So this is like the period where a lot of, all right, we're going to go, we're going to do some, we're going to do some guerrilla shit now. You know, the Fedein and stuff like become more of a deal after this.

So a lot of the, most of the groups kind of fighting and advocating politically for Palestinian liberation at this time kind of were under the broad umbrella of the PLO or the Palestinian Liberation Organization. And their charter stated armed struggle is the only way to free Palestine. It embraced commando action to further this end. And the popular front was one of the organizations under the PLO. It was explicitly Marxist and militant.

And yeah, one of its like leaders summed up its purpose when he observed to kill a Jew far from the battlefield has more effect than killing hundreds of Jews in battle. So that's kind of the idea, right? So Ilitch goes to Beirut, which was a place, you know, where you're going to be if you're a Palestinian freedom fighter because it's kind of the safest place where a bunch of them are gathering. And it's like right there.

It's very close, you know, the whole of all of the area whenever people talk about conflicts in the Middle East, it's like driving from Jersey to Connecticut in a lot of cases. Well, like one of the things about the Golan Heights, which is one of the disputed territories certainly in this period, it's the Golan Heights, which means you can see into Israel. You know, you're standing on a hill and you can see a lot of what's downhill from it. It's just one of those, the lesson you continuously get as an American

reading about the rest of the world is it's tiny. Yeah. Unless you're reading about Africa, in which case, it's so much bigger than you have any like it's incomprehensibly large. So Ilitch traveled to Beirut, which was, you know, yeah, cool place. Still cool. Well, kind of a bummer at the moment, but that's not Beirut's fault. He fell in with the popular front and he found himself drawn to a movement

where political theory and rigid social organization took a backseat to shooting people repeatedly in the face, which he was great at. Oh, he was so ready to be in the shooting people repeatedly in the face. I mean, if you were raised with theory and theory and theory, being a rich kid with theory, for someone to just say, fuck theory, want to shoot people? Yeah. Probably shoot people, dude.

Oh, god damn, do we finally get to shoot people? Yeah. And, you know, a lot of these folks, these Palestinian fighters were kind of the sort of people who saw like they wanted the destruction of Israel and the liberation of Palestine. But most of them would have seen that as like the first step on a journey towards like toppling all of the regimes of the Middle East and like bringing Marxism.

Right. It was a pretty calm. That's why the Japanese Red Army like got along with these dudes. Well, it's also why the PLO had kind of a hard time because like, they got used as a pawn by other governments in the region. I mean, and to some extent still do, but that like uncomfortable, that uncomfortable tendency of like, and then we want to overthrow all these other government, like governments don't like it.

Would you say you want to overthrow all the government? Yeah. That's why anarchists are only popular. Sometimes the popular front operated a bunch of training camps out in the Jordanian desert. And Jordan was like, you can keep your revolutionaries here in Jordan. We're cool with that. But also pointed that way.

Yeah. They weren't wild about it. But, you know, Ilich was pretty wild about learning how to do cool stuff. Like they had like airplanes out there that you would like to training into like how to get into gunfights on airplanes. And he thought that was cool. Yeah. Could you do practice hijackings?

I think you probably did a lot of practice jacking. I think a lot of people were jacking it in the Jordanian desert. Back in those days. So yeah, and his initial plan, like he didn't really want to fight for Palestinian liberation a whole bunch. He wanted to learn from them and then take a bunch of other Venezuelans who were doing the same thing and go back home to Venezuela and do some revolutions in Venezuela.

Yeah. And when he joined in 1970, the PLO recruiting officer who inducted him gave Ilich the nickname Carlos. And the only reason for this was that he came from South America and that was the only Spanish name that his recruiter really knew. So he was like, you're Carlos because you come from Latin America. Right. And that's why he's Carlos from here on out.

That's how we give nicknames now. That's how we give nicknames. It's like everybody you've ever met who has a nickname like, you know, Texas or like, yeah. So he goes to this training camp in the desert with like 90 other guys and a lot of them are fringe and Belgium or other Europeans. And they all start learning like a bunch of, there's like a mix of like political lectures and also courses on like how to handle guns and making

bombs and stuff. And one popular test of like how brave the trainees were, which you'd make them stand in the open air about a meter away from a plastic bomb that detonated, something not wildly different from like the distraction devices that pull us through with us. Like the flash bang grenade. The stingers. Yeah.

So you have to like stand and not, and try not to flinch when that thing explodes new. It's like what we do on a Saturday. Yeah. We flinch. And like a lot of Tuesdays too. You flinch. That's why I don't let you take videos that often.

Fair. Yeah. It's, it's, yeah, he does really well with this. Carlos is just like seen as like, oh, you're not scared of things exploding near you and you're good at shooting people. We should fast track you to go do cool stuff. Look, we're halfway there. Yeah.

We don't flinch when things explode. Carlos himself didn't really like it much. He thought there was too much propaganda and not enough learning how to shoot people right in their faces. It seems like after an entire lifetime of being raised by private communism tutors and sent to special communism indoctrination school, he's kind of good on the communist indoctrination. He does know some communism.

And he, he's like, cool. I got it. But when do we get to shoot stuff? You know, though, who is knowledgeable about communism be. I was going to say indoctrination, but they're knowledgeable about that. You know what will indoctrinate you in communism. You want to get indoctrinated in communism. Is it Raytheon?

The products and services. It is Raytheon. He loves communism, but you know what? They love more than communism shooting people right in the face. You know, the best thing about Raytheon is that they're responsible for, and it only took 20 years of a global war on terror and launching thousands of missiles at weddings and schools and school buses and villages filled with women and children before Raytheon, the humanitarians that they are,

had the brilliant idea of what if we made a missile that was just full of knives and shot it only at cars of people we're pretty sure are bad. And that's the best idea anyone's ever had in the entire war on terror. And I'm not joking about that. That's where we are. That's the best idea. That's the best idea of the whole war. And they are sponsoring this podcast as are these other people and their

products and services. They're all Raytheon subsidiaries. So excited. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. What a good time to be a human. I feel optimistic about the future. Let's talk about the past where things were also great. So in early 1970, the king of Jordan, again, he's letting all these Palestinian freedom fighters and such hang out in Jordan, but he's not jazzed about it because, again, he's a king and these people are trying to overthrow governments.

