The Most Dangerous Terrorist Before Bin Laden: Carlos the Jackal | Joby Warrick

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So it's, you know, it's a, it's a unified government for the most part, but it's, it seems very, very precarious to me. When you say consolidated control. That is right. He is, like I said, he's no Democrat. He's an autocratic leader, but he's kind of like the dictator. Right. But he knows that he looks good in a suit. He knows how to say the right things at a, at a, at a conference, shake hands with diplomats. So he's been surprising, but yeah, I just, I'm not completely convinced that he's a different guy than he used to be. I would pay to be a fly on the wall in those conversations once they go in the rooms after doing the cameras where someone says, listen up motherfucker. Yeah. Yeah. No doubt. All right. All right. You, you killed 10 of your secretaries. All right, fine. You do this shit. Yeah. Like it's gotta be some sort of business agreement there for sure. I think so. And they're, and I must say in that region, they're, they're used to kind of these complexities and kind of working out as businessmen and you don't cross certain lines. Otherwise you get whacked. It's, it's very mafia like. That's another argument though. When you look at that country and you know, the outcome's still kind of up in the air with what it'll be. Maybe there's a couple okay signs right now, but that was a country ravaged by sanctions again, that turned into that crazy war zone, arguably because the sanctions pushed them there. I mean, you were reporting on literally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you were reporting on literally every single country that was in that war zone, and you were reporting on literally witnessing all the trucks coming across with, what was it? Crank or? Yeah. It was, yeah, it was, uh, it was Captagon. Captagon. This weird, slightly, I guess, a bit like meth. It's, it's a strange synthetic drug that yeah, sanctions dried up sources of income for the, for the Syrian regime. And so they essentially turned to Captagon to create, um, revenue for themselves. And so it became basically the world's biggest narco state and it, massive amounts of drug manufacturing with shipments of, you know, millions and millions of these Captagon tablets heading out all over the world, particularly in the Middle East. But it was just this, that was, you can't say it was, it's a direct result of, uh, of sanctions, but it was certainly a side effect. Yes. And it's, that's, that begs the question. It's like, how much of the whole like sanction strategy is just trying to big dick people you maybe righteously don't like by the way, when you can take a bad situation and technically make it way worse by doing that, how else do you solve it other than like invading the country? Sanctions became kind of like the easy fix for us because it didn't require any real effort. We don't have to send troops anywhere. We can just say, wow, we're going to sanction this country. And, and then we create a sanctions regime that stays in effect for decades. It loses its effectiveness. People find ways to get around it. And then it just becomes kind of a shell of a policy, kind of a way to make us feel good about things without doing anything good. And sometimes doing things kind of bad, like creating a drug, a drug economy that didn't exist. Yeah. That's, uh, unfortunate, but we'll see how it shakes out, I guess. That said, I've been waiting on this book. It's time to get to it a little bit. Okay. So I had to keep my mouth shut on this. Like I said, for about two and a half years, you told me about this, like I'm working on this thing and little did I know you and I recorded, it was like that Friday in March, 2024. It was like the 22nd or something like that. And I guess you got on a plane a day or two later for Paris and went and visited Carlos the Jackal in prison. Is that correct? That's right. It's March, 2025. Okay. Who was Carlos the Jackal? Let's start there for people who don't know. Cause this, this is a very important story that as you said, ties into very modern day issues right now, it's a symbolic time for it to come out. So if we can roll back the clock a little bit. So most of us basically grew up in the 9/11 generation. So we think of terrorism. We think of Al Qaeda and 9/11. There was a whole other generation and I'm old enough that I remember it. But back in the sixties and seventies, there was this terror wave that involved hijackings of planes, hostage taking, murder of Israeli athletes in the, at the 1972 Olympic games. This is an awful period. And any, any air travel involved the risk of, of hijacking or worse. And of that generation of terrorists, the one that became internationally famous was this guy who became known as Carlos the Jackal, who became, so the most famous of the Palestinian militants, even though he wasn't Palestinian at all, he was from Venezuela. He's some crazy kid who moved himself to the Middle East and thought he'd become a, a, you know, a guerrilla freedom fighter and ends up becoming a sleeper agent for the Palestinians. And then goes on to do one outrageous, uh, terrorist attack after another, uh, and then eludes, uh, capture for 20 years. Essentially becomes famous in part because he was so good at getting away with it and just living like a rock star, living in fabulous hotels and, and meeting amazing women and, and drinking the best liquor and just had this almost fable-like existence. And this is the guy that, uh, you know, was really the international face of terrorism throughout the, in the last century, the seventies and eighties. Before Bin Laden, right? Before Bin Laden. Before Bin Laden basically changed how we think of terrorism. This was the guy. Bin Laden happened, we kind of forgot about him because he was, uh, by that time sitting in a, in a prison in France and living not too badly if you're, if you're going to be in a prison. But, uh. French prisons are nice? French, they're not so bad. Good cuisine? The one that I saw, um, before I visited him used to, it was actually originally a convent and it was built in the middle ages, you know, kind of convent turned prison into, maybe not too big of a stretch, but he, he was captured in the nineties in a, in a really dramatic fashion that we can talk about if, if you want. But, um, he, he's not allowed to speak very much because he murdered a lot of French people. Uh, a lot of his terrorist attacks were in France and the French don't like him getting the microphone. They don't like him being able to talk about his, you know, glorify his past. And so it took a very long time to get permission to, get to talk to him. But once I did, it was just this moment that I'll never forget kind of sitting in this prison and in comes this man who was, when I was a kid, the most famous terrorist in the world. And now he was 75 years old and kind of an old man, but still kind of scary in his own way. How, first of all, when did you first hatch the idea that you wanted to write a book on him? And how soon after that did you think in your head, damn, I wonder if I could talk to him? So it's crazy how these ideas start sometimes. And for me, you know, the Jackal was a name I remember you know, almost like maybe kids who grew up in the 9/11 generation have the sense of, of Bin Laden being this boogeyman. And then there was an international search for him and they found him and killed him and so on. So Carlos to me was kind of like that. I remembered some of the stories about him when I was young. And then when I was a reporter working as a terrorist in the Middle East, I kept running into his trail in weird ways. And, you know, as you know, I spent a lot of time in Jordan, but I would talk to Jordanian intelligence guys and said, oh yeah, Carlos Jackal was here for a while. Mm-hmm. He kind of smuggled himself into our country. We didn't know he was here. And once we discovered it, we cultivated a relationship with him. We used to talk to one guy who his job