When You Meet Carlos the Jackal, Something Weird Happens... | Joby Warrick

Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Do you ever put yourself there, like imagine that, like this could be my kid or whatever if I lived in a different place? As a father, I do that all the time. And it's hard not to because you have to have, if you have any empathy at all, you have to understand and appreciate this kid's pain. And also talk to people who are victims of the terrorist attack on Israel and in October. And it just makes you think that one thing that comes back to me over and over again is there has to be a better way than violence. And that's true for the terrorist organizations who, as they've ultimately discovered, violence doesn't really achieve their ends. It just creates more victims. But it's also true when you're dropping bombs instead of the messy work of diplomacy or using other levers to try to change conditions on the ground. Because once those bombs drop, you're creating conditions you can't control. And there are always shockwaves and repercussions and things that come back to you in ways that you can't anticipate. I mean, we invested in the 1980s in helping the Mojahadin, the Islamic freedom fighters, defeat a communist government in Afghanistan and thinking we were going to give them stinger missiles. And they're going to fight the communists there and then we could just wash our hands of it. And what was the result? We got al-Qaeda and we got 9/11 because we empowered those groups at the time. So it's, you know, it's just the thing I just said again. It's never the right way. It's never the easiest. It's much more important to kind of use those clunky but effective tools of diplomacy and, you know, just trying to change things peacefully on the ground. How do we do diplomacy if you don't allow one side to have their own government and their own state? And whatever regions you're going to end up doing it, like they, they haven't allowed you have all the hardliners that have really existed across the spectrum in Israel over the years who, for the most part, you tech were being obviously got killed for considering this. But like, for the most part, have said there can't be a state which means they can't have a military, they can't have a centralized government, which means it's a predisposed, like you know what's going to happen. And of course, black market groups terrorists are going to take advantage of the situation. So how do you fix it diplomatically if you don't at least start there. And this really is complained that the Palestinians are not good partners. They're not reliable. But if you don't allow some kind of self expression, then, then that pen up anger finds a way to express itself. And I was naive enough just because I cover these issues and was a diplomatic reporter for a while and watched kind of peace talks and the negotiation process between Israelis and Palestinians. And as as grim as it seemed and hopeless and kind of stuck in endless mire as it seemed at times, there was always a sense that eventually we're moving this way that eventually it's going to be a day when there's going to be handshake and there's going to be a way for Palestinians to have some kind of control over their lives and their government. Now there's just there's not even any discussion of it. It feels like that's completely whether it on the vine, you know, these the Saudis kind of use it as leverage every now and then and say there's going to be a kind of a peace settlement. The region has to be in this rate or Palestinian state, but the Israelis are making no effort now and even among the population, it's lost support. But you just can't ignore the fact that you've got what three or four million Palestinians many of them living within your border. They're not going away, so you have to find some way to accommodate them and to kind of give them sort of the apparatus of a state so they can function as a normal society. Otherwise, you know, you just you're stuck with an apartheid state that's just unstable and is volatile is eventually going to blow up on you. Yeah, well, you've written in the past before the one we're going to talk about today, you've written a couple books, including a Pulitzer winner black flags, which is in our 10 recommended books on the newsletter, by the way, link in description down below. But I always recommend this to everyone because it's such an amazing book. These two books, though, happen to have the line of you getting a really interesting high-place source, which is the King of Jordan, who I mentioned a little bit ago, where, you know, this guy's obviously lived an interesting life. You and I have talked about him in the past, but as I said, he's been someone who demonstrably over the past 25 years has almost been like a no-stradamus every time there is a major thing that's about to happen in the Middle East. He's kind of over the target with how things are going to go. It was no different in the days after October 7th, which we've talked about a bunch on the podcast before, you know, to where he was like, this is going to be an ethnic cleansing and everything. So have you had a chance to talk to him? Yeah, I do stay in touch with him and his people too. What's he thinking? So here's a guy, and I don't want to put words in his mouth and sort of suggest that I know everything he's thinking, but what's been conveyed to me very powerfully is the anguish that he feels over what's happened in his neighborhood. He was a military guy by training, and he's done a lot of, he's kind of personally involved in doing sort of aid drops to Gaza, so he does a lot of overflies. He goes on the planes and kind of sits in the back with the pallets, go out the back door and get parachuted down to Gaza. He's dumping the pallets. Yeah, he's been, he's dumping, yeah, he's bad-ass that one. I'm the dude who burnt this guy's burned his pilot. He flew the actual plane. Like he said, his father was the same way. His father was like a helicopter pilot, a firefight pilot, and they're all kind of daredevils in their own way. Interesting. He can be very emotional about it, but one of the most powerful stories that has been