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

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It's a unified government for the most part, but it's, it seems very, very precarious to me. And you say consolidated control. That is right. He is, yeah, like I said, he's no Democrat. He's an autocratic leader, but he's kind of like the dictator, 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, uh, but yeah, I just, I am 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 room after doing the cameras where someone says, listen up, motherfucker. All right. All right. You, you killed 10 of your secretaries. All right, fine. Do this shit. Yeah. Like it's gotta be some sort of business agreement there for sure. So, and there, 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 witnessing all the trucks coming across with, what was it? Crank or. Yeah, it was, yeah, it was, uh, Captagon, this weird. Slightly, I guess a bit like meth. It's, it's a strange synthetic drug that yes, 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, just, that was, you can't see. Yeah. 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. Yeah. How else do you solve it other than like invading the country? Sanctions became kind of like the easy fix for us. Yes. Because it didn't require any. Right. 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. It all shakes out. I guess that said, I've been waiting on this book and 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, because 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. Okay. But back in the 60s and 70s, there was this terror wave that involved hijackings of planes, hostage taking, murder of Israeli athletes in the 1972 Olympic Games. It was an awful period and any air travel involved the risk 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 the most famous of the Palestinian military. Even though he wasn't Palestinian at all, he was from Venezuela, he was some crazy kid who moved himself to the Middle East and thought he'd become a guerrilla freedom fighter and ends up becoming a sleeper agent for the Palestinians and then goes on to do one outrageous terrorist attack after another, and then eludes capture for 20 years since he becomes famous in part because he was so good at getting away with it and just living like an idiot. He was like a rock star living in fabulous hotels and meeting amazing women and drinking the best liquor and just had this almost fable-like existence. And this is the guy that was really the international face of terrorism throughout the last century, the 70s and 80s to the 90s. 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 by that time sitting in a prison in France and living not too bad. He was living not too badly if you're going to be in a prison, but. French prisons are nice? French, they're not so bad. The one that I saw before I visited him, it was actually originally a convent and it was built in the Middle Ages, kind of convent turned prison, maybe not too big of a stretch, but he was captured in the 90s in a really dramatic fashion that we can talk about if you want, but he's not allowed to speak very much because he's not allowed to speak very much because he's not allowed to speak very much. He murdered a lot of French people, 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's 75 years old and kind of an old man, but still kind of scary in his own way. 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, the Jackal was a name I remembered, almost like maybe kids who grew up in the 9-11 generation have this sense 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 as you know, I spent a lot of time in Jordan, but I would talk to Jordanian intelligence guys and they said, "Oh yeah, Carlos the Jackal "was here for a while. "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 up to? Is he planning a terrorist attack? And they tried to befriend him. Really? Yeah. Rather than 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 essentially 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? the thing is you can't that's a hard thing to say like it but it's he's a very charming guy and you and the people that would describe to me their meetings with them 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 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 gonna come out and just gun him down but after they figured out that he he was pretty much harmless, he wasn't gonna 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 internationally wanted fugitive. fugitive and to get to spend time with them, it was fascinating for them. Now, this is a guy, though, like you said, who 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, 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 kids' names were an homage to his communist hero. And Carlos got the middle name, Ilyich. He got the middle name, even though he was the oldest kid. And 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 very famous character at the time named Che Guevara, who was like a swashbuckling, you know, Latin American revolutionary. And you can see movies about him. You see his face 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 Che Guevara, was it really because of the things Che 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 Che Guevara. He wanted to have his picture on 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. And back then, you couldn't do that, but he just wanted to build an image, 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 mystique that comes with that. Oh, yeah. And you can't get laid with that name, I can't help you. Yeah. Well, if you can't get laid as Iliach, because that's just kind of a strange name. But if you're Carlos the Jackal, man, yeah, you could have films made about him. And you actually, of course, that went on to happen, the Born Identity series that was initially a novel series. It was a novel series by Robert Ludlum. He based his bad guy, his bad character, was Carlos the Jackal, and created the entire persona of this villain in all three of his novels, based 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 can see 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 in our meeting that reinforce the fact that he's essentially a criminal narcissist. He has that kind of brain, doesn't regret any of the terrible things that he did, feels like he's a hero in his own mind. But he is a charming bad guy, and that's. Even the Jordanians who were trying to debrief him in the '90s, they could certainly see that, that he's as one guy who became a senior official in the Jordanian intelligence agency. He said, "You can't help but like him. 