Speaker 1: M hm, sis, No, that's not how the Robert Evans here.
Speaker 1: This is behind the bastards of podcast that is never
Speaker 1: introduced well despite the significant resources that we put into
Speaker 1: too writing and producing it, um, which just shatters the
Speaker 1: whole the whole effect of the product. And really, um,
Speaker 1: it's a real shame. UM. So it's just I know
Speaker 1: people are tuning out right now because I said syphilis.
Speaker 1: Nobody likes to think about syphilis. It's a horrible illness.
Speaker 1: But you can't go back in time. This is how
Speaker 1: we started the episode, and so this is how we're
Speaker 1: continuing things. This is part two of our episode on
Speaker 1: the Golden Age of terrorism, and my guests, as in
Speaker 1: part one, are my friends and uh colleagues in getting
Speaker 1: repeatedly assaulted by police and federal agents being a lane. Hello.
Speaker 1: So uh, we talked about, you know, a couple of
Speaker 1: different things. Last episode. We talked about jacking and this
Speaker 1: guy the highest of jack the highest of jackings, um
Speaker 1: as high as you can get and still be jacking
Speaker 1: until space jackings happened. Just to wait, I have plans.
Speaker 1: I'm excited for that decade when it's legal to basically
Speaker 1: hijack a spaceship to go to space Cuba, which is like,
Speaker 1: I'm excited for Space Cube. Is gonna be a good time.
Speaker 1: We're all gonna have fun in space Cuba. We'll all
Speaker 1: retire to the mountains of space Cuba and only half
Speaker 1: of us will come back. We talked about the Japanese
Speaker 1: Red Army too, and now we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: the highlight of the Golden Age of terror. If if
Speaker 1: you're asking my opinion on the matter, Carlos the motherfucking
Speaker 1: jackal This guy, bad person, real bad man. Um, goddamn.
Speaker 1: He had some style like some pinash in. Carlos the Jackal. Um.
Speaker 1: This was a dude all new to me. He did
Speaker 1: some terrorism and not like not like your Samabin law
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna get people money and you're gonna be
Speaker 1: yeah and on day out like not none of that ship.
Speaker 1: He was like a he was like he was a
Speaker 1: James Bond villain. He was a I'm going to keep
Speaker 1: a machine pistol under my coat and leap out of
Speaker 1: windows and have all sorts of gadgets and shoot up
Speaker 1: opec He was. He was. He was just cool as hell. Um.
Speaker 1: Really terrible to women, but cool as hell. Did you
Speaker 1: cover them in gold so that none of their breathing
Speaker 1: the axpixiated. He was terrible to women in a really
Speaker 1: unique way that I actually think is kind of fascinating.
Speaker 1: Not really abuse. I mean, we'll decide if you think
Speaker 1: he's an abuser. It's more complicated than that. Their skin
Speaker 1: can't breathe and they suffocate somehow. Is also really unique. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is unique, but he did not do that. But
Speaker 1: what he did it was also pretty Let's move on here.
Speaker 1: They weren't self critics, yes, weren't. So yeah, Carlos the Jackal.
Speaker 1: Carlos was for a brief period, not a brief, for
Speaker 1: like a decade or more, the most wanted man in
Speaker 1: the world. Um, he was the most famous terrorist on
Speaker 1: a planet until again, like nine eleven really fucked the
Speaker 1: curve on a lot of things. Because now, like you
Speaker 1: hear about his record and it doesn't sound nearly as
Speaker 1: impressive as as having a nine eleven in there. But
Speaker 1: Carlos fucked up a lot of people. He personally killed
Speaker 1: at least eighty three people with his own hands. Um,
Speaker 1: still beat but in terms of actual people that you
Speaker 1: shot in the fucking face, yes, And then the SI
Speaker 1: in Lundon didn't dive out a lot of windows. A
Speaker 1: significant number of them would have been his ideological allies,
Speaker 1: which just tie in with the Japanese Red Army thing,
Speaker 1: because you know, the Palestinian liberation movement had to be
Speaker 1: purged of people who want to deliberate Palestines slightly differently
Speaker 1: to um or people who I think it was more
Speaker 1: often people who were like, you know, working with some
Speaker 1: sort of Interpol or whoever whatever. Um. So he killed
Speaker 1: personally about eighty three people, and then he claims that
Speaker 1: men and women under his command killed two thousand more. Um.