shared with me, and I don't like talk about specifics of conversations and sourcing, but the experience of flying over Gaza is like flying over Dresden. After World War II, and just seeing the miles and miles of just, well, it's not a big place, but just endless devastation. And his sentiment about that is that when the rest of the world see what really happened, when reporters are finally letting end to take pictures on the ground, they won't believe it. He had tremendous problems with Hamas. They were evil and a terrorist organization should not have ever been allowed to control politically Gaza, and they were absolutely to blame for what happened on October 23rd. But having witnessed the destruction that followed, he just emotionally just devastated by it. And one of the ones who kind of has to be responsible putting the pieces back together, and initially the signals from Washington is, well, we're just going to dump all this on your lap. We're going to see if we can force Jordan to accept all these Palestinian refugees as being citizens of your country. And get imagine that if somebody said, well, you ask you have to take the population of Haiti because they're destitute. They don't have a functioning government. So we're just going to append those millions of citizens to the United States. No country would accept that. Remember what he said to, at the beginning, before they were even doing that, when they said, will you take them in? And he said, this was like October 20th or something like that. It was in the weeks after October 7th. I'll never forget this. But he said, if I do that, I will give the hardliners of the Israeli government exactly what they want. They will ethnically cleanse the place because you think they're going to let them back. The hard right in the cabinet make no bones about the fact that they see a greater Israel project that includes Israel completely taking control of all those occupied territories. And then Jordan, by the way. And probably too. That's on the map for some of them. But at least West Bank and Jerusalem, and they feel like they've been sort of divinely appointed to have that dominion, to have to be able to control those territories. And so they're not thinking about any kind of future for Palestinian people because they don't care about it. They don't see it as legitimate. And they're absolutely explicit about that. And to see those comments by people who are supposed to be responsible leaders in government in charge of ministries saying something so terrible. It's shocking to hear. But yeah, our friend, the king has his hands full at the moment. Plus, he's one of the countries we like the Gulf Arabs in some cases even worse. His country has really struggled because of this ongoing conflict. Economically, I mean, terrorism, tourism is is dried up. You know, it's it's hard to move goods internationally. So commerce has really been hit hard. So this is a country that had has few resources. They don't have oil. They've got a very educated society. They've got really great natural resources. It didn't since they've got a wonder of the world, which is Petra, which is the most incredible place I've ever seen in my life physically. So they've got a lot to offer. But if people aren't going there, if they can't sell their goods, you know, the economy begins to crumble. And they also have the burden of millions of refugees from Syria, from the Syrian fighting who are still there. They're even Iraqi refugees from from a war 20 years ago. And they all kind of come to Jordan because it's safe and stay and don't leave and that becomes more mouths to feed. More drains on a country that has doesn't have enough water for its own people and they have really no place to turn too forward. They don't have rivers to speak of. And so they're problems just kind of build and build and build and just wonder how sustainable it is. Does he have a leg to stand on when it comes to like, I don't know, come into the US and being like, what the fuck? Yeah, you know, he he doesn't a sense that he's he's got a lot of respect. I don't. From the White House, it kind of depends on the day, you know, if they see him as being a useful ally, we've got military bases there, so they're important to us. But they get disrespected a lot, I think. On the hill, it's remarkable Republicans ain't done in the crafts when he comes to town, people want to sit down with them and listen to him because he really has a read on what's happening in the region. He has in a very sophisticated view because he's of the Arab world, but he's sort of Western educated. He speaks some people would say better English than than Arabic. He understands us. He has and as you've said, historically, he's had a pretty good sense of what is about to happen and kind of warns this one when we're about to fall into a cliff. And so when he does come over, people, people sit down with him. I just feel like he's, he feels that in important ways he's not being listened to and his country's suffering because of it. When you talked to him in the first book, you wrote the triple agent about El Bellowy, who is the guy who. He was a Jordanian doctor, who ended up becoming an al-Qaeda terrorist and blew up coast. Was that the base? Yeah, the CIA base in the Middle East, where, you know, a lot of CIA people and some military people were killed. You then set out to write this book to understand what the hell happened here, which is where you came across the king. And obviously, it was embarrassing for him that someone from his country had done this. But, you know, maybe for people out there who haven't heard some of our previous podcasts in the past, can you just explain who you learned El Bellowy was? And then I'd love for you to give what the king's perspective was on him becoming who he was. Yeah. So, Bellowy was one of these accidental terrorists. Somebody who was, I should say, he was a doctor. He's a Jordanian physician, a pediatrician. So he was Western educated, went to school in Turkey, spoke good English, but also had a great deal of, of sympathy for what was happening in the Palestinians, because it's, it's, you know, these are his people too. So he would watch