was to bring liquor over to Carlos the Jackal in his little villa where he stayed in Amman and try to figure him out. What is he doing here? What is he, what is he up to? Is he planning a terrorist attack? And they tried to befriend him. Really? Yeah. Rather than arrest him. Rather arrest him. And that becomes kind of a contentious point in the book because the Jordanians should have told their American friends about this, their secret guest, and that eventually happened, but it didn't happen right away. But in the meantime, they actually got this amazing debrief with Carlos because they would sit down with him, get him super drunk, and just get him to talk about the shit that he did. And so the guys that I would talk to, these are just regular sources, had the most amazing stories about Carlos the Jackal that I'd never heard before. I never knew anything about this part of his life. Did they like him? They. The thing is you can't, that's a hard thing to say, like him, but it's, he's a very charming guy. Yes. And you, and the people that would describe to me their meetings with him, after they overcame their initial fear, and this one guy is literally, there's this scene in the book where this Jordanian who meets Carlos for the first time, he's in an office and he's got his pistol out under the desk because he's so afraid this guy's going to come out and just gun him down. But after they figured out that he was, he was pretty much harmless, he wasn't going to do anything to them. They were just fascinated to hear his stories and just kind of, because let's say he has the wildest stories in the world. He's lived the life of a rock star and being a slash terrorist and, and, and internationally wanted fugitive. and to get to spend time with them it was fascinating for them now this is a guy though like you said he was born in venezuela his father's a communist attorney in pre-communist venezuela it was not a communist country at the time and he names his three kids after each part of was it lenin's name lenin's name so lenin's the founder of the soviet union's real name was vladimir ilyich sorry ilyich yulianov so he named his three sons lenin uh vladimir and then ilyich and so he kind of had all parts of the name covered and that just a testament to the guy to the father's devotion to communism he considered literally considered lenin the most important figure in all of human history and so his his kids names were an homage to his communist hero and carlos got the middle name he got he got the middle name even though he was the oldest kid and um kind of grew up with that legacy and was influenced by that but also by kind of revolutionary fervor in latin america at the time because this was 60s so time of you know there's communist uprisings throughout latin america there are communist you know militants in the jungle this a very famous character at the time named shea guevara who was like a swashbuckling you know uh latin american revolutionary and you see movies about him you see his face on on on on t-shirts he was a very photogenic good-looking guy and he was carlos's real hero he wanted to be this you know adventurer revolutionary you know larger than life character beautiful women surrounding him that was his goal in life was to become that guy young carlos though who's looking up to shea guevara was it really because of the things shea guevara emoted that you just laid out and the lifestyle he had or did he actually look into say the policies that he backed and the politics that he had yeah and vibe with that so carlos would always say the right things like i'm for the common man i'm a marxist revolutionary reality was carlos didn't really give a crap about any of that carlos wanted to be a hero he wanted to be a shea guevara he wanted to have his picture on on uh t-shirts if he'd been living today he'd have an instagram account he'd be all over tiktok he'd be promoting himself and his own brand back then you couldn't do that but he just wanted to build an image yeah and ended up getting a sexy nickname that he didn't plan on having but once he was called carlos the jackal then suddenly there's a whole you know mystique that comes with that oh yeah and you can't get laid with that name i can't help you yeah you can't can't well if you can't get laid as eliot because that's just kind of a strange name but if you're carlos the jackal man yeah you could you could have films made about him and and you actually of course that went on to happen the the born identity series that was initially a novel series by robert lundum he he based his bad guy his bad character was was carlos the jackal he created the entire persona of this this uh the villain in all all three of his novels based on on carlos yeah he had massive charisma absolutely and you could still see it i must say even as an old man he kind of walks in a room and you you can see there's some there's there's a charm but there's kind of a presence and god knows i didn't admire him and he said lots of things you know in our meeting that reinforced the fact that he is he's essentially a criminal narcissist that's he has that kind of brain uh doesn't regret any of the the terrible things that he did feels like he's a hero in his own mind but he is he is a charming bad guy and that's you know even the jordanians who are trying to debrief him in the in the 90s they could certainly see that that um that he's you know as though as one guy who became a senior official in the jordanian intelligence agency said you can't help but like him you know i just liked him one of if not the most common dms i get on instagram are many of you asking me what my favorite books are well today's your lucky day because if you use the link in my description below to join my newsletter i'm going to give you my top 10 book recommendations right now also if you'd like to join my clipping community for a new episode of the show you can do so via the discord link in my description below and finally you can join my patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the patreon link in my description below as always please take one second to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already i really appreciate that also the like button's a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below and uh and it was almost sorry to see him go so you're talking with your guys and they're whispering about this and telling you the stories in the 2010s while you're working on other things and then you end up finishing red line the book on on syria and was it pretty much right after that where you're like i gotta go yeah look at this again there was another reason too so i have what you'll see in all my books is i have a kind of a writing style that's it's narrative non-fiction and it's usually very character driven so if the best book for me is one that tells a larger story but so there's a central character that propels the narrative and that the story i wanted to tell is is another origin story black flags is a kind of an origin story of isis and where it came from the jackal story allows me to tell sort of explain how we got international terrorism how that arose in the middle east in the 60s and 70s and who were the important characters and why it was able to flourish and eventually why it failed because these groups always overreach their violence always turns people off and they end up kind of becoming the reason for their own demise but carlton's story is a kind of a story that's Carlos, luckily for me, is in all the right places at all the right times, and he allows me to kind of string together a bigger story about this important development in our modern history with a singular figure in the middle of it who you can't take your eyes off of because he's just always doing something outrageous. This is also a guy, though, that is still living when you're writing about him, and obviously we're going to talk about you going to talk with him and everything, but is there a difference in the approach for you from like a storytelling and writing perspective when you are dealing with someone who's still alive, especially when you know you may be having a conversation? That's really appealing because there are parts of the Carlos story that had remained a mystery for a long time, and because people had kind of forgotten about him after 9-11. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was a lot of new material that had come out, archival material from East Europe, for example, used to be kind of a pet. So the communist governments of Eastern Europe in the 90s and 80s kept him almost like their little dirty secret. Right. Because we've got Carlos the Jackal living with us, and we could stop him if we wanted to, but we don't. We'd let him go out and bomb things in France and just live a crazy life in our own countries. And a lot of the files from that time only started coming out. In the late 90s and in the early 2000s, you know, some of his former henchmen and closest associates are still around, so they can be debriefed. But Carlos himself obviously knows a lot. And I felt there was just finally a critical mass of material to kind of take a new look at the life of this guy who was once on, you know, top of mind. People, you know, he was a household name. And to reconstruct, you know, how he came to be, how Carlos the Jackal came to exist. In the light of all this new contextual material, it just seemed very attractive. And I just felt that people used to care a lot about Carlos. And if they reread his story in the context of how he got to where we are with terrorism and these other national threats, it'd be a story worth telling. And it was a lot of fun to report, I must say. It was just endlessly fascinating. How did you get to talk to him? So the hard part, well, let's just start with the easy part. The easy part was getting Carlos to see. And it was a matter of I contacted his lawyer, explained who I am, talked about my books. And I said, I'd love to meet your guy. And Carlos has a lawyer. Carlos' lawyer passed along the message. Carlos writes back, said, sure, Washington Post guy, I'll meet with you. He's not publicity shy. He's the opposite. He likes attention. He loves the idea of getting an interview. But the problem, as I mentioned, was the French did not want to let me talk to him. They don't want to let anybody talk to him except under very restrictive conditions. So I had to agree. There's no recording equipment. There's no camera taken into prison. I only had a pencil and a notebook. Pencil and a notebook. That's it. Old school. Oh, really old school. You were writing it. Writing things down as fast as I could. You like transcribing? And then after it's over, going back to my hotel and just trying to do a Julian Dory and trying to photographically remember everything that happened and every nuance and every wrinkle in his brow, you know, trying to kind of recreate every bit of that. But even with that, I mean, one of the restrictions, I had to agree to was this was not going to result in a Q and A interview because they didn't, the French did not want me to have this verbatim, you know, conversation with Carlos that would allow Carlos to reinterpret history. So it had to be, you know, I was able to use little snippets, but I couldn't quote him extensively. But that's not even work. That seems really subjective to, you know. Yeah. And it's frustrating for sure. But on the other hand, my whole purpose in meeting him was I had some, some things I wanted to ask, but even with those things, I didn't think I would trust anything Carlos said. He's going to exaggerate. He's not going to tell me the truth. So it was more to kind of get, get him to kind of fill in color, a little bit of, of the blank spaces that I had in my own narrative of what happened. but also just to kind of get a measure of the man. And that was very important mentally in getting my head around the project and writing about him and his life is to see him as a 75-year-old man. And then you'll see in the book, I mentioned kind of briefly this encounter that I had with him in the prologue. And then at the end of the book, the bad days are over. He's been in prison for a long time. And here I am face-to-face with the man for the first time. And so there's, it's, you know, people have read this part of the book, say it's kind of a very profound moment where after you've read the story of his life, you're sitting there looking at the guy eyeball to eyeball. I like how you did that. Yeah, so it was a great way to end up, you know, after telling a story, kind of like, what did it amount to? What was it? How did it matter? And welcome back, freaking frack. Welcome to the Jungle, ABC Wednesday. Abbott is back. It's going to be the best year yet. Thank you. Now we can finally turn this up. And everyone's going wild. Y'all think you run this school, but you don't. It's going great. Abbott Elementary. Anything can happen in the jungle. Right, guys? Season premiere Wednesday on ABC and stream next day on Hulu. Hank joined BJ's Wholesale Club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices, 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks. And that's just pregame. He knows teamwork and BJ's knows savings. This is your home, Coach. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's Home of the Save. You get a sense of that when you sit down and look at the guy face to face. Well, I'm really curious about this process, though, to even get there with the French. So it's easy on his end. He's like, fuck it, I'll do it. But had he really talked to anyone except that one French journalist? This one French journalist had. Most of the interviews that have existed over the past few years, decades really, have been secretive. So they weren't. Nobody got permission to talk to him, but managed to find ways to do it. The one case was a French journalist who basically said, basically kind of came at him as just, well, I'm a member of the public that wants to meet, you know, I've got my own personal reasons for wanting to meet him. And because she was, you know, attractive woman, Carlos is a obsessive womanizer. So you just, you know, put a pretty face in front of him. He's very happy to talk to you. And she managed to kind of have many, many visits with him. This was like back in the 2010s. That went past French Intel? Yeah, yeah. So she just showed up like she was, like she was like just like a fan or a member of his, you know, support group or something. But she, she didn't do it as a journalist, but she ended up writing a book based in French based on her experiences with him. What was her name? Her name was Sophie Bonet. Bonet. Sophie Bonet. B-O-N-E-T. Let's get a look at Sophie. Yeah. So she's a documentary filmmaker slash book writer. I've talked to her. She's a very interesting lady. This is, she's older now, but she did it, you know, a year later in her career. Okay. There's her name, Dubé. Then later, later on, in fact, I benefited from this one, one interview that happened. There's an Israeli journalist who really wanted to talk to Carlos and he wasn't allowed to. So he managed to talk of one of Carlos's attorneys. We had a couple, this one he married actually. He married his attorney. He had a kind of a prison ceremony. Oh, Carlos married his attorney? Married his attorney, yes. Is he still married to her now? She died about a year ago, but they were married for a long time. But he was able to, this journalist was able to talk the attorney into, basically bringing, you know, she had a cell phone she was allowed to bring into the prison meetings with Carlos. She'd bring her phone in. She'd ring this journalist up and basically relay questions like, Carlos, what do you think of this or that? And he would reply into the phone and the phone call was being recorded on the other end. So this Israeli journalist very kind of trickily got a pretty long interview out of him. They're not like that at all. No, no. So I wanted to go through the front door, but this journalist, this Israeli journalist ended up doing a