Speaker 1: He's still alive and in prison today, so like he
Speaker 1: still talks he almost nine eleven, Yeah, he's he might
Speaker 1: he might have committed close to a nine eleven if
Speaker 1: he added all together. UM. Now that said, these numbers
Speaker 1: are heavily debated, and a lot of people will say
Speaker 1: that he exaggerates massively the claims of the deaths that
Speaker 1: he were tied to, and he was a consummate liar
Speaker 1: because of the whole international terrorist thing. So like who knows, um,
Speaker 1: But definitely, like the debate between scholars and lawyers isn't
Speaker 1: like whether or not he killed a bunch of people.
Speaker 1: It's whether or not he's got like an ocean of
Speaker 1: blood or river of blood on his hands. Either way,
Speaker 1: killed a shipload of folks, So let's talk about him.
Speaker 1: Ill Ramirez Sanchez was born on August on October twelfth
Speaker 1: nine in Michelina, Venezuela. His Russian first name was the
Speaker 1: product of his father, Ramirez Navas, who was both a
Speaker 1: deeply committed Marxist and a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie. Um.
Speaker 1: So he's he gets Lennon's first name from his dad,
Speaker 1: the rich lawyer um who Lennon also famously Yeah a
Speaker 1: poor kid. Yeah, not a poor kid at all. Um,
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time on very nice trains. Uh
Speaker 1: So yeah. His His mom, Elba, was not a Marxist,
Speaker 1: though she was Catholic and Catholic as all hell um,
Speaker 1: and she did not like that her son wanted to
Speaker 1: name their boy after a dead Marxist revolutionary UM, but
Speaker 1: he refused to listen, telling her the biggest man in
Speaker 1: all humanity, Vladimir Ilich v alias Lennon. Humanity before the
Speaker 1: bomb is divided into two periods, before and after Lenin
Speaker 1: not Christ who was an ordinary run of the Millman.
Speaker 1: So that's that's like what Marxism is for his dad.
Speaker 1: It's not like it's not like I'm interested in left
Speaker 1: wing politics. It's like lenin is my is a functionally
Speaker 1: a god who my basic worship. So that's Ramirez Navice
Speaker 1: uh Ilich his dad UM and he's Illaged, not Carlos
Speaker 1: at this point, because at no point is his actual
Speaker 1: name Carlos. But that's a story for later. So today
Speaker 1: Venezuela is famed for being, um, you know, either a
Speaker 1: communist tellhole or a glorious socialist paradise, depending on like
Speaker 1: what chunk of Twitter you hang out in. Um. But
Speaker 1: when young Illach was born, the nation's political situation was
Speaker 1: a lot more fluid. More than a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand of Venezuelans died in the National Wars of Independence,
Speaker 1: which had occurred in the early eighteen hundreds. UM and
Speaker 1: kind of freed them from Spain, and the success of
Speaker 1: Venezuelan revolutionaries against Spain gave them a reputation for being
Speaker 1: like the best rebels in Latin America. So Venezuelans traveled
Speaker 1: across the whole region during the mid and late eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds launching like wars of independence in other countries. So
Speaker 1: that was kind of like the you're of Venezuelan like
Speaker 1: are are. One of the things we're known for is
Speaker 1: our revolutionaries, which is the Cuba of its day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone needs to export something. Yeah, they're called And if
Speaker 1: you're a government, a good thing to export is young
Speaker 1: men who went to for throw governments. That is the
Speaker 1: thing to send out of the country. I would put
Speaker 1: it out there that the United States exported quite a
Speaker 1: few of those, and it seems to have worked out
Speaker 1: okay for them. Yeah. Now they all have super fun
Speaker 1: painkiller hobbies. Yep. Um so yeah the uh yeah, As
Speaker 1: often happens, liberation for Venezuela was followed by a series
Speaker 1: of brutal dictators who seized power and held it through
Speaker 1: horrible violence. Yeah, it tends to work that way. Ramirez
Speaker 1: novice Ilich's father spent his early life watching a series
Speaker 1: of four dictators rise to power and be overthrown. While
Speaker 1: he initially enrolled at seminary, he changed his mind rather quickly, and,
Speaker 1: like Stalin, declared himself an atheist while still a teenager.
Speaker 1: He spent most of his youth hanging out on the
Speaker 1: edges of Ennezuela's dissident scene, and he got into minor
Speaker 1: trouble for harboring a fugitive from justice. The authorities declared
Speaker 1: him a communist, although he insists he did not know
Speaker 1: what the word communists meant at the time he was
Speaker 1: arrested and imprisoned for it. I would doubt that based
Speaker 1: on his name. No, No, he's not Illage. This is
Speaker 1: his dad. Sorry I'm talking about I'm we're going into
Speaker 1: like why his dad he is? Yeah, that's Ramirez Novice.