the kind of fighting in Gaza, this is like 2008 time period, and become really inflamed by it and is outlet the way this, you know, middle aged, you know, middle class doctor with two children was able to event his rage was to was to basically create a podcast channel, sort of amounted to that, he had his own little, you know, blog of commentary, pictures, things he would post about about fighting going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I think he was doing it secretly on our fake name. So nobody really knew it was him. And then one day the Jordanians discovered that this really incendiary blog was coming from a doctor living right in their noses. So they arrested him, threatened him with jail, got him to flip and basically talked him into becoming an informant. And as an informant, he decided that he would actually volunteer for a foreign assignment. He told them that I'm willing to go to Pakistan and become an, you know, an agent for you, find out what Al-Qaeda is doing, find out what the Taliban is doing. So they send him off to Pakistan to be a kind of this undercover agent as a doctor. He gets there and he actually turns out his sympathy for Al-Qaeda is never left. And he becomes a suicide bomber, convinces the CIA that he's got important information about Al-Qaeda's leadership, sets up a meeting with CIA officers in a base in Afghanistan, walks into this meeting with Americans with a, with a bomb under his vest and blows himself up and kills seven Americans and, and a Jordanian intelligence officers there too. So this was a remarkable story. It was a, the single biggest sort of worst casually raid or the highest death toll for the CIA since the 80s, since the bombing of the, of the, of the US embassy in Beirut back in 1983, seven Americans killed at once. It just doesn't happen. And the, the King's involvement became pretty important because for one, the one Jordanian officer who was killed happened to be his cousin. So it was kind of very personal to him. And his government had been involved. His intelligence agency had been involved in setting up this, this agent as, as somebody who would help the Americans find Al-Qaeda leader. So he, he felt very, very deeply affected by this whole thing. But you know, the Jordanians have a good story to tell in this because they, they tend to try to get the Americans to be cautious in, in who they believe. You know, you've got a source who's giving you good information, but do you really trust them, especially if you haven't met him, which the Americans hadn't. And you know, there's sort of the red teaming that went on that should have gone on to, that might have identified the fact they had a double agent working, working with them was ignored. And so it became big tragedy for the Americans and for the, for the Jordanians too. Obviously, he didn't like the guy and didn't at all appreciate what he did for all the reasons you just laid out. But did you ever get to have a conversation with him that either went on the record or you know, maybe didn't make the book that you can talk about where he looked at it and wondered about the greater problem of maybe even some people from his country thinking the same way because of other things that happen in the region. Yeah. I think his consistent message and his consistent warning to the Americans has been that you, you can't kind of blunder your way into these things like the Iraq invasion, right, and not expecting that there to be blowback. And he actually personally warned President Bush before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that this, this is going to be opening a Pandora's box. You may think you can succeed militarily and defeat the Iraqi army and you probably can, but don't think it's going to be that easy when you're done. And I think his, his frustration with American policy is there's it's driven by these grand ideas and it's sometimes a very naive concept of how we can, you know, change the region and make it more suitable to us. And often we just don't know what we're doing. We don't know what we're getting into. And then guys like him, the king of Jordan and his his sort of other countries in the region end up holding the bag. They end up paying the cost that sometimes we walk away from things and go on with our, our business. And they're stuck with these problems for decades. Yeah. How did places like that feel about what they see in Syria right now? Because like it obviously previous leadership wasn't very good. I think that's very fair to say. But you have what's his name? Al Jalani? That's how it used to be called. That is Al-Sharab. Al-Sharab, right. But used to be called that in his old days as a terrorist. It's like you have a guy that sitting on stage with Patreas going Yeah, I hunted you 10 years ago. Nice to see you. Nice to see the mighthouse. Like what would that again? Am I crazy to think that's a little nuts or a little suspicious and they might be upset about that over there in other countries? This is a head snapping kind of moment. I still can't take it all in because you're right. I mean, I did a lot of research on this guy when he was known as Jalani. And when he was a member of al-Qaeda and he was sent by what we can now know is ISIS into Syria that kind of create an army, the Jalani army to fight the regime there and then send a go on beyond that. Was he in this book? He is in the book. I took yeah, yes, in the second part. And it was crazy. And I'm actually to remember the moment in 2012 when he he emerges as the leader of this al-Qaeda-aligned force in Syria. It's a moment when we really knew we had a problem because Syria started as kind of a civil war with protesters fighting the government and the government trying to you know, repress them very quickly. You get all these other outside groups coming in becoming part of the fight. And Jalani was the scariest of all because he was true al-Qaeda and he was coming into create a jihadi army. And you know, thinking of al-Qaeda having a kind of a failed state in which they can operate and build an army and and a mass weapons and then, you know, proceed to kind of carry out their agenda however they want to do it. That's what Jalani represented. 