documentary, documentary film based on this guy. What's the guy's name? Yaron, Y-A-R-O-N, Niski, N-I-S-K-I. And his documentary actually was released on Fox Nation earlier this summer. It was Carlos in his own words, but it wasn't Carlos, you know, face to face. It was essentially a kind of a bootleg interview with a guy. But I ended up making friends with the journalist. We found out about each other's work and so we collaborated. I was on his documentary, I was featured in, I was on that number of times and he shared all his transcripts. So all the conversations. So I had things that I could relate because of my conversation with Carlos, but also had the benefit of many hours, I guess maybe more than 10 hours of telephone conversations that he had. And what that all amounts to is you see a lot of things through Carlos's lens and you realize about half or more is just crap. But there are parts that, oh, he actually told the truth about this. So it's kind of a fact check. Because you could verify it. Yeah, you could see certain things you could, or certain things that he wouldn't have a reason to lie about because they're not flattering for him. And I ended up, because of those interviews, including Sophie's, I had a pretty remarkable book, and my own encounter and my own research and talking to CIA people and others who are involved in capturing him, that's a ton of material. And then it was just a matter of what makes the best story? What are those, this is the thing about narrative nonfiction, is you end up with a lot of stuff, but then almost like a filmmaker, what is the most interesting story I could tell based on the facts that I know? And then you construct the story out of, it's all real facts, but then you have to kind of be the painter with a paintbrush and paint the picture. This process to get to talk to him, though, where they came up with all of these stipulations, who are you talking to to do that? Are you talking with French intelligence? Started actually with the prison ministry. So there's a, you know, you write to the people who run this one prison. What's the prison? It's called the Poissy, it's the Maison Centrale de Poissy, but it's a little town outside Paris, about 20 miles to the west of Paris. And other fascinating thing about the prison, it had this past as a convent, but after when the Nazis took over the country, it became like a Gestapo headquarters. They killed and tortured members of the French freedom movement there. So it had this really, really crazy history, but that's what Carl was doing. - Living with the ghosts when you're in there, yeah. - So I wrote to them and they said, well, you need to send us all this information and all these forms you need to complete. I did that and I waited and waited. - What year did you write to them? - First year was 2024, when I just, early 2024, when I first reached out. And then there'd be like radio silence for months and I would send reminders, are you gonna let me see him or not? And they would just be no reply. So I started kind of working through other angles, trying. The French embassy in Washington, can they help me? And they were somewhat sympathetic. My second book, "Black Flags" came out in French and it had actually was well received in France. I did a lot of interviews. So I'm somewhat known there. And they were helpful, but then it was like, then there's just layers and layers of bureaucracy. There's the French justice ministry, which ultimately had to sign off. It just took pressure on so many pressure points until finally I got a yes. Once I got the yes, I went right away to France 'cause I was so afraid they're gonna change their mind. And even to the moment I walked into that prison to have the interview, I was so afraid that somebody was gonna back out. Carlos was gonna be sick or was gonna change his mind. The French were gonna decide they don't want me to talk to them after all. So part of the suspense was, am I actually gonna get to have this moment? - You're in the story. That's what's cool. It's like, you've written all these stories where you're reporting on it after the fact and going and visiting the places and living with the ghosts and trying to understand what happened. And then you're like, "Oh, there's a ghost in there," which is what you do here. But then the culmination of it is you get to go directly to the source and it's like you are now the first person walking into your own book. - Yeah, and it's the first time I've done that 'cause I've always had this distance in my other books. I'm kind of writing from a dispassionate third person voice. This is the first time I said in a book, I was there, I saw him. I was sitting there and Carlos walks in. And so describing that moment becomes personal because I'm part of the story. - Was it just one day with him in there? - Yeah, I was hoping. - And how many hours did you have? - I got like an hour and a half. That's all they would give me. So it was very compressed and it was frustrating because Carlos, even though he looks robust, you can see he's starting to fade. - He's 76, right? - Yeah, he's 76 now. And he would lose a thread in the conversation. He would repeat himself. And the other problem, I mentioned he has an obsessive interest in women. There was a woman in the room and she happened to be a friend of a French justice ministry official. They were kind of as a minder to make sure I didn't do anything, break any of my promises. She was 27, as I recall. He could not take his eyes off of her. And I would be talking to him. I'd ask him a question. He would ignore me. He's kind of facing the woman and saying things like, "Are you a real blonde?" - Still got that dog in him. - Just incorrigible. But you know, The French biographer, the woman I mentioned, Sophie Bonnette, said in her book she described it as almost that he's constantly on the hunt that any female within his view his sight in his range of vision was a potential target and no matter how old how young just whatever the circumstances he's just obsessed and he has to figure out does he have a chance with her is it somebody that's going to like him uh and and you can see him even as an old man working it and trying to kind of impress this this young woman and very very annoyed by the fact that i was also in the room and just creating an obstacle to him potentially getting to meet this woman so it was it was wild to see them see him kind of operate that way that's crazy you only got an hour and a half i mean that's an hour and a half more than pretty much anyone has ever gotten but my publisher or editor of who's who worked with me through the publisher when we were talking about this and about possibility yeah He kept saying if you can get carlos to grunt at you then that's that's a victory we just we just it just is important to have some personal connection with him and i got a lot more than that it was not what i had hoped to get i hope to be able to maybe meet him several times over many hours and record a conversation so it was much less than that but it was gratifying to succeed at least making the meeting happen looking at his life like just estimating it i'd need four full podcasts yeah yeah absolutely yeah i would need four three hour podcasts with the mood need to be about 12 hours to really yeah get down and dirty on the details from a storytelling step-by-step psychological profile like culmination of it all and then you need a whole other episode at the end to say well and after my research this was crap this was that's right that he didn't he made this up this didn't really happen um because that's the way it is with carlos he's he's uh he's not a reliable witness to his own life's events right you're plugging and playing like you said as far as like things you already know what information he can corroborate or where you know he's going to lie about something because you already have the other source and asking about his how he's captured for example that becomes in carlos's mind all about those acts of betrayal people who one of the