And even if you don't like the government, they're trying to overthrow. You're a king and there's a bunch of people trying to overthrow a government all hanging out near you. You're probably like, got to keep an eye on them. Just a curiosity, how do Marxists feel about monarchies? Not wild about it. So it's a rocky situation and there's fights between his soldiers and them. It's not the smoothest situation in the world. And yeah, it got rockier that September when the popular front attempted to hijack

four airliners bound for New York at the same time. And to their credit, they succeeded in taking two planes, which is not bad for hijack. Familiar. No. Hijacking four planes. Yeah, but they just did the boring shit with it. Yeah, they got like 360 captives and they actually they flew them to an abandoned airfield in the Jordanian desert and like stamped their passports

with like liberated, like free territory or something like that. It was really weird. I like that as a choice. Yeah, it's me. Weird performance art. Bisa 9-11 every time. Not quite performed. So whenever, when they started the hijacking, the dudes in charge on each plane would tell the passengers,

look, I'm sorry, we have just hijacked you to a desert in Jordan. This is a country in the Middle East next to Israel and Syria. We're fighting a just war, a war for the liberation of our country from Israeli occupation. You relax tonight. There is food and drink here for you. So this was to the guys that got captured, which is like nice. Again, like that way better than a 9-11. I do.

Yeah. Very, very fitting for the region. And also like kind of funny that like you kidnap a bunch of Americans and you're like, OK, the first thing we got to do is let them know like. They don't know where fucking Jordan is. They need to know, like, is this part of Africa? No, but it's yeah. Close to no.

OK, three hours later. All right. So are we everybody clear on Jordan? The Mongols invade. Now this is really with. Oh, no, no, it's the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean. It's where pizza comes from.

OK, we're near the pizza place. Yeah. Yeah. So they have a very nice kidnapping, which most as a rule, you read every time when you start reading through a bunch of stories of plane hijackings, most people on the planes talk very highly about the hijackers, which again might seems like a good tactic. If you can hijack a plane and everybody on the plane is like, you know, that didn't seem so bad.

That guy who threatened our lives with a bomb was quite pleasant. What a nice and exciting detour. Yeah. Yeah. You'll never guess, Marcia, what happened when we were when we were traveling? Yeah. Most people like would love to be hijacked as long as it was this kind of hijack where you get to spend some time.

If you sit down on the next slide, I took another picture. Yeah. And this is where the nice young PLO man gave me some tabula and showed me the bomb around his neck. Yeah. Yeah. The popular front eventually succeeded in trading the passengers for seven of their arrested comrades.

And yeah, it was a big old success. And for a while it was probably the most impressive airplane related act of terrorism in history until some assholes, you know, I would say that by some standards, still more successful. I like it a lot better than 9-11. You know, all those people, they seem like they had a pretty okay time. Seems like it went all right. I would say the people flying the planes, the people hijacking the planes and the people

riding on the planes all felt better about it afterwards. Yep. I would say so. A lot of people had stories they told for the rest of their lives, which they got to have. So yeah, it was not the worst act of terrorism in history. You could say that for sure. But it was a big old deal at the time and it put the King of Jordan in a pretty rough

situation. And he eventually was like, I'm expelling y'all from Jordan, which led to a horrific war in Jordan between the Palestinians called Black September and the Jordanian military. And the Palestinians were, again, as is pretty usual in the long saga of Palestinian liberation, fucked from the jump. But they fought tenaciously. Eventually though, casualties were so high that Carlos, the young Venezuelan recruit, was sent into battle.

He described it as a sheer massacre, thousands of dead. I fought until 1971. I was on the front line in the mountains. The enemy was trying to force us down the banks of the River Jordan. His commanding officer noted that he was nervous under fire and could take life without blinking. By the end of the whole disastrous conflict, more than 3,000 Palestinian fighters were dead. And Carlos, who had once been planning to return to Venezuela, was utterly committed

to their cause. No more did he talk about going home. Instead, he went back to his old stomping grounds in London, this time as an agent for the popular front. This is when the James Bond shit starts. Yeah. So a life of wealth and travel had prepared him pretty well for his next job, which was pretending to be a socialite, so he could make a list of high-profile pro-Israel targets

to kidnap and murder in London. Which if you cut out some of the stuff we were just covering here, there's a way to spend this where he is in fact a socialite. Yeah. Yeah, kinda. Yeah. I can't wait till he meets Roger Moore. Yeah.

I've been waiting for two episodes now for this. So Carlos became a fixture in certain London social circles, using his easy charm and a facility with languages to build connections. He was most successful when it came to wooing young women, which he did constantly. Now to say that Carlos used women would be putting it lightly, his most common move was to flirt with a girl until she fell for him, and then ask him to hold a bag of his things in her attic whenever he went out of town on business. The bags would contain machine pistols, usually, and large amounts of explosives like jellignite

and dynamite. I mean, I would rather if some dude left some shit at my house, I would rather it was that than a bunch of his spare underpants. Just gonna put it out there. Right. Or like his guitar that he doesn't really know how to play. He is that guy, but with bags of, he has an endless supply of machine pistols. He knows how to play those machine pistols.

We will learn very soon, very good at them. So again, there's consequences for the women that he does this to. At least one of his women did a year in jail when she found weaponry that he'd stashed there and reported it to journalists before the police. Yeah. Oops. He also endangered these women due to the fact that he left bombs in their houses that were always stored improperly.