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. And what was interesting is Baghdaddi, the leader of ISIS, [BLANK_AUDIO] decided that he wasn't moving fast enough. And so they created a separate thing which became ISIS within Syria. But Jalani was hardcore. And to think that now he's kind of leader of Syria and in someone that we consider a friend and we invite to the White House and give him special recognition. It just kind of boggles the mind. And I have to say he's been everything he's done up to now has been surprising. He's been a tolerant leader. He's no Democrat, but he's allowed in the sense he's allowed religious diversity. He's there's incidences where he's still surrounded by some of his old friends in the old days. But at least he says the right things. Some Christians in Aleppo say he's been allowed and put up Christmas decorations when after he came in and things they haven't been able to do for years. So he at least is very good at playing the game of seeming moderate. Maybe it's just very pragmatic and it is realized that if he wants to succeed, he needs to stop alienating everybody else around him the way that ISIS certainly always did. But kind of every time I see him speak, I keep thinking this guy was a serious terrorist. He was on the most wanted list. He was, we considered him the worst, the worst. Now he's a leader of a country, which is basically-- - Blame basketball. - Blame basketball. So it's nuts. It's one of these things that I didn't think, first honestly, I didn't think that the Assad regime was gonna ever be driven out. I just thought, I didn't. - You didn't. - I didn't, I didn't see. It seemed like around 2013, 2014 when it just, it seemed when the Iranians and the Russians both decided that they were all in and keeping Assad in power. They just didn't seem to be an exit. There wasn't any way for him to be driven out. The Americans and the other neighbors weren't willing to invest enough in the opposition to kind of drive him out. So it's just gonna be this permanent bad situation and kind of a military stalemate with parts of Syria still run by opposition groups, particularly by Jolani's organization, which was kind of a kind of related group. - But they also had hundreds of subgroups duking it out like it was Mad Max Fury Road in Syria this whole time, which that was the one part that never made sense to me because I was going on for so many years. I'm like, what does, how much does Assad even get to control? - Yeah. - You know? And it's like, is he collecting taxes from the Kurds and the South? I feel like those checks are gonna bounce if he gets them at all. - Yeah, he had had some of the cities in the Arlan and the coast and big chunks of the rest of the country were not under Syria control. And ISIS was heavily, you know, involved in the eastern part of the country. These al-Qaeda-related groups are in the north backed by Turkey in some cases. And like you're right, a hundred other, literally, hundreds of subgroups and local militias of some of them with their own kind of funding from Gulf Arab countries. And it was just lawless kind of Mad Max kind of place. And the one thing that Jolani/Alsharah has done is mostly consolidated control. So it's a unified government for the most part. But it seems very, very precarious to me. - And you shake and solidate and you control? - That it's right. He is, like I said, he's no Democrat. He's an autocratic leader. But he's kind of like the dictator. - But he looks good in a suit. He knows how to say the right things 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, no doubt. - Yeah, no doubt. - All right, all right. 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 could, so. - And they're, and I must say in that region, they're used to kind of these complexities that kind of working out as businessmen. And you don't cross certain lines, otherwise you get whacked, 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 of 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, cranker? - Yeah, it was, yeah, it was so, it's kept to go on. It was kept to go on. - It was kept to go on. - This is weird, slightly, I guess, a bit like meth. It's a strange synthetic drug that, yeah, sanctions dried up sources of income for the Syrian regime. And so they potentially turned to kept to go on to create revenue for themselves. And so it became basically the world's biggest narco state. And it massive amounts of drug manufacturing with shipments of millions and millions of these capped on tablets, heading out all over the world, particularly in the Middle East, but it was just, that was, you can't say it's a direct result of sanctions, but it was certainly a side effect. - Yes, and that begs the question. It's like how much of the whole like sanctioned 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 because it didn't require any real effort. We don't have to send troops anywhere. We can just say, "Wow, we're gonna sanction this country." 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 for sure, creating a drug economy that didn't exist. - Yeah, that's unfortunate, but we'll see how it shakes out, I guess. That said, been waiting on this book. It's time to get to it a little bit. - Okay, sounds good. - 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 when it visited Carlos the Jackal in prison, is that correct? - Yeah, that's right. - So it's March 2025. - Okay, who was Carlos the Jackal? Let's start there for people who don't know, 'cause 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 to remember it. 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. This is 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, 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 grilla freedom fighter and is up becoming a sleeper agent for the Palestinians and then goes on to do one outrageous terrorist attack after another and then eludes a capture for 20 years. And she 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 meeting amazing women and drinking the best liquor and just had this almost fable-like existence. And this was the guy that was really the international face of terrorism throughout the last century, the '70s, '80s to the '90s, before Bin Laden. Before Bin Laden basically changed how we think of terrorism, this was the guy. Bin Laden happened and we kind of forgot about him because he was, by that time sitting in a prison in France and 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. Convent turned prison and it's 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 a lot of speak very much because 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 this 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 incomes this man. He 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. 