memorable lines that i was able to use was you know his big regret in his life was he didn't kill more people and he should have killed those bastards who got him at the end and just uh was too slow on the draw yeah one of those guys like another i used a line from the wire earlier but another famous line where he's like the game ain't in me no more it feels like this is dude the game is gonna be in him until the day he drops yeah which i must say i'm hearing recently that he's he's in further decline that his his health is is waning and so it could be that by the times as you're still talking about the book he might may not have him with us anymore which is um a real possibility just because he's of that age he's 76 he's been in prison for a long time now you knew you were gonna maybe have like 90-ish minutes or something like that yeah so obviously very different approach to what i do here we're just talking all day and we see where it goes i had you had to be very prepared right i had annotated notes i had all these things i wanted to try out on him and like your conversation it actually it becomes once you start with him sometimes the notes just get disregarded because he goes down a trail and then you think well okay we'll ask him about this or i could tell that this line of questioning is not going to be fruitful he's not going to have anything to say or else he'll shut down this was also the frustration i'd start to talk about an incident that you know i know a lot about and he would just say i don't remember and and that would be it and that there's no point in asking him anything else because he would just kind of clam up he doesn't like to admit to things that he hasn't been convicted of and there are certain things like you'll if you read the book you'll see that he one of his big attacks in his historical career was bombing radio free europe and munich in 1981 he set up this elaborate bombing it doesn't go off quite like he intended but he succeeded in bombing this u.s built u.s run international broadcaster and creating a lot of damage but he didn't like to admit to things that he hasn't been convicted of he has never acknowledged having anything to do with it and he denies it you know fusively because he's never been convicted of it uh and he doesn't want to have you know be on record as saying that he attacked this american facility because it could have consequences i have all kinds of evidence that it was him that he did it and uh but he just wasn't going to talk about it in that interview a lot if if you talk to like or listen to a lot of great actors talk about roles where they play a villain or other of your fellow great authors where they talk about the fact that they're the fact that they're playing a villain or other of your fellow great authors where they talk about writing about people who were objectively evil many of them will often go through how the approach when they're going through it is to not judge the person kind of suspend that so that in the actor's case they can actually feel and be in their bones and let out that performance and in the author's case they can actually do the same thing to be able to write about it factually and then they'll say afterwards then they can kind of judge it yeah yeah what was your approach when you were with him from that perspective kind of the same dopey approach that i take to most of my interviews which is i i just want to know i'm not gonna i certainly can judge you carlos because you've been a terrible human being but i'm walking to this meeting as a very curious interested person who just wants to know what happened i want to give you the chance to tell me your story and i find that people really respond to that even if they insistent in most cases to speaking to the press or just talking to an author but if you come at it you're not prejudging them and that you it's not about your ego because i feel like that should not be in the way of of a conversation that should be about trying to get information and just say i am personally honestly curious to know what happened here what really happened in 1975 carlos when you as a 26 year old man walked into the headquarters of opec the international oil cartel and proceeded to take the whole thing hostage what were you thinking about and who put you up to it and i i could get him to ramble on about that because he's kind of proud of it that's the one thing he's probably most known for one of the most audacious terrorist attacks i've ever heard about that's what he was wearing that's what he was wearing that's that's that that day he was wearing a funky uh beret because that was again like his hero um che guevara wore a it was wore a black beret that was a black beret and he was wearing a black beret and he was wearing a his uniform he looked like pedro pascal right he does a little bit and in this one he's he's he's playing cosplay uh trying to be che guevara and walking into a to a big office building in downtown vienna austria 1975 with five henchmen with guns and took the place hostage and ran off with dozens of hostages out to the north african desert and ransomed them for millions of dollars so crazy story we'll come back to that okay you first walk in there and you're like oh shit it's happening yeah first of all were you meeting with them in like a holding room or something like that yeah so you think of a visitor's room in prison and it wasn't like that because you imagine you've seen those enough films where you know kind of there's all these chairs and maybe police people congregate it was if viewers have a sense the size of this studio it was smaller than this but about by about half it's about 14 and a half by 18 so yeah maybe that enough room for a table and four chairs around it i was in one chair carlos gets ushered in and he sits right next to me so we're like two feet away and um dangerously close and the guy you know it's not scary because it's it's uh you know under very controlled conditions and he's been a prisoner and he's an old man for a long time but kind of the moment of kind of like this is this is my research subject and it's like you've been trying to discover some new species and suddenly this is this animal is is you know it's it's this animal is is that you've been spending a you know years studying is is right there in front of your jurassic park yeah you're right you're looking at this uh you know t-rex or whatever it is a velociraptor and and thinking man i can't believe i am two feet away from this guy that i've been obsessively researching for the last couple years and here he is so it's pretty wild how do you walk in like what was the vibe walking in and how's his english too so his english is great and that's one of the things he's uh he's a smart guy and he's a smart guy and he's and he speaks five languages at least and um including russia because he was lived in russia as a kid of course spanish english french arabic and um so you hear him i'm there first so i'm kind of camped out in this little room just kind of waiting for him to show up and you can hear him coming down the hall because there's a commotion and everybody in prison knows carlos the jackal and they call him carlos and so you hear the french the guard saying oh monsieur carlos bonjour how are you and and then he he kind of knows them so he's ragging them and i described this scene where he's kind of shadow boxing with one of them and kind of you know pretend like he's beating the crap out of them so he's very playful in that way with them they they don't treat him like he's some you know arch murderer but just like he's some famous guy who happens to live in the same place where they work so um then he kind of walks in and you think he's gonna walk in like in a prison jumpsuit but no i don't know if it's because he's this is how he dresses to meet visitors or if it's how he dresses every day he's all natty he's got like nice pants on it has a nice brown leather bomber this is you know late winter so it's kind of cold in prison yeah and he's