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 chance to make money producing content from 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 I 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 Redline, the book on Syria. And was it pretty much right after that where you're like, "I got to go look at this again?" Yeah. There was another reason, too. So what you'll see in all my books is I have a writing style that's narrative nonfiction. Oh, it's brilliant. It's usually very character-driven. So the best book for me is one that tells a larger story, so there's a central character that propels the narrative. And the story I wanted to tell is another origin story, Black Flag, which is 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 Carlos, luckily for me, is in all the right places at all the right times. And he allows me to kind of string together, you know, a bigger story about this important development in our modern history with a singular figure in the middle of it who is. You can't take your eyes off of him, 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 gonna 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 maybe haven't 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, there was a lot of new material that had come out, you know, 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, 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. 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, 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 say yes. And it was a matter of, like, 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 does not publicize. He's just endlessly 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, just trying to. Doing a Julian Dory and trying to photographically remember everything that happened, and every nuance and every wrinkle in his brow, trying to kind of recreate every bit of that. But even with that, one of the restrictions I had to agree to was this was not gonna result in a Q&A interview, because the French did not want me to have this verbatim conversation with Carlos that would allow Carlos to reinterpret history. So it had to be. I was able to use little snippets, but I couldn't quote him. I couldn't quote him extensively. But that's. That does not even work. That seems really subjective to. Yeah. And it's frustrating, for sure. But on the other hand, my whole purpose in meeting him was I had some things I wanted to ask. But even with those things, I didn't think I would trust anything Carlos said. He's gonna exaggerate. He's not gonna tell me the truth. So it was more to kind of get him to kind of fill in, color a little bit of the blank spaces that I had in my own narrative. In my own narrative of what happened, but also just to kind of get a measure of the man. And that was very important. um mentally and getting my head around the project and writing about him in 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 and uh that i had with him in the prologue and then at the end of the book it's it's you know 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 where after you've read the story of his life you're you're sitting there looking at the guy eyeball to eyeball i like how you did that yeah so it's it's it was a it was a great way to end up you know after telling a story kind of like what did him what did it amount to what was it how did it matter and this episode is brought to you by universal pictures fucker and law spend this thanksgiving with the fuckers the beloved meet the parents 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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 one french journalist that 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 uh but fan it managed to find ways to do it the one case was a french journalist who basically kind of came at him as just well i'm i'm a member of the public that wants to meet you know i've got my own personal reasons for wanting to be on the show and because she was a you know attractive woman carlos is a 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's uh like she was like just uh 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 bonnet bonnet bon b-o-n-e-t sophie yeah so she's a documentary filmmaker slash book writer she's i've talked to her she's a very interesting lady this is she's older now but she did it you know earlier in her career okay but um then later later on in fact i benefited from this one relate 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 uh one of carlos's attorneys we had a couple this one he married actually he married this his attorney had a kind of a prison ceremony and oh carlos 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 uh 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 basically relay questions like carlo 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 got a pretty long interview out of them they're not like that at all no no so i i wanted to go through the front door but this journalist the israeli journalist ended up doing a documentary documentary film based on the guy's name is yaron y-a-r-o-n niski n-i-s-k-i his documentary actually it was released on fox nation earlier this summer um 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 right but i ended up making friends with the journalists we we found out about each other's work and so we collaborated i was on his his documentary as featured in a 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 with carlos but also had the benefit of many hours i guess maybe 10 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 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 captain capturing him had a ton of material and then it was just a matter of what what makes the best story what are those this is the thing about narrative non-fiction is you've got you end up with a lot of stuff but then you then almost like a filmmaker what is the most interesting story you're going to tell me what's the most interesting story i can tell based on the facts that i know right and then you construct um the story out of it's all real facts but then you you have to kind of be the painter with a paintbrush and that's right 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 like and are you talking with french intelligence or started 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 question it's called the posse it's the mason central de posse but it's a little town uh outside paris about 20 miles to the west of paris and um 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 since they they killed and tortured members of the french freedom movement there so it had this really crazy history but that's living with the ghosts yeah so i wrote to them and they said well you need to send us all this stuff 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 this is 20 the first year was 2024 when i just early 2024 when i first reached out and then to be like radio silence for months and i would send reminders are you going to let me see him or not and they would just be no reply so i started kind of working through other you know 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 uh actually was well received in france i did a lot of uh interviews so i'm i'm somewhat known there and they uh they 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 it just took pressure on so many pressure points until finally i got a yes and once i got the yes i went right away to france because i was so afraid they're going to change their mind and even to the moment i walked into that prison to have