So like people would like become aware of the arms caches he'd left because the stink of rotting dynamite would start to overwhelm there. So he was not didn't really give a shit about these people. Yeah, that's that's on another level above and beyond like maybe you got a yeast infection and now your couch has scabies. Yeah. Like this guy left some decaying dynamite in my attic. Yeah.

I mean, I got a fucking cat from an ex-girlfriend once, which is a lot better, I think, than an illegal arms cache. I don't know. I mean, sometimes I have my own flavor of toxic relationships that I prefer. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, he's not, he's not, he's not, this is what he does with relationships. You know, it's not going to help you hijack a plane, Robert, a cat.

I mean, it might. It would if it could. I have some cats that you should meet later on in life, musing on the nature of his relationship to women. Carlos said this, I love women. I mean, the good life, but not only sex. In the end, I love friendship a great deal. I haven't lived many love stories in my life.

At the same time, I can fall in love easily like any old school boy. I can love several women at the same time. He also stated in another interview to succeed in missions. You must have the support of girls. You must strike up friendships with these apparently inoffensive creatures because they are very useful in supplying havens and warding off suspicion. So I like to hang when I run my neck and it keeps the vampires away. So there's there's part of that that seems like, OK, so you're kind of a slut and that's

OK. That's a fine thing to be. It's the part where you'd leave decaying dynamite in their addicts. That's the thing that I don't like, you know, you just want ladies to be treated like people. I mean, not and not arms caches. I mean objects to ward off evil. I'm fine with being a totemic object to ward off evil. I just feel like I'm, you know, but if you start leaving decaying dynamite around the

house, you might have to have a talk. Yeah, it's more that he hid it from them and they never knew that it was there in the first place, which is another level of problem that is like a special Valentine's Day treat. So there were some women that he seemed to have more real relationships with generally so he could trust them to like actually know that he was living weapons at their house or he could trust them to act as a safe house. Once he started committing all the crimes that he was going to be committing now, depending on who you ask, the whole crimes thing may have started right away as soon as he got

back to Europe in 1972 with Carlos providing critical support to help hijack a Lufthansa jet and carry out the abduction of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. Yep, there it is. Munich was like that's like the 9 11 of kidnappings. Really the brass ring of murdering people at the Olympics. It was it was, you know, a big deal and there's zero evidence that he had anything to do with it. Right.

This was the thing he started claiming later because again, very famous act of terrorism and and if you're if you're a famous terrorist and there's a famous terrorism, it's, you know, you don't you don't want people to not think you had anything to do with it. Yeah. And the next thing you know, people are like, oh, were you in that band and you were like, um, yeah, yeah, we played a show together or whatever. Yeah, he's like the Ringo of Munich where he didn't actually do anything, but he takes credit.

Ringo did octopus's garden. No, we're not talking about Ringo today. He was Carlos had his first mission on December 30. Time station. We're talking about Carlos the Jackal today, not Ringo. All right. And equally bad man. So Carlos had his first real act of terrorism that he committed on December 30th, 1973,

when he tried to murder one of the men he'd been stalking for months, Joseph C.F., Vice President of the British Zionist Foundation. He successfully broke into CF's house and shot him once, but then his revolver malfunctioned and most books say it jammed, which I don't. It's hard to get him. I expect it may have been an ammunition problem. I mean, famously Ringo's attempt on Sir Topham Hatt was foiled when his revolver jammed, and that's why George Carlin took over the series.

I don't. Okay. So yeah, Carlos tries to shoot this guy to death and it doesn't work and Carlos leaves and CF's badly injured, but you know, he makes it. So it was a little bit of a shit show as far as acts of terrorism go, but it was like his first try and he got away. So that's what George Carlin knew. You got to keep your powder dry.

Yeah, that's what Bernie, another Bernie Sanders joke. Bernie Sanders when he killed Robert F. Kennedy. Another a month later, fucking Carlos tried again and this time instead of trying to shoot. Yeah. No, no, a different that he doesn't go after a guy this time. He goes after an Israeli bank, the Hapualim Bank in London and in Carlos's mind, it made a good target for the 200 the 200 gram plastic explosive charges he built after storing materials in some nice ladies house.

He later recalled, I threw them through the main door towards the tills, but one of them landed in front of an employee before sliding over the parquet floor and exploding. He wasn't killed because he pulled back in time. That said, the bomb destroyed the entire facade of the bank. The operation created a big stir in the media, although there were no victims. Okay. And again, this is one of those he just threw a bomb through a door. Yeah.

Like not going to like walk in, be all suave, like put it somewhere extra good, like just throw it through a door. Yeah, he's new to this. He's new to this. He's new to this. He's trying. Practice makes perfect, Dave. And characteristically, when he says that there were no victims, he's not quite accurate

because he actually injured a 19-year-old woman with shrapnel, but he just doesn't like to talk. But that was a woman. Yeah. We've already established that. Hurting women doesn't seem to bother him. It does not. And they're feelings, they're addicts full of explosives or their bodies in bank explosions.

I don't think a lot of other people's feelings matter to Carlos. But yeah, so I will say though, it is weird reading about him because like by the standards of modern terrorists, all of the terrorists in this period, they avoid murdering as many people as they could. I suppose it's not fair to call that sucking at it. No, I would prefer terrorists who are more targeted in their violence, although not always, but still not like, we're not not like ISIS-y, right? Like terrorism is a different matter today a little bit.

So to quote from a summary of Carlos' life by researcher Mitchell Barth, soon after he set off car bomb attacks of three French newspapers accused of pro-Israeli leanings. Cars full of explosives were left outside the offices of, I'm not even going to try to read those names, three French newspapers. The bombs were set to explode at 2 a.m. and Carlos later claimed that the hour was selected to limit human casualties. In addition, he advised the papers of the attack. At the appointed time, three of the four bombs exploded causing massive damage.