Speaker 1: I could have been a little clear about that, but yeah,
Speaker 1: his dad gets arrested for being a communist before he
Speaker 1: knows what communism is. And so there's an interesting arc
Speaker 1: somewhere in there where he goes from not knowing what
Speaker 1: communism is to naming his kid after as the story
Speaker 1: we're gonna tell before we tell the story of the Yeah,
Speaker 1: had some fun stuff here. So Ramirez learns quickly and
Speaker 1: by the time he's out of prison. The national dictator
Speaker 1: was this guy, General Juan Gomez, who was a cattle
Speaker 1: rancher with a big, terrible mustache. Um and yeah, he
Speaker 1: did dictator ship. He banned the people of Caracas from
Speaker 1: having a rotary club because he was afraid that it
Speaker 1: would turn into a hive of rebellion. Um And at
Speaker 1: the point where you're keeping people from going to the
Speaker 1: rotary club, no chance anyone has any resentments. No, people
Speaker 1: are very happy. Um. It was illegal to organize as
Speaker 1: a communist or a socialist under General Gomez. Uh So, yeah,
Speaker 1: Ramires did some time in prison and when he got
Speaker 1: out he had converted to Soviet style communism. He was
Speaker 1: like full on at that point. He goes to prison
Speaker 1: where they put all the communists and he leaves prison
Speaker 1: a communists. I'm so surprised. Yeah, hey, guys, anyone want
Speaker 1: to explain to me the thing I'm in prison for being.
Speaker 1: They told me that this is what I was, and
Speaker 1: then they put me in prison for it and probably
Speaker 1: beat the ship out of me. And it sounds like
Speaker 1: you guys have been all over this ship. So what's
Speaker 1: that about? If anybody gets some notes? So um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he gets out and he gets involved in radical politics
Speaker 1: and he plays a small role in a successful revolution
Speaker 1: against the General. But he kind of hates everyone else
Speaker 1: all the time. That's kind of this guy's thing. He
Speaker 1: doesn't get along with anybody and he doesn't, so nobody actually, like,
Speaker 1: he doesn't get to do anything in politics, and he
Speaker 1: hates the thing that they do, which is established another dictatorship. Um.
Speaker 1: So he basically gives up on ever doing any work
Speaker 1: to try to make his Marxist beliefs a reality and
Speaker 1: instead makes a bunch of money as a lawyer. Um.
Speaker 1: And he decides that he's going to his son is
Speaker 1: going to become perfect revolutionary, that he's going to raise
Speaker 1: his son from childhood to be like a great Marxist revolutionary.
Speaker 1: I went to law school so that you could overthrow
Speaker 1: the government. Yeah. It's kind of badass actually, Like also
Speaker 1: was a better dad. Yeah. Pinning all of your hopes
Speaker 1: and dreams and expectations that you never achieved on your
Speaker 1: child has never ended badly for anyone. It tends to
Speaker 1: work out well. In this case, it ends with the
Speaker 1: guy throwing grenades instead of French shopping. So anyway, um
Speaker 1: so yeah, so he decides that his son is going
Speaker 1: to fulfill all of his dreams of revolutionary Marxism um
Speaker 1: so that he can just make money, um, which is
Speaker 1: an interesting thing for a Marxist to do. Yeah, nobody's
Speaker 1: we all make compromises when we live in a world
Speaker 1: that doesn't meet our values. Uh so he did, uh
Speaker 1: did that? Um? And to make up for the fact
Speaker 1: that he was giving his kid a very bougie upbringing,
Speaker 1: he raised illig on stories of great revolutionaries, including his grandfather.
Speaker 1: Back in the biography Jackal, author John Folean writes, the
Speaker 1: family hero was Elba's grandfather, a doctor who transformed a
Speaker 1: sixties strong band of followers into an army big enough
Speaker 1: to help overthrow the government of Caracas in only to
Speaker 1: lose power a few years later. What I said, like
Speaker 1: Venezuela was just nothing but revolutions in this period um unbowed.
Speaker 1: The doctor repeatedly tried to assassinate the state governor, resisting
Speaker 1: the forces sent after him in a courageous last and
Speaker 1: loan stand to give his comrades time to flee into
Speaker 1: the andes illag delighted in the tales of how the doctor,
Speaker 1: after he was caught, refused to betray his his companions
Speaker 1: under torture. So that's that's like his Uh, that's like
Speaker 1: his his heroic grandpa, Your grandpa. Yeah, God, absolutely the
Speaker 1: ship and he never talked, Yeah, which I'd be proud of.