got like a little cap leather cap on like that would have thrown me off it looks like you might you might have met him at target or something so it doesn't feel like you're in prison at all he's he's a little bit you know scruffy now as he apologized actually for not shaving he hadn't shaved that for a couple days he had a little bit of stubble um takes off his hat sits down kind of gives me a very bemused smile and then almost like um what's our subject today what do you want to talk about you know who are you again and and i'm saying gee mr carlos uh you know i'm not like a school boy but i'm i'm trying real hard not to be kind of overwhelmed by the moment and and then i just explain again who i am i'm a journalist for the washington post i'm an author and i'm working on this book and i want to understand the kind of early history of these terrorist movements and you were right at the middle of all that and i just would appreciate having some of your memories and then i just went through my list and and the air where he was okay with talking that became a longer conversation and then others just kind of got x'd off my question list is okay that's that's not gonna be very productive but that's just kind of how it went so deep is a script writer okay and a writer and a novel writer as well i'm seeing the script here dude joey warwick running into the prison oh my god it's happening it's raining a little bit outside yeah covering himself he gets in there bonjour and they walk through it's like all tense he sits down he's waiting and then we just see like a dude coming through in a bomber jacket we don't see his face yet but he's like yeah shadow boxing with the prisoners along the side and you're looking he's not revealed then he walks in saunters in with a little gate welcome back freaking frack welcome to the jungle abc wednesday abbott is back it's gonna be the best year yet thank you now we can finally turn this up and everyone's going wild y'all think you it's going great abbott elementary anything can happen in the jungle right guys season premiere wednesday on abc and stream next day on hulu hank joined bj's wholesale club the day he became a father of 30 i coach football now coach hank saves up to 25 off grocery store prices 30 pounds of pasta three cases of protein bars 75 sports drinks and that's just pre-game he knows teamwork and bj's knows savings this is your home coach home of the save join for just twenty dollars at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only bj's home of the save sits down you're staring at him like shaking yeah and then he goes so what's going on and then the movie goes to venezuela yeah he's born yeah something like that that's a great scene yeah okay and then it ends can we copyright that so yeah yeah no i might need to write this now i see the movie getting adapted dibs no dibs on that d if we go to venezuela yeah we got that that's wild though like i'm getting chills thinking about like him walking in and just kind of the other interesting moment in the beginning was him figuring out what language you were going to use said can we can we speak in english because even though he's been in a french prison for 30 years english is his most comfortable language really spanish and so there was kind of oh good we can talk in english and that was kind of a relief to me too because i wasn't sure can you speak french no i barely like 15 words so it wasn't wasn't going to be much of a conversation if we had to speak in french and i had been so afraid i knew that historically he spoke pretty good english because he's on the record many of his crimes announcing himself in english and having conversations in english and writing letters but i i just he'd been in jail in france for so long does he still speak it i just didn't know and so it was a relief to me when he said oh great let's talk english that'll be that'll be better for me and and um so okay carlos what do we talk about and it was more kind of his curiosity what did i want to know and him being not reticent but almost kind of like oh yeah so do you want to talk about that i can i can fill you in on on vienna in 1975 let's let's chat with that so that's kind of how it evolved did you start with his childhood i think i no so i talked with because this very key moment for me is how he parachuted into the middle east as a young man and why and what were the circumstances so i asked him and because that was about that was the heart of this effort to try to reconstruct this period of history of you know of of sort of early uh terrorism why did you go there and what you know what were the circumstances what did you hope to achieve so i went right to this really pivotal moment early in his life when he became made the step from being what had been a college student in the soviet union got kicked out of school as it turns out you got kicked out got a girl pregnant had all these problems yeah i got kicked out of school because he was such a a partier there's this great scene where you actually you know sort of the soviet minders come into the university dorm to kind of uh because there's been a party and they're trying to figure out what went on they go into carlos's room there's liquor bottles all over the place and then this drunk prostitute stumbles out of a closet and she so carlos is out of his he's got money because his dad had money and he's he's he has foreign currency had money yeah he did which is interesting because this communist who was actually very rich but it's funny how that happens so prostitute someone's out of the closet and the the soviet authority is kind of what are you doing here her reply is i feel sympathy for the oppressed so she was trying to relieve their repression or something like that with whatever favors but so that was his life and because he was such a washout and he got kicked out of school he had nowhere else to go so he moved himself to the middle east partly because he was just out of out of options he didn't want to get in trouble with his family i and he wanted to become a guerrilla fighter so he went to the middle east and became one and so i wanted to try to get him to recreate that that that feeling and when why did it back and that's that's actually a really good spot to spawn in yeah to start in and then you kind of the rest of his career proceeds from there all right real quick i just gotta go back sure we'll come back and pick it up gotcha all right i could do the same all right we're back we were actually just starting to talk off camera i want to make sure we got on camera having this discussion because we were going back and forth about like the creative process and all that and as a two-time pulitzer winner i always you know i think when i have a guy like you in here i love to know what that looks like but the thing i was just going to tell you about that i said to save it for camera was whenever you're going to do anything whether it's music or writing or you know drawing whatever it might be creatively i always love the ed sheeran idea of it where he talks about the faucet so he shows on one side you picture a faucet that the water coming out is all brown and dirty and everything and then on the other side you see a faucet and the water coming out is crystal clear and he always talks about how in order to be creative and make great every session you do in some way some longer than others has to start with the dirty faucet just to get it out and start working it out and then you work your way the clean faucet absolutely and create great stuff do you agree with that is it is such an important lesson to learn because you think you're gonna sit down at a keyboard and just write some opus that that and the thing is no matter what your talent is it's all that muddy crap comes out first it's it's not refined and you you kind of sometimes just have to get it out right kind of almost like free write and and then once you once you're looking at that at some words on the screen and you're like oh i don't know how i'm gonna do this on