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 remembered, you know, almost like maybe kids who grew up in the 9/11 generation have the sense of bin Laden being this boogie man 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, you know, 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 Jordan and intelligence guys and he 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 and his little villa where he stayed in a man and try to figure him out. What is he doing here? What is he up to? He was he planning a terrorist attack and they tried to befriend him. Really? Yeah. Random arrest them. 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 meantime, they essentially got this amazing debrief with Carlos because they would sit down with them, get him super drunk, and just get him to talk about the shit that he did. 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. They like him. The thing is, you can't. That's a hard thing to sit like him, but he's a very charming guy. 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 going to come out and just gun him down. But after they figured out that he was pretty much harmless, he wasn't going to do anything to them. They were just fascinated to hear stories and just kind of, because it's a, he has the wildest stories in the world. He's lived the life of Rockstar and being a slash terrorist and internationally wanted a fugitive, and to get to spend time with them was fascinating for them. Now, this is a guy, though, like you said, who's born in Venezuela. His father's a communist attorney and pre-communist Venezuelans, not 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 Aliyevich, sorry, Ilyevich Yulianov. So he named his three sons, Lenin, Vladimir, and then Ilyevich. 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. 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, the time named Shay Guevara, who is 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 Shay Guevara, was it really because of the things Shay Guevara emoted that you just laid out in a 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 Shay Guevara. He wanted to have his picture on T-shirts. If you'd been living today, you'd have an Instagram account, you'd be all over TikTok. He'd be promoting himself in his own brand. 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, you know, mystique that comes with that. Oh, yeah. And you can't get laid with that name. I can't help you. You can't, well, if you can't get laid as Eliatch, 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 you actually, of course, that went on to happen. The Born Identity series that was initially a novel series by Robert Lundheim. He based his bad guy, his bad character, was Carlos the Jackal, 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, 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 you said lots of things, you know, in our meeting that reinforce the fact that he is 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, you know, even the Jordanians who are trying to debrief him in the, in the 90s, they could certainly see that 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, you know, I just liked him and, and was almost sorry to see him go. So you're talking with your guys and their whisper in about this and telling you the stories in the 2010s while you're working on other things. And then you end up finishing right line the book on, on Syria and was it pretty much right after that where you're like, I got to go look at this again. There was another reason too. So I have, what you'll see in all my books is I have us, kind of a writing style that's, it's narrative nonfiction. It's usually very character driven. So at the best book for me is one that tells a larger story, but so there's a central character that propels the narrative. And the story I wanted to tell is, is another origin story, black flag, which is 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 Carlos, luckily for me, is in all the right places, in all the right times. And he allows me to kind of string together a, you know, a bigger story about this important development in our, in our modern history with a singular figure in the, in the middle of it, who's, you can't take your eyes off of it because he's just always doing something outrageous. This, 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, there was a lot of new material that had come out of, you know, archival material from the 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, their little dirty secret because we've got Carlos to tackle living with us. And we, we could stop 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, so 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 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 we got to where we are with terrorism and these other national threats, it'd be worth the 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 that let's just start with the easy part. Easy part was getting Carlos to see yes. And it was a matter of like contact as a lawyer, explained who I am, talked about my books, and I said, I'd love to meet your guy. And Carlos says a lawyer, Carlos says lawyer, passed along the message, Carlos writes back, said, sure, Washington Post guy, I'll meet with you. He does 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. I don't want to let anybody talk to him, I accept 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 on a notebook. Pencil on a notebook. That's it. All really old-scriding. Writing things down as fast as I could. Like transcribing. And then after it's over, going back to my hotel, I was just trying to do on a Julian Dory and trying to beautifully remember everything that happened and every nuance and every wrinkle in his brow, trying to recreate every bit of that. But even with that, one of the restrictions I had to agree to was this was not going to result in a Q&A interview because they didn't, the French did not want me to have this verbatim conversation with Carlos that would allow Carlos to reinterpret history. So it would have to be, I was able to use little snippets, but I couldn't quote him extensively. But that doesn't even work. That seems really subjective to you. 