the interview i was so afraid that somebody was going to back out carlos is going to be sick or he's going to change his mind the french are going to decide they don't don't want me to talk to him after all so part of the suspense was am i actually going to get to have this 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 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 because i've always had this distance in my other books i'm kind of writing and from a dispassionate you know third person voice this is the first time i said in a book i i was there i saw him i was sitting there and carlos walks in and so describing that moment was uh becomes personal because i'm part of the story was it just one day with him in there yeah i was hoping 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's looks robust you can see he's starting to fade 76 yeah he's good 76 now and he's as 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 french minister justice ministry official there kind of is a minder to make sure i didn't do anything break any of my my promises he 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 like ignore me he's kind of facing the woman and saying things like are you a real blonde still got that dog just incorrigible but you know the uh the french biographer the woman i mentioned sophie bonnet said in her book she described it as almost that he's constantly on the hunt that any female with a 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 of the interview 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 it's 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 oh yeah yeah absolutely yeah i would need four three hour podcasts with them it would need to be about 12 hours to really yeah get down and dirty on the details from you know what you're talking about 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 in after my research this was crap this was that's right that he did 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 is 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 the line from the wire earlier but another famous line where he's like the game ain't in me no more feels like this is dude the game is going to be in him until the day he drops which i must say i'm hearing recently that he's he's in further decline that his his health 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 and he's been in prison for a long time now you knew you were going to 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 them and like your conversations it actually it becomes once you start with them 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 would 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 uh attacks in his historical career is that he doesn't like to 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 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 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 with him from that perspective kind of the same 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 may be resistant in most cases to speaking to the press or just talking to an author but if you come at it is that 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 right 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 che guevara wore a it was wore a black beret that was 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 uh 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 when you first walk in there in your like oh 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 that you've been spending a 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 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 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 kind of knows them so he's ragging them and i described this scene and he's like i don't know i don't know i don't know i'm dragging him 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 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 but he's all natty he's got like nice pants he's got like a nice dress he's got a nice shirt 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 cab 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 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 their subject today what do you want to talk about you know who are you again and and i'm saying gee mr carlos 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 and i'm an author and i'm 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 areas 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 going to be very productive but that's just kind of how it went so deef 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 then he walks in saunters in with a little gate this episode is brought to you by universal pictures fucker and law spin this thanksgiving with the fuckers the beloved meet the parents franchise returns with a twist robert de niro and ben stiller are back joined by ariana grande as the newest member of the family get ready for laughs unexpected surprises and a hilarious new chapter of the family saga fucker and law rated pg-13 only in theaters this thanksgiving get tickets now carhart's holiday gift guides were built in collaboration with the greatest gift giver of all time santa claus himself old saint nick counts on carhart's durable gear to have his back through rain sleep and snow on the biggest night of the year because when everyone's counting on you to do your job what else would you wear to work tap the banner to grab a gift for every hard-working person on your holiday shopping list or head to carhart.com sits down you're staring at him like bacon yeah and then he goes so what's going on and then the movie goes to venezuela yeah he's born 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 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 because i speak french no i very 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 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 will 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 know 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 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 there's this great scene where he 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 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 oppression 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 he 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 bathroom 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 is 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 shit every session you do in some way or another you're going to have to be creative and make great shit and 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 and you just have to get it out and you 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 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 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 about it and you're 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 brilliantly 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 yeah 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 news room in the morning you don't realize that by the end of the day you have to produce 1500 words or 2000 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, well, 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. You can, there are many ways you can do it. You can like have whiteboard paint, which doesn't work very well. As I've discovered, you can buy big rolls of it and just wallpaper 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. I can 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 down there? 