There were no casualties. The only paper to escape damage did so when the vehicle bomb left in front of it failed to detonate. So three out of four, not bad. It fucks up three newspapers that are like pro-Israel. Passing grades on car bombs. He does like the thing he's trying to do, you know, he's getting better at terrorism, right?

Like this is his montage where he's like, he's like running up the steps of the root of something or other and like learning how to plant bombs in random places. I mean, there's a little bit too of it. It's very much a targeted like, I could blow you up, but I'm not. I'm just blowing up these vehicles with no one in them. Yeah. Right now. And I'm going to, you know, fuck your building up a bit.

So, you know, by this point, he was getting seasoned at attempting terrorism, but his identity was still unknown. So he got to still be like a playboy, like living around Europe, acting as a fixer for the popular front and allied left wing groups. So he's also kind of a Batman villain. Yeah, he is. People will tell him that he would like, well, he was kind of like Q for the popular front in this period.

Yeah. Because like other terrorists will come in. They'll say like, we need this. And he'll like open up. He had closets full of weaponry and grenades and explode like all sorts of cool shit. So period wise, keeping bond theme, did he have a cat? I don't think so. I don't think so.

I don't think just, I can't imagine him taking care of a cat. He's moving around a lot too. And he's really good at getting weaponry. Like particularly just fucking sacks of these machine pistols. He loves machine pistols, a lot of easy 52s and a lot of scorpions. And he gets a shitload of hand grenades too. And again, you know, puts them in the houses of women that he likes. And in some cases, when he trusted the women, he was very open about what he was doing as

this passage from the book, Jackal makes clear, Nitya was the girlfriend to whom Carlos felt closest and he turned to her for help as he slowly built up a stock of arms for operations in Europe. One evening in July 1974, he called Nitya from Paris and asked her to join him as soon as possible. She flew over and Carlos handed her a heavy black suitcase. All her boyfriend told her was, keep this with you until I come and join you, or until somebody calls your flat and gives you a precise date, the date of my birthday.

According to Nitya, who took the suitcase back with her to London, it was only sometimes later that she found out what it contained. Look, my love, this beauty is a Czech pistol, a high speed M52 automatic. It's marvelous, Carlos told her as he guided her through the suitcase's contents with childish glee delight when they met again. Carlos brought the barrel to his mouth and blew on it with a tender gesture as if it had been a first kiss of love, then he seized a grenade and put it in my hands, showing me how I should remove the primer and throw it.

Forget that you are a woman, he added with a certain arrogance. Don't close your eyes. That's not. I've had better dates. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, forget that you're a woman because surely a woman could not handle the complex

operation of pulling a pin out of a grenade and throwing it at a thing. Yeah. Real feminist icon, Carlos the Jekyll. Carlos the Jekyll. Yeah, I know you all were really hoping that he was going to wind up being being a real gender, gender equality crusader, but instead he's a terrorist who was he's an entitled rich boy who was raised by the best Marxist and the shitty lawyer dad. So now is about the time in late summer, 1974, that some old friends of ours come back into

the story. The Japanese Red Army. Oh, yeah. And this is non-murdering all their friends, non-trapped in North Korea, like the people who are committing tons of terrorism and really good at it, the fucking scary as hell Japanese Red Army. Yeah. Yeah.

So one of their members, their leader actually, he'd been arrested by French border patrol bearing a suitcase with three fake passports and $10,000 in counterfeit bills. And that may sound like he was like being kind of lazy, but again, everyone just flew with whatever illegal things they wanted to fly with and nobody took any precautions back then. So he wasn't he wasn't out of the norm here. So he gets caught, though, in this case for some reason and gets put in prison. He probably knew the words, the Cuban national anthem started playing it and he started singing.

So yeah, they want him out and they plan their plan to get their boss out is to carry out a daring attack on the French embassy in the Hague and like occupy the entire French embassy and take everyone inside of it prisoner and then ransom them out for their captured boss and a plane. Sure. I mean, which is cool as hell. That's like a diehard plot. Yeah.

Straight up a diehard plot. And also all of the diehard plots and everything else make a lot more sense given what you were talking about with the sixties and early seventies because it seems like governments would have been like, OK, yeah, it seems fair, OK, good on you. Yeah. All right, whatever. Yeah. It's some I have to imagine at this point that it was in like a Bruce Willis movie that

the phrase we don't negotiate with terrorists was uttered for the first time because it certainly was not that anyone in the sixties or the seventies negotiates immediately with terrorists. Not even negotiates. Just fucking gives them what they want. Yeah. Now, so yeah, Carlos and his boss with the popular front is like contact with the actual like organization is a dude named Mucarbol, who's a Lebanese guy, and they provide the

Japanese Red Army with all the guns and grenades they need. And the Japanese Red Army takes control of the embassy and kidnaps the ambassador. And here's how Michelle Barth summarizes what happens next. The JRA commandos held the French ambassadors as well as 10 other members in the French embassy hostage in order to force the release of their leader while these negotiations persisted. Carlos in conjunction with these attacks devised a plan that he hoped would force the release of the terrorists on a busy Sunday afternoon. He entered a trendy cafe in Paris and he made his way to the first floor balcony and threw

a fragmentation grenade down into the crowd that milled around the boutiques on the ground floor. Carlos left just before the blast scattered hundreds of lethal fragments through the crowd killing two and injuring 34 or 34 innocent shoppers. The French government caved to the JPA demands two days later, providing both the release of the organization's leader as well as a jet that would fly them to safety. So that's a terrible act of terrorism also makes them a big deal because it worked like fucking gangbusters.

I mean terrible act of terrorism that if I'm not mistaken, he threw a grenade and they were like, here's a jet and we're letting this dude go. And all of his friends who occupied it, like who conquered our embassy and held it in gun way, yes, that's a lot from a different era. It's I mean, it's a very different period of time. So yeah, he's famous now, like now not famous in terms of like his identity is still a secret, but like within the world of people who are like, you know, terrorists and stuff or freedom fighters or everyone a column, he's like a big deal now, like a big fucking operation.