Speaker 1: That that's a pretty cool grandpa to have overthrew the government.
Speaker 1: Didn't do a great job of being the government, but
Speaker 1: nobody does. Uh yeah, pretty good, Pretty good grandpa. My
Speaker 1: grandpa didn't ever throw any governments. I know that's what
Speaker 1: everyone says about your grandpa. Okay. So Ramiers was insistent
Speaker 1: that his boy be raised atheist, and he lectured a
Speaker 1: lot about the non existence of God, would again cast
Speaker 1: some conflict with his deeply Catholic wife. Another thing that
Speaker 1: caused some conflict with his deeply Catholic wife was the
Speaker 1: fact that Ramirez cheated constantly and openly fucking around like
Speaker 1: a sex metaphor. I can't really think it didn't go well.
Speaker 1: It was not a good marriage. One partner was like,
Speaker 1: I am a Catholic and want to be a traditional
Speaker 1: Catholic person, and another said, I'm an atheist and I'm
Speaker 1: going to funk whoever, and I'm going to raise our
Speaker 1: son to overthrow the government. And she said could we
Speaker 1: talk about this? And other people he was it was
Speaker 1: a bad relationship marriage. It really doesn't seem like a
Speaker 1: marriage when you read about it. It kind of seems
Speaker 1: like he found someone to have his kids and then
Speaker 1: ignored her for years. I don't know. I mean I
Speaker 1: have studied history. This seems like most most marriages. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a great one. So young Illage and his brothers
Speaker 1: were expected by their father when he was like paying
Speaker 1: attention to them because he goes off and he's working
Speaker 1: a lot of the time. Wait, so he has siblings,
Speaker 1: he's got like, he's got like a couple of brothers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what were they raised? Were they just like, your brother's
Speaker 1: going to be a revolutionary, You guys better help make
Speaker 1: money to his dad. I don't think his dad had
Speaker 1: a super clear like idea in mind, but Illag seems
Speaker 1: to have been the one that he was really hanging
Speaker 1: his wishes on. What I just want to know though,
Speaker 1: is was he raising them all like you get to
Speaker 1: be a revolutionary and if he falls the number two
Speaker 1: steps up? Or was it very much this child is
Speaker 1: going to be a revolutionary. I think they're all supposed
Speaker 1: to be revolutionaries. But Illach was the one. He was
Speaker 1: his first kid, so he was like, you're the one
Speaker 1: who's really you got the best best? How much of
Speaker 1: this coming more or less? How much of this is
Speaker 1: coming from from Illage, and how much of this is coming.
Speaker 1: Like this part of it, the biographer talks to people
Speaker 1: who knew them as families. This is real because I
Speaker 1: could absolutely see, yeah, when he grows up to be
Speaker 1: the jackal, being like my papa always told me it
Speaker 1: was time to go overthrow some governments. Although if this
Speaker 1: comes from his brothers who were just like, yeah, we
Speaker 1: were told to go become shoemakers. Yeah, I I don't
Speaker 1: know more about how his brothers were raised, but I
Speaker 1: don't think like like they all got kind of the
Speaker 1: same education. But how many thousands of people's desk are
Speaker 1: they responsible for? None as far as oh, well, slackers.
Speaker 1: So Ramirez wrote a book for his kids that told
Speaker 1: them how they were supposed to behave because again he
Speaker 1: was gone being a lawyer most of the time and
Speaker 1: did not actually have the time that is, lawyer is fun.
Speaker 1: By the way, I wrote for you know. It was
Speaker 1: called Social, Moral, and Civic Formulation. Was a guide to
Speaker 1: manhood written by a man who wanted his kids kids
Speaker 1: to become revolutionaries. Um, which for that like included some
Speaker 1: really bad advice that makes you maybe think he didn't
Speaker 1: know what it took to be a revolution arry because
Speaker 1: one of his core tenants for them was I tell
Speaker 1: anybody the truth to his face, which is a bad
Speaker 1: thing to do if you might be trying to overthrow
Speaker 1: the government's are you trying to overthrow the government? So
Speaker 1: when their dad was out of town, which was a
Speaker 1: lot of the time, the Illig and his brothers were
Speaker 1: like real moms boys because his mom wasn't a giant
Speaker 1: piece of shit. Um. Yeah, he was raised kind of
Speaker 1: like like when he was able to kind of like
Speaker 1: relax and play and stuff when he was with his mom,
Speaker 1: when he was with his dad, like all of the
Speaker 1: boys were expected to behave like soldiers. Um. And you
Speaker 1: can kind of see him. He was kind of raised
Speaker 1: like John Connor, um, only like in this I guess
Speaker 1: was like yeah, yeah, not ignoring him because she was
Speaker 1: falsely imprisoned in a mental asylum, but fucking a mistress
Speaker 1: and making shiploads of money. Slightly different from John Conner,
Speaker 1: Sarah Connor comes off better in that comparison. She sure does,
Speaker 1: probably better at pull ups, better upper body strength. Absolutely so.