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 going to exaggerate. He's not going to 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 it 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 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 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, people have read this part of the book and 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, after telling a story to kind of like what did him, what did it amount to, how did it matter? And 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 and he's like, "Fuck it, I'll do it." But had he really talked to anyone, except that one French journalist? - That this one French journalist had most of the interviews that have existed over the past few years, decades really, had been secretive. So they weren't, nobody got permission to talk to them, but managed to find ways to do it. That one case was a French journalist who basically kind of came at him as just, while 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 a, you know, attracted woman, Carlos is a obsessive womanizer. So you just, you know, put a pretty face in front of him. Mary'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 one passed, French, and Tom. - Yeah, so she just showed up like she was like, just like a fan or a member of his, you know, support group or something, but 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. Bonet. - Sophie Bonnet. - B-O-N-T. - You looked Sophie. - Yeah, so she's a documentary filmmaker, slash book writer, so I've talked to her. She's a very interesting lady. This is, she's older now, but she did it, you know, or later in her career. - Okay. - There's her name, Debi. And then later on, in fact, I benefited from this, 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' attorneys. He had a couple, and this one, he married, actually. He married this attorney. He had a kind of a prison ceremony. - Carlos married his attorney? - Yes, as he's 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 bring 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, I wanted to go through the front door, but this journalist, this Israeli journalist, ended up doing a documentary film. - What's the guy's name? - Your own YA-R-O-N-Niske, N-I-S-K-I. And his documentary, actually, it 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 kind of a bootleg interview with a guy. But I ended up making friends with the journals. We found out about each other's work. And so we collaborated, I was on his documentary, I was featured in a number of times, and he shared all his transcripts of 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, we actually told the truth about this. So it's kind of a fact check on that. Yeah, you can say it's certain things, or certain things that he wouldn't have a reason to lie about 'cause they're not flattering for him. And I ended up, because of those interviews, including Sophie, so I had a pretty remarkable book, and my own encounter in 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 you, 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 the paintbrush and paint the picture. This process to get to talk to him now, where they came up with all of these stipulations, who are you talking to, to do that? Like, are you talking with French intelligence? Or started actually with the prison ministry. So there is a, you know, right to the people who run this one prison. What's the prison? It's called the posse, it's the masson central deposit, 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 and so they killed and tortured members of the French freedom movement there. So it had this really crazy history, but that's what happened with the ghost in there. 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? It was 20, the 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, well, are you gonna 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 they had actually, as 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. And 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 is gonna be sick, or he's gonna change his mind. The French are gonna decide they don't, don't mean to talk to him after all. So part of the suspense was, am I actually gonna get to have this moment? - You're in the story, and 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. 'Cause I've always had this distance in my other books. I'm kind of writing, and from a dispassionate, 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 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 it looks robust, you, you can see his starting to fade. - He's 76 now. - 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 some obsessive interest in women. There was a woman in the room, and she happened to be a French minister, just as ministerial official. They were kind of as a minder to make sure I didn't do anything, break any of 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? (laughing) - She has that dog in her hair. - She just decordable. But, you know, the French biographer, the woman I mentioned, Sophie Bonnet, said it in her book. She described it as almost that he is constantly on the hunt. That any female within 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 gonna like him? And you can see him even as an old man working it, and trying to kind of impress 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 wild to 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 work with me through the publisher, when we were talking about this and about the possibility of the interview, he kept saying, if you can get Carlos to grunt at you, then that's a victory. 