a page then you can begin to kind of impose some order on it and do that filtering and purifying and also the hard part for me is because writing is such a personal thing is is to get other people to kind of weigh in to get very smart editors to kind of look at what you've done and say you know what as a outside observer i have to say this doesn't work or you should do more of this and yeah there's a lot of filtering before you come up with a product that looks like it's it's where you want it to be now when you were writing stories for many years that are news stories you generally correct me if i'm wrong always have some sort of word number idea on it going into it yeah right okay and then you're also writing things pretty often so you're going through stories you're getting sources and it starts to become the kind of thing where you have your voice you have your style but i'd imagine you get a good feel for what you got to do to put out the similar here's what's going on everyone else make your judgment yeah whereas when you're writing your books you're sitting with research for months and years at a time you're organizing your thoughts on based on all these different sources you're talking to and then trying to bring it back as you brilliant as you brilliantly do to like a narrative driven story what's your order there like how are you getting all the sources first or are you already outlining what you want before you talk to anyone how do you go about it so the other number there's the number that word count you'd mention in your head the other number that is factors in as a journalist but also as a non-fiction writer is the is deadline and if you're a journalist working for a daily newspaper or a wire service as i've done you have to be creative in a very constricted part of amount of time you have to kind of write the story sometimes you go walk in the newsroom in the morning you don't realize that by the end of the day you have to produce 1500 words or 2 000 words on this subject that you may not know very much about so you kind of do all this research and reporting and then you have to kind of write quickly which is not easy to do especially for i struggle with that and with this the same if i didn't have a calendar deadline with an editor saying we need this manuscript delivered by this date I would probably research forever there'd be no because often there's like an infinite infinite amount of information you could acquire but you're forced at some point to shut off the research spigot and just start writing and so for me I usually just have just allow myself to just run free with the research in the beginning and just try to learn as much as I can how many books are available on this subject and can I absorb them all how many articles have been written you know what are the interviews what are the original sources just just just absorb all this data and then at a certain point you start to think what is this story going to look like and how am I going to structure it and for me that process is massive white walls I have a basement that's just filled with just blank white walls whiteboard whiteboards let's go you can there are many ways you can do it you can like have whiteboard paint which doesn't work very discovered you can buy big rolls of it and just wallpaper your place your place with with just rolls your wife lets you do this only in the basement which she doesn't doesn't allow me to base doesn't essentially walk into my space because it's just it's so messy and so cluttered it'll just kind of make you make your head explode how many square feet we working with so this is like it's basically the size of my house but you know what else it is it's all my workout area and I find that if I'm struggling with like how to structure a story or how to structure a story I'm not going to be able to start a story I'll I'll love I'll work out and then suddenly as I'm doing something physical it comes to me and then I'll start writing it down on these ridiculous looking whiteboards where it's sometimes it's drawn out like how story starts here the scene or the kind of the moment where Carlos is walking into my the guest room in the prison and then how do I structure from there and what's that almost novel like what's the climatic moment when when if when does you know where's the point where there's the ultimate suspense and and you kind of create those those moments because you want it to be you want the reader to get to an end of the chapter and they just can't wait to see what happens next but that has to kind of be planned out like you have to kind of put those dots on a on on a on a matrix and figure out this is this is the rising action this is kind of the resolution this is kind of the cliffhanger moment this is how I'm going to weave in this very complicated sequence I'm going to try to figure out what I'm going to do with it I'm going to try to figure out what I'm going to do with it I'm going to try to figure out what I'm going to do with it it's a dramatic thread and to me it all becomes like written scrawled out on on on big boards with lots of of post-it notes stuck here and there and it looks like the kind of the product of a diseased mind when you're kind of you're charlie and always sunny yeah that's it that's and and and I don't think I'm necessarily um you know a visual thinker in that way but I found that just as a process of creating something like that I can't I can't create a book without that that kind of this gathering information let it kind of ferment a little bit and then start to kind of visually structure it and and create on a whiteboard what those scenes are going to be and how they're all going to string together but that's all it sounds like correct me if I'm wrong that's coming together while you're also still in the midst of flying to see people and meet with people and talk with sources on the phone and stuff like that because one thing that you discover is when you when you start to try to write you realize how much you don't know right you're you've gathered a lot of information but like oh I'm writing the scene but I don't really know the details that well where else am I going to get it so it turns out that you're you're still reporting up to the moment you turn in your manuscript because there's things holes that you didn't realize you needed to fill in until you're that far along and then it's gosh I gotta I gotta find somebody who knows this fact and and how am I gonna find this person who could it possibly be and it's there's a lot of kind of desperation reporting at the end yeah because you do have that tick tick tick of a deadline that's always and there's a lot of desperation reporting the back of your mind that I gotta turn this thing in and and um and so there's never enough time to kind of do it as well as you think you should be doing it but it's still a different kind again you're not dealing with the daily kind of deadline or the weekly deadline with writing the story you know that you have a year or two to do something like this and you can get all enthralled in it and also we forgot to say this but I know in the past when you've gone to write a book they have they've let you take some time away to go do that full time as opposed to like writing your stories all the time for the Washington Post but now over the past year and a half you've stepped back from being full-time national security reporter for the first time and now you're doing you're more like part-time with them yeah right I've got a I'm a contributing writer basically for them but I don't have the staff position anymore as by my own choice they took a took a buyout so I was able to get I did it so I could get some space that's where I can do some more creative work because I feel like because of that it's it's it's it's it's it's a it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's much more fulfilling to be in control of a story from start to finish and to have something when you're all done that you know this is not you know disposable