Now the problem though with getting famous is that tasting your first dose of fame makes you want it more. And Carlos set for his next attack as a spectacular goal. There were some LL airplanes on the runway at Orly Airport near Paris. And instead of hijacking them, he wanted to blow them up because he had acquired a sack full of rocket propelled grenades. Now so their plan was just to like shoot taxiing LL aircraft and blow them up while they were on the runway filled with hundreds of American tourists, which was quite a plan.

And also let's get a little bit more into like modern terrorist territory, like some modern, he was talking about killing like 170 people, right? Yeah, that's actually quite a bit different than all of his previous actions, because I think one thing that's been getting me over a lot of this is there's all sorts of wars going on. And we're in a period in time when everyone kind of low level thought that they could die any minute in nukes, any minute, but at the same time, the idea that you were that you killed more than like four people in a single action for anything is like, oh my

gosh, loss of life is incredible. It is weird. There's probably a lot of reasons for it that we're not going to delve into now because it's kind of a bummer to think about. So yeah, I'm going to read a quote from the book Jackal talking about how this attack went because it's a fun, it's a fun story. The LL plane was 130 meters away when Weinrich, who is his partner on this, who was a German guy who was like, I think the son of Nazis and stuff and like became a left wing activist.

Anyway, I think that's the guy that that is. So he's with he and Weinrich have like this truck full of rocket propelled grenades. So yeah, the LL plane was 130 meters away while within the weapons maximum range at 300 meters, but the missile sword wide of the nose of the plane without waiting to see the rocket's final impact, Weinrich hurriedly consulted Carlos before reloading and taking aim a second time. The first rocket hit a parked car and then smashed into an empty workshop where the black boxes recording flight data were manufactured.

It failed to explode. A moment later, the radio and the cockpit of the LL jet crackled with an urgent order from the control tower for all planes on the tarmac to come to an immediate halt. The Israeli captain, a former fighter pilot with combat experience, had no intention of obeying the order which would have offered his attackers an easy target. He accelerated sharply and made straight for the runway. In his haste to fire a second rocket, Weinrich failed to brace himself for the recoil which punched him backwards and the bazooka steel tube shattered their car's windshield.

The rocket pierced the fuselage of a parked and virtually empty Yugoslav plane before exiting on the other side. Flying metals slightly injured a steward, a policeman, and a baggage handler, but the rocket, like the first, failed to explode and burrowed its way into empty kitchens. The only damaged cause was a few broken plates. Weinrich and Carlos jumped into the car and sped away, leaving behind a Soviet-made automatic pistol on the edge of the road. Outside a cemetery a few miles away, they abandoned the car and paused only long enough

to throw a cover over the launcher, a third unused rocket, two grenades, and another Soviet-made pistol lying on the back seat before switching to another rental car. Carlos blamed his teammate for the fiasco. Weinrich, he explained, was courageous and experienced, but the last second he broke down. Shortly afterwards, someone called the Reuters news agency in Paris to claim responsibility for the attack. The message ended with the promise, next time we'll hit our target.

So every comedy made during the 80s makes a lot more sense. Yeah, they're not great at it, like once it gets to using the big weapons. Yeah, like, sad tuba throughout this entire scene. And just like the casualness with which they're leaving rocket launchers and machine pistols behind, is they're like, well, I guess we're fucked. Right, well, and because I was definitely picturing these two guys as like, suave 80s villain motherfuckers, up until you described all that, and now I'm picturing them as like, you know, like, Kerry Ellis and John Cleese, just like flying backwards into the windshields

of their cars, because they're not properly brazed and two rockets in a row that don't blow up. And yeah, they're not, it doesn't go well. They're just littering their trail. Yeah, all of their guns, pistols, like red crumbs and Dan Ackroyd is in this movie. Dan Ackroyd is definitely he's the security guard who is like comically unaware of what's going on, yet somehow still manages to foil the plot. So yeah, they promise to come back and not to miss in the future, but they don't keep

this promise. They try again, like a week later with a bunch of Palestinian guerrillas to like help them. But this is also a cock up from the start, Carlos and his boss, like they get spotted immediately and like wind up like the guerrillas all wind up in a running gun battle with French counterterrorism police and take a bunch of hostages and like get an airplane to fly them safely back home. Meanwhile, Carlos and his partner like drive away. Do they successfully get the airplane?

Yeah. Okay. Nobody dies. So their grand plan to blow up planes on the tarmac and then instead they hijack a plane because that's the fallback. Because that's the fallback because everyone can hijack a plane. Yeah. Because it's really easy.

Why didn't they just hijack the planes to begin with? Because they wanted to kill people, but they're bad at it. But you know how you can kill people, but never mind. No one thought of that. Never mind. People did eventually have that idea and it didn't, it wasn't great. It was the worst. Yeah.

So on June 27th, 1965, Carlos's boss with the popular front, Michel Moucarbel was captured and interrogated by French intelligence. He apparently turned and like, you know, did, you know, did the, he snitched and he led the cops to Carlos's safe house, which was of course the house that his girlfriend lived at and was currently holding a party. So everything about this is baffling because these three French intelligence agents have this Palestinian like PLO guy who they know is a big terrorist and has just committed big terrorism and they're going to meet his partner at a party.

But it's the start of the weekend and it's like a holiday weekend and they all have guns, but they all check them in at work because they don't want to deal with like going back to the office later to drop their guns off afterwards. Oh my God. So that would just come with guns. Beautiful. I mean, it is France in the 70s. Yeah.

Like there's the chance that the party was going to be really good and maybe they wouldn't find him and then there was going to be a convoy of cars heading to an orgy afterwards and you were. They start drinking while they're talking to Carlos. Of course they do. So they start drinking while they're talking to Carlos, but then one of them brings Moucarbel into the room and Carlos realizes instantly like, oh shit, he fucking, he fucking turned on me.