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 start a story, I'll, I'll, uh, 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, you know, Yeah. it's, um, sometimes it's drawn out, like how story starts here, the scene or the kind of the moment where, uh, Carlos is walking into my 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 one 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 in, 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 they have to kind of put those dots on, um, 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, uh, dramatic thread. And to me, it all becomes like written, scrolled out on, on, on a big boards with lots of, of posted notes, stuck here and there. And it looks like 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, 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. Cause 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've, 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, 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 going to find this person? Who could it possibly be? And it's, there's a lot of kind of desperation reporting at the end. Cause you do have that tick, tick, tick of a deadline. That's always in the back of your mind that I got to 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 of, 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, 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, a full-time national security reporter for the first time. And now you're doing, you're more like part-time with them. Is that 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 where I can do some more creative work. Cause I feel like because I've been able to do this successfully, it is much more fulfilling to be in control of a story from start to finish and to have some space to do it. And I think that's, I think that's, I think that's, I think that's 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. 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 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 them 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 eight to 12 AM or from, from 8 AM to 12 PM. I don't have any internet access. I'm sitting in the same place. Are you more freewheeling? It's has to be structured and discipline. 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 to do that. And the other thing that's is my own little 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 grade of sand is, is, is gone. And 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, but it's, if it's focused time that you can, you can write a, you know, the 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, 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. 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 allowed 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. That's great. Yeah. I have a little, it's over there somewhere. I have a little round timer thing. I'll 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 shit 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 1030 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, 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, opening sentence to a chapter is just really hard thing to do. And if you're struggling with it and 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 of what I need to do. Yeah. 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 hour. glass what goes into writing a brilliant opening sentence because you described your writing style earlier and i totally agree like you your non-fiction 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 yes and and for me it becomes a 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 kind of i'll be in that scene myself and then i 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 it and i'm sorry i'm jumping around here with this but no it's good it's great with non-fiction is it's a different exercise because if fiction you're just kind of imagining this you're creating something in your head if with non-fiction 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 when 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 a fun exercise for me and when it comes across when it succeeds it's just it's thrilling to myself i just wow that you know that really worked yeah you know it when i know this when 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 thank you guys for checking out this clip if you haven't already subscribed please subscribe and hit the like button on 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 this episode is brought to you by universal pictures fucker and law spin this thanksgiving with the fuckers the beloved meet the parents franchise returns with a twist robert de niro and ben stiller are back joined by ariana grande as the newest member of the family get ready for laughs unexpected surprises and a hilarious new chapter of the saga fucker and law rated pg-13 only in theaters this thanksgiving get tickets now observe the north american dad 50s great polo collection he enters his vehicle information on carvana an offer appears in minutes remarkable he squints reads it again smiles and says dang that's a good offer the highest form of approval no haggling no hassle no one called him boss he's still on the couch astonishing sell your car today on carvana.com pickup fees may apply wearing those old cargo shorts if your wardrobe's due for an upgrade but you don't know where to start you need stitch fix your stylist learns your size your style and your budget then sends a box pick just for you they always nail the fit no store no hassle no subscription required get started today at stitchfix.com that's stitchfix.com some personality quirks are really funny like i don't know if you've heard of stitchfix.com i don't know if you've heard of it i talk to my left foot more than i talk to my right you know what's not funny and not a personality quirk ocd although the term ocd is widely recognized it's misunderstood by most people it doesn't mean being tidy or clean it's having obsessive fears thoughts and urges you question your character you question your safety that's ocd breaking the ocd cycle takes effective treatment go to no cd.com to learn more traditional home security only alerts you after a break and that's too late simply safe is changing that stop this is simply safe police are on the way we don't just alert we help stop crime before it starts plans starting around a dollar a day right now get 70 off your new system with professional monitoring at simply safe.com spotify simply safe ahead of crime in real time outdoor deterrence plans start at 49.99 a month visit simply safe.com licenses for alarm license information