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 would hope to get. I hope to be able to maybe meet him several times over many hours in recorded conversation. So it was much less than that, but it was gratifying to succeed in at least making the meeting happen. - Looking at his life, like just estimating it, I'd need four full podcasts. - Oh yeah, yeah. - Yeah, absolutely. - Yeah, I would need four, three hour podcasts where the moon need to be about 12 hours to really 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, after my research, this was crap. This was bullshit. He made this, this didn't really happen. 'Cause that's the way it is with Carlos. He's not a reliable witness to his own life's events. - Right, and you're plugging him playing, like you said, as far as things you already know, what information he can corroborate or where you know he's gonna lie about some of 'cause you already have the other source. - And asking about his values captured, for example, that becomes, in Carlos's mind, all about, it was acts of betrayal, people who, one of the memorable lines that I was able to use was 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 was too slow on the draw. - Yeah, one of those guys used a line from the wire earlier, but another famous line where he's like, the gaming in me no more feels like this is dude, the game is gonna be in him till the day he drops. - Yeah, which I must say, I'm hearing recently that he sees in further decline that 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 a real possibility just because he's of that age, he's 76, he's been in prison for a long time. - No, you knew you were gonna maybe have like 90ish minutes or something like that. - Yeah. - So obviously, very different approach to what I do here or just talking all day and we see where it goes. - I 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 conversations, it actually, it becomes, once you start with them, sometimes the notes just get disregarded because he goes down to trail and then he think, well, okay, we'll ask him about this or I could tell with this line of questioning, it's not gonna be fruitful, he's not gonna have anything to say or else he'll shut down. This was also the frustration that I'd start to talk about and incident that, you know, I know a lot about. And he would just say, I don't remember. And that would be it and that I just 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 for Europe and Munich in 1981. And he set up his elaborate bombing. It doesn't go off quite like he intended but he succeeded in bombing this US, built US 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, fusedively 'cause he's never been convicted of it. And he doesn't want to have, you know, be on record as saying that he attacked this American facility 'cause it could have consequences. I have all kinds of evidence that it was him that he did it and but he just wasn't gonna talk about it in that interview. - A lot, if you talk to like, or listen to a lot of great actors talk about roles where they play a villain or other, you 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 actors case they can actually feel and be in their bones and let out that performance. And in the authors 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? - I kind of the same dopey approach that I take to most of my interviews, which is I just wanna know, I'm not gonna, I certainly can judge you, Carlos, because you've been a terrible human being, but I'm walking 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 to stalk into an author. But if you come at it, you're not prejudging them and that it's not about your ego, 'cause I feel like that should not be in the way 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 could get him to ramble on about that, 'cause he was 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 day. He was wearing a funky beret because that was again, like his hero, Che Guevara wore a black beret that was his uniform. - He looked like Pedro Pascale, right? - He does a little bit. And in this one, he's playing cosplay, trying to be Che Guevara and walking into a big office building and downtown Vienna, Austria in 1975, with five henchmen, with guns, and took the place hostage. And ran off with dozens of hostages out into the North African desert and ran some of them for millions of dollars. So crazy story. - We'll come back to that when you first walk in there and you're like, oh shit, it's happening. - Yeah, first of all, were you meeting with him 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 please people congregate. It was, if viewers have a sense of the size of this studio, it was smaller than this, by about half. - It's about 14 and a half by 18. - So yeah, maybe that, the bathroom 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 the guy, you know, it's not scary 'cause it's under very controlled conditions and he's been a prisoner and he's an old man for a long time. But to kind of the moment of kind of like, this is my research subject and it's like, you've been trying to discover some new species and suddenly this animal is that you've been spending your years studying is right there, front of you. - You're a Jurassic Park. - Yeah, you're looking at this T-Rex or whatever it is a velociraptor and they can, man, I can't believe I am two feet away from this guy that I've been obsessively researching for the last couple of 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 a smart guy and he speaks five languages at least. And including Russia because he was lived in Russia as a kid, of course, Spanish, English, French, Arabic. And so you hear him, I'm there for us. 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 'cause 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, Michio Carlos, Banzhou, how are you?" And then he kind of knows them. So he's ragging him and I describe 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 him. So he's very playful in that way with him. 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. 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.