And while all the cops up until then, they just thought Carlos just thought they were having a nice conversation. Oh, these two cops when I asked me some questions, I can get out of this because I'm a charming motherfucker and we're all at a party and we're all at a party and like they seem chill. Like I think I can get out of this. Then they bring in his business partner and Carlos did not leave his gun at home and he immediately pulls a CZ 52 automatic pistol. He shoots Moucarbel in the throat and he shoots two out of three cops dead.

Just immediately wounds the other, I think. And then fucking books it and makes it away with like as like like the whole country of France turning on to like chase him, he makes it all the way back to fucking Beirut without his face even getting like exposed during like, he's very good at some parts of being a terrorist. This is why he gets famous. Like running away. Like shooting a bunch of people in the face.

So yeah, he gets away. And like things are rough at first in Lebanon because people are like, you shot one of our heroes in the face, but then he's like, that guy was a snitch. And then they're like, all right, things are good after that. Yeah, international authorities do eventually put two and two together and Carlos's name, you know, suddenly is all over the world news. And like right around this time by coincidence, a big heatwave hits London and one of the packages of high explosives that he just left in an ex-girlfriend's flat started to smell

weird. And they opened it and found a list of local Jews, a machine pistol, a silencer and a bunch of bomb making stuff. Carlos. He's a, he's a whole anti-Israeli thing. Like yeah, you're going to run into some uncomfortable shit sometimes. I understand that we shouldn't expect, you know, find distinctions between these people are Jewish and the state of Israel has policies I don't like from a guy who can't be bothered.

He is a terrorist. He is a terrorist. He did just shoot his friend in the face. He just shot his friend right in the, and he shot his friend in the face a second after seeing him and realizing what had happened. Yeah. Like there's a zero. Like there's no turn around.

I think that might mean they're not friends anymore. So they, this, this girlfriend and like her boyfriend at the time find all this stuff and instead of calling the cops because they're both like far left activists, they call the guardian and the reporter who goes over to their house to do the story notices a copy of Frederick Forsythe's book, the day of the jackal. And if you remember from our episodes about the, about Guinea and the coups there, Frederick Forsythe was the guy who like wrote that book about how to do a coup that then people use as they like to do it.

So they find a copy of Frederick Forsythe's day of the jackal on the bookshelf. The reporter does and this is like while he's getting ready to write this story and it gives him the idea for Carlos's nickname, he starts calling him Carlos the jackal. So that's at this point forward. And this is Carlos the jackal. So Carlos, and this is the same attic where there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of guns and decaying dynamite and the jealous night, I think I might have local, yeah. It's not.

Look, man, he's a terrorist. What do you want? I wasn't standing Carlos the jackal up until this point, but like, buddy, he's one of those guys who there's moments in his life because it's so outrageous, like the kind of like the way everything worked in the 70s and the kind of terrorist he is where you're like, oh my God, that's so cool. And then you remember like, oh, and this is also a guy who dropped a grenade into a crowd of strangers.

Yeah. I need to, I need to cool it a little. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he was, I'm going to guess that list was not for giving people nice notes about how. He wasn't like keeping track of, yeah, no, he was, it was not nice stuff, but yeah, it

was for his earlier job trying to kill a bunch of random, you know, people who supported Israel. So yeah, now from this point forward, Carlos is, you know, the most wanted man on earth. This is when he becomes like the most like wanted person by international law enforcement on the planet for a while. But you know what also is the most wanted thing by international law enforcement? The manufactured demands of capitalism. I was going to say the products and services that support this podcast, but they are one

in the same. Yeah. Uh-huh. Here we go. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good badass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

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stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. We're talking about Carlos the Jackal, C to the J. And as the summer of 1975 turned into fall, he was sitting in Beirut. He just had a whole big string of cool successes and some failures related to rocket launchers. Super cool successes. Like that time he killed people with a grenade and then got a jet. The 70s were quite a decade. And that time he shot his friend in the face instantly, instantly, immediately.

So he's sitting in Beirut and he's planning his most ambitious attack yet, an assault on OPEC headquarters in Vienna. And OPEC are the guys who run oil. They produce it and export it if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, that's OPEC. So on December 21st, he led a six-person team that raided the annual OPEC leadership meeting and took more than 60 people hostage, including most of the people running OPEC. Three people were killed, including a Libyan delegate in the opening stages of the attack.

Which also, this is one of those things where he's now... There will be some consequences for him to be a Libyan. It's one thing to be PLO and be fucking with Israel and everybody's like, yeah. You really want Gaddafi on your side if you're a PLO guy in this period. You just fucked with a whole bunch of people who might have been down with your shit a few minutes ago. Who might have let you hide in their country. Yeah.

Yeah, it's... Oh, it didn't. It's not perfect. You raided OPEC. You're gonna crack some eggs. That's the only part of a plan where several people die that's not perfect, but you know. So yeah, they take over OPEC and take a bunch of people hostage. And once their hostages are secure, Carlos and his comrades make the same familiar demand

for a plane and money that every other group of terrorists does. But they add something new to this. They demand that Austrian authorities read a letter about the Palestinian cause on their radio and TV networks every two hours. If Austria doesn't, Carlos promises to execute a hostage every 15 minutes. I just love how much of this terrorism has boiled down to, we got some pamphlets for you. You gotta read this letter.

We're gonna like, y'all, there's like libraries and like, can you imagine this sort of shit couldn't happen in the era of YouTube because YouTube's just there. You could just like... And you know what, back when things were done this way, a lot of people had interesting plane experiences and now we have tons of fascists. So you're saying YouTube did 9-11? I am saying that we should go back to a hijacking based economy. Like things were in the 70s.