daily journalism this is something that that hopefully stands and it's uh it's it's it's more of an achievement it feels like it's something that has kind of a legacy value in a way yeah real quick can you just take the phone off the cord right there I just don't want to interfere with the audio we're all good yeah it's it's like very finicky like sometimes our cords down here I'll step on it and I'll change oh wow okay they're sensitive I still don't understand some of that stuff with audio it's crazy but what is so when you write though again it's a different emotion when you're sitting down writing a book and writing chapters that you're living with than when you're writing a story at the desk at the Washington post but when you sit down and you're starting to write the book I imagine you're doing it in your basement where all these boards are but do you have like a like a set process you know that you hear from so many writers where it's like I write from 8 to 12 a.m or from from 8 a.m to 12 p.m I don't have any internet access I'm sitting in the same place or are you more free willing it's has to be structured and disciplined and I'm not naturally very good at that I'm a real procrastinator and that's the problem with a two-year deadline because you feel like oh I got plenty of time and I could take off and I can paint the living room or do something else and you can find a million ways to fill your time so I have to say all right every day this week I'm going to block out this amount of time in the morning I'm not going to take any calls I'm going to shut off all the alerts on my phone I have to do that and the other thing that's is my own little perfect personal trick is it's a physical hour hourglass like an egg timer kind of thing I've got a 30-minute hourglass and it's just a cheap plastic one filled with blue sand and I'll put it on my desk and I go boom turn it upside down that starts 30 minutes I'm not going to look up until the last grain of sand is is is gone and I'm that is like free write time I'm gonna do this and nothing else or if it's a research day I have to find out the certain fact I'll time myself and if I force myself to just not do anything else for 30 minutes that doesn't seem like a lot of time oh no but it's if it's focus time that you you can you can write a you know the start of a chapter in 30 minutes that's a lot of time but it's if it's focused time that you can you can write a you know start of a chapter in 30 minutes you can at least have a you know you're trying to do some research you can at least have in in your hands in 30 minutes a pretty good uh you know estimation of all the sources that that you need to to write this particular chapter you can do a lot in 30 minutes if it's absolutely focused time and the way for me to physically do it is to have an hour have the hourglass in front of me I also have an hourglass app so if I don't have if I'm somewhere else I'm at the library at a coffee shop I actually have a an hourglass app that all it is is a picture of an hourglass with sand going through it that's so and you can set the time on it and I'll I'll put the uh the phone at an angle where I can see it and then it'll until that little chime goes off that the hourglass is done with that amount of time I'm not allowed to do anything but this one task that I have for me so that's my own little cheat but I love that yeah that's great yeah I have a little look it's over there somewhere I have a little round timer thing okay just kind of turn and I'll put it I have to use it more than I do but I'll do that for like 30 or 60 minute intervals when it's really that I don't want to be doing and like try to time myself to get it done or even creatively restrict something yeah like I make for every episode we ever do on the main channel we're doing three a week I make all the thumbnails we end up testing three of them there's usually 15 to 25 that people don't see but like in that process each of those mornings I put out episodes usually like Tuesdays Friday Saturday or Wednesday Friday Saturday you know I'll try to like especially with a bigger episode that I know people are really looking for and want I'll try to restrict myself to like an hour to come up with all the ideas yeah so that even if I end up working past it I get so much done in that hour that the best ideas have somehow been creatively fleshed out because your mind is working against that this needs to be done by 10 30 instead of actually 12. yeah that I don't know it forces you to do something good I find I feel like these days to to get anything done you need something like that because the distractions with these phones if if something's unpleasant if it's even slightly you know like writing a you know the opening sentence to a chapter is just really hard thing to do and if you're struggling with it it's uncomfortable then all of a sudden what's you know what's my friend Julian doing or what's this message you just sent me or what's going on in Iran in the news today there's a million things that you your mind wants to kind of shut off and turn to and and if you if you allow yourself to wander like that you're never going to get that first sentence written. So I, for me, at least I need to have a physical reminder that right now I'm going to focus and I'm not going to do anything else until this, until that sand finishes leaving the hourglass. What goes into writing a brilliant opening sentence? Cause you described your writing style earlier. And I totally agree. Like you, your nonfiction books read like beautiful fictional thrillers. Like they're, you're engrossed in the story. You feel like you're there. You're not just reporting on facts. There's a time and place for that. And some people do a great job with that, but your style is like, I mean, I can see the movie playing out before my eyes. I, I love, I'm drawn to storytelling and, and for me, it becomes figuring out the most appealing way to tell, to create a scene, to get people in the moment. That's very conscious with me. I want, I want people to be there at that moment with me. And so, in order to create that scene, I kind of have to be there myself. And I spend a lot of time like in my little workout area, or sometimes I'll take a walk and I'll just to kind of, I'll, I'll be in that scene myself. And then I have to have to figure out how do I, how do I bring people along with me? What's that, what's that image that I want them to see that I see. And, and, uh, and sometimes the first time you try it doesn't work. So you just rewrite it and rewrite it until you come up with a way that does, but that's always, the scene creation is, is, I'm sorry, I'm jumping around here with this, but with nonfiction is a different exercise because fiction, you're just kind of imagining this, you're creating something in your head. And with nonfiction, you're putting yourself in a historical moment. You're trying to make yourself see what it was like to be Carlos the Jackal on this day where he did this certain thing. And, and how am I going to kind of paint that picture for people who are going to read the book? And it's, it's really, it's, it's a fun exercise for me. And when it comes across, when, when it succeeds, it's just, it's thrilling to myself. I just, wow, that, that really worked. Yeah. I know this, this, yeah. And, and I, I may take a long time to get there, but once I feel like I've nailed it, it's exhilarating. I've created this scene that I had in my head. Now it's on paper and it kind of works. So if you're interested in this video, it is a huge, huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. And finally, you can follow me on Instagram and X by using the links in my description below. Welcome back. Freaking frack. Welcome to the jungle. ABC Wednesday. Abbott is back. Thank you. I think you run this school, but you don't. It's going great. Abbott Elementary. Anything can happen in the jungle, right guys? I coach football. Home of the save. 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