And ban the internet. Ban the internet, make hijacking legal. It'll fix a lot of problems. That's all I'm gonna say. No notes. There's nothing wrong with that plan. So Austria is like, I guess we're going to broadcast a bunch of pro-Palestinian stuff because you have all of OPEC captured.

So we don't really have a lot of options here. So they give them a plane and it flies to outjeers. Well, that's the baseline. You gotta, no matter what happens, you get a plane. You get a plane. Like, what are you doing to terrorism? One second. Let me go.

Let's get you 737. Come on now. What do you have? What, a bottle of hairspray? That's fine. A bottle of hairspray. Bugspray. Bugspray.

Oh, no. You're getting a Cessna. So, yeah, they fly to outjeers where Carlos frees 30 non-Arab hostages in exchange for refueling the jet, which then flies to Tripoli. Now, Tripoli isn't wild to have them there because of the Libyan they killed. Weird. And a number of other reasons, you know. Minor details.

They didn't ask. Gaddafi was a big asking guy. He did do authoritarian dictators like it when you, you know, maybe get permission from them to do things. He's not psyched. So Carlos is like, okay, well, could you at least give us a plane that can like go further so that we can like get away with all these hostages we still have? And Gaddafi's like, no, you killed my guy, like fuck you.

I'm Momar Gaddafi. I'm not famous for being reasonable. So you know, eventually though, in exchange for releasing all the Libyan hostages and five other delegates, the plane was refueled and returned to Algiers, where Carlos agreed to release everybody else in exchange for political asylum and a huge pile of cash, which was provided by either Saudi Arabia or Iran. Now, this was supposed to, this cash was supposed to go to the movement, but Carlos took a bunch of it, which got kicked out of the popular front.

So you know, this is kind of the end of that part of his career, which also you got a respect. Well, yeah, you also, you got to respect a terrorist organization that's like, okay, that time that you had a list of Jews you were going to kill, that's fine. All those times you left decaying dynamite in those ladies' attics, that's fine. That time you just threw some grenades off of a balcony into a random crowd of strangers. Totally fine. The time you totally fucked up trying to shoot down those jets.

Also totally fine, but you kept a bunch of money that we were going to use to keep doing those things and that's where we draw the line. Yeah, that's kind of where things go here. So yeah, Carlos, you know, he winds up kind of on the run for a while. He flees to the Balkans where he's detained by the Yugoslavian government and then sent to Iraq for some reason. It's never been clear to me. I mean, it's out of the Balkans.

It's out of the Balkans. It's out of Yugoslavia. Yeah, that's what they say in the tourism brochures for Baghdad. Not the Balkans. Yep. Well, and he successfully, he'd successfully pissed off quite a few other countries at this point. He didn't kicked out of the Balkans.

Yeah. So he wound up kind of wriggling out of this and setting up shop in Aden, where he tried to form his own terrorist group made of Syrian, Lebanese and German rebels. And he winds up getting the attention of the East German government and their secret police, the Stasi, who offer him an office and a safe house in East Berlin. Wait, wait, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, the Stasi is like. Yeah. They hire him next.

Yeah. They're like, you're pretty good at this terrorism thing. Come on. Living Berlin. Oh, man. Here's this house and here's this apartment that we've prepped for you. Don't worry. Don't bother opening up the walls.

We're only the Stasi. Yeah. We're the Stasi. We don't even know how to record things. That's what everyone says about the Stasi. Also the Stasi, famous lovers of guys who want to overthrow government. I don't think it really does wind up in Prague pretty soon. Yeah.

I mean, considering who they are and who he is, they know about it before he did. And they he spent some time as like a semi-legendate agent of the, you know, of the USSR of East Germany and like kind of just like global, you know, all of that stuff. He lives in Prague. He gets a 75 person support staff, a car and the right to carry a handgun anywhere he wants, which is a fun thing to get to have, to get to do in Prague in the 70s. This was not a great actually freedom for them to give him because he drank very heavily and would lock himself out of his hotel room and then wave a handgun around wildly screaming

at everyone around him. I bet that got one of the staff of 75 to come in, come to help out. I was going to say that's probably a good way to get people to let you into your apartment. I mean, I could page my secretary or I could scream wildly and wave a handgun. All right. One, do you think he's going to get a quicker response? So he he keeps running his terrorist group. And obviously they do, they do some cool stuff in 1982 that carried an attack on a French

nuclear reactor. It didn't work out, but famous good targets for terrorism. Yeah. He's doing the bomb thing. You've got to go after it. Yeah. I'm someone that really loves 70s Roger Moore Bond movies. I'm really impressed by how well this all lines up.

It's amazing. Yeah. That's part of why those movies got made is because Carlos the Jackal was doing the shit. And now he goes to the moon and he went to the moon in the 70s, too. And it was great. No notes. So yeah, he he tries to carry his group carries out an attack on a nuclear reactor. It doesn't work.

He's married at the time and his wife gets arrested. And Carlos demanded her release from France, which is kind of a bold move, which it sounds like we're just going to move on past this, but you say it doesn't work, which I assume means they didn't blow up a nuclear reactor in central Europe. They did not do that. And also his wife is just a footnote. Yeah. Okay.

He got married at some point. He got married at some point. You know, sometimes we're fucking page 22 here. There's got to be some. You throw a duffel bag full of decaying dynamite in somebody's attic. There's a special connection that's different than all the other duffel bags you've thrown in all the other addicts. I'm just going to put out there, though, that once you marry someone, it makes it harder

to hide duffel bags of bombs in other people's addicts. I don't. That really depends on the nature of the relationship. I was going to say, based on Carlos Jackals dead, I would say that being married is not an impediment to throwing your whatever in anywhere you want. So yeah, he demands his wife's release of France after trying to blow up their nuclear reactor, and France, shockingly, is like, we were not going to be doing that. Really?

And so Carlos the Jackal bombs their cultural center in Beirut, and then he bombs a train in France that was supposed to be occupied by Jacques Chirac, who was the president of France at the time. Right. Recently. Well, he asked her something and they didn't give it to him. So he bombed a train in a cultural center. And this is also now an interesting turn, though, because at this point, he's like specifically

I was going to blow up a nuclear, a nuclear plant, and now you arrested my wife. I think they were just trying to steal stuff from the plant. Oh, OK. Well, whatever. But now it's personal. Yeah. Like you arrested my wife. Now I'm on a series of terrorism to get my wife released.

Is it personal or was he actually planning on blowing those things up anyway? And he's just using it as justification because if it really is about his wife, it might be one of the only things that he's done. So he blows this plane, this train up that the president of France is supposed to be on. And he kills five passengers. He injures 30. The next year he bombs two more French trains as payback for a French bombing of Lebanese

training camps. OK. So he's moved on from his whole wife thing. And for like, yeah, for more than a decade, Carlos the Jackal, you know, was like the most famous terrorist on earth. He inspired movies and a lot of villains and now forgotten TV action dramas. But yeah, in Prague, his drinking and his whoring and his increasingly unfocused attacks on civilian targets started to get like on the nerves of the powers that be.

And in 1986, Czech security forces told him that French intelligence had sent a hit squad after him. He fled Prague and went on the start of an eight year long flight from Western justice. So he is completely unbacked and he makes it eight years. He's very good at running from the law. Yeah. And also that might be the longest stretch that he didn't blow something up. It is.

He's he's like Ethan Hunt in Pagan Mission. He's famous like he wasn't bad at the bad guy. So he winds up in Syria, where he lived in the mansion of a Mexican millionaire. For again, reasons I don't know how to explain to you and money kind of retired for a while. France was content to give up on catching him. But in 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. That didn't work out great. And you know, once he was licking his wounds and angry at America, he reached out to famed

terrorist Carlos the Jackal and was like, what have you did some terrorism on America? And Carlos, I don't think really got around to it, but Syria was, you know, got kind of nervous about that whole deal and was like, we don't really want to piss off the United States right now because we were watching. So we're you can't be in Syria anymore. So by the end of it, the only country in the world willing to shelter Carlos the Jackal was Sudan. And Carlos immediately didn't if you're if you're down to Sudan, that's your last place.

And he wore his welcome out there basically instantly because again, you got kicked out of Sudan. Yeah, all of the drinking and whoring and then like a really fundamental. Yeah, he just couldn't stop drinking and whoring. So Sudan gives him up and extra it's in Sudan, extradites him to France. God damn. He really pissed off Sudan. Shit.

Uh, in August of 1994, 1994, he had a good run, he had a good ass run, but that also explains why there's very few communist countries that he can get back to. Yeah, well, yeah, that was a pretty fucking good run. Pretty fucking good run of being the most wanted man in the world. And this began. There was, of course, a series of trials for his many crimes that like the last of them, I think just finished up like he was in court recently. He's still alive.

He still gives interviews sometimes in court. He's regularly defended his innocence when talking about specific crimes while bragging about his involvement in general ones. He told a French court recently, no one has executed more people than me in the Palestinian resistance. Hell of a thing to brag about. Hell of a thing to brag about. He also bragged in court, I have been a professional revolutionary since I was a teenager.

There's a little bit of a little bit of an exaggeration, but not all that much. In so far as being trained by private tutors makes you a professional. Also in the way of like in age, he is profoundly a boomer at this point. His teenager hood versus his thirties are all very far away from him. He doesn't really matter. He was a professional revolutionary as a teenager in the same way that the current president was a businessman as a teenager. Yeah.

His dad gave him a whole bunch of shit he didn't have to work for. But unlike the current president, he did become a self made man. He sure did. And he did it by shooting people right in their faces. And making bombs. Making bombs and running from the police for like decades. So you know, in the end, I'd like to read a quote from him that he gave to a journalist that sums up at least how he likes to portray his his philosophy on life.

I like good food. I like to drink and I like good cigars. I like to sleep in a comfortable bed, which has just been made. I like to wear good shoes. I like to play cards, poker and blackjack. I also like parties and dances, but I'm against possessions. But I possess belongs to others as much as to me. So that's OK.

That's his. That's that's how he describes himself. I'm just going to put it out there that if it's like a luxury communist, a whole bunch of explosives behind you, the things you possess will belong to you and other people equally as much. These are their explosives, too. And after they go off, no one has anything. Yeah.

Look, like this apartment that you own is also very soon going to be in lots of other people's apartments. This is how we spread Marxism. Oh, Carlos. Yeah. Or not so much. So he's a there's a fun story. The fun guy.

Yeah. I like this. Honestly, I like this one more than the one where all of those Japanese college students murdered each other on the mountain. So yeah, that's the story of Carlos the Jackal. Everybody learned something good. I sure did. I learned that everybody gets a plane.

Everybody gets a plane. Everybody gets a plane. That's the first rule of terrorism. No matter how badly your terrorism goes, you get a plane. No matter what happens, you get a plane. Were you were you trying to blow up some planes unsuccessfully? Let's give you a plane to make you feel better. Well, they did shoot a bunch of cops, too.

Well, OK. Again, let's give you a plane to make you feel better. Yeah. So this was a cool era of terrorism. Sure was. Easily my favorite. So yeah, you got any pluggables to plug? We're we're on Twitter and Instagram and medium at 45th absurdist.

You can find things that we write and pictures that we take and random things that we post on all of those. And, you know, if you find yourself in the streets of Portland, getting repeatedly tear gassed and shot by impact munitions by law enforcement, come say hi. Yeah. Well, we'll say you should not be here. There's tear gas or something along those lines. And you'll say what?

Because it'll sound like. Oh, because that's where I guess that it'll be a good time for everybody. All right, Godspeed. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. And our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.