Speaker 1: Other kids bullied Illitch for his weight, calling him El
Speaker 1: Gordo or fat. So whenever he was mocked, ill would
Speaker 1: burst into tears and scream back, the whole world we're here,
Speaker 1: the whole world will hear of me, which is not
Speaker 1: a thing that kids who go on to not shoot
Speaker 1: lots of people was going to say, having you know,
Speaker 1: never listened to your podcast before. I imagine that the
Speaker 1: fat kid who we're talking about in the middle of
Speaker 1: the Golden Age of Terrorism episode, who screams that the
Speaker 1: whole world will know his name, goes on to not
Speaker 1: carry that resentment in his heart for the rest of
Speaker 1: his life. He gets some therapy, he finds someone nice down,
Speaker 1: and that's the end of the episode. So anyway, yeah,
Speaker 1: continuing on. Uh So, Fortunately, since he got bullied a lot,
Speaker 1: his direct contact with his peers was limited. Ramires as well,
Speaker 1: meant that he was able to hire expensive Communist teachers
Speaker 1: for Illage and his brothers. I'm also just sorry. I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna put out there real quick. I was bullied
Speaker 1: a lot in junior high, in high school. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people were. We sure were. I think
Speaker 1: all of us here were, did you not. I don't
Speaker 1: think I'm responsible for the deaths of any thousands of people. Well,
Speaker 1: special he got some time. I don't know what a
Speaker 1: LANs been up to so uh yeah. So he gets
Speaker 1: special communist teachers hired by his dad to train him,
Speaker 1: and he takes because his dad's so rich. Because his
Speaker 1: dad's so rich and communist. So these communist teachers give
Speaker 1: him private lessons at home, where he learns history and
Speaker 1: mathematics and biology through a Marxist lens and the palatial
Speaker 1: comfort of his family mansion. Um, which is an interesting
Speaker 1: way to learn Marxism. Capitalism is bad because it's hard
Speaker 1: to explain when you think about But see how shitty
Speaker 1: life is for these people outside of our mansion. That's
Speaker 1: why this get this systems a problem. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: make more money and abandon your mother again for several weeks. Remember,
Speaker 1: you gotta stop this. I tried, you know. In the
Speaker 1: last episode we talked a little bit about good house
Speaker 1: cleaning beginning at home. Yeah yeah, yeah, so uh yeah.
Speaker 1: This kept him very isolated, he later recalled, somewhat mournfully.
Speaker 1: We studied at home. We had a private instructor. That's
Speaker 1: not normal, Um, which is not his communist education would
Speaker 1: have indicated to him that that was not normal. It
Speaker 1: is weird to be instructed in communism alone. Yes, So
Speaker 1: Ramirez was insistent that his son had, you know, would
Speaker 1: be trained to be a great revolutionary. And it turns
Speaker 1: out that raising a kid that way doesn't make them
Speaker 1: very personable. As one friend later recalled, when there was
Speaker 1: a game to be organized, which was always the one
Speaker 1: who would do it. He was the leader, He would decide,
Speaker 1: but not a rotarian manner. He was the most organized,
Speaker 1: the one who took the initiative and made the rules.
Speaker 1: The same friend noted that Ilich's favorite game was hide
Speaker 1: and seek, liked to play at goodies and batties with
Speaker 1: plastic weapons. In our group, he was the strongest and
Speaker 1: most aggressive, so you know, uh. He was full of
Speaker 1: ideas and how to hurt living things. He taught his
Speaker 1: friends how to coat the tips of their toy arrows
Speaker 1: with metal in order to kill birds. He was full
Speaker 1: of ideas and how to hurt living things. This guy
Speaker 1: doesn't go on to be an assassin or a terrorist
Speaker 1: or anything. Doesn't kind of both pretty good at both steps. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, to have friends and you live alone, and
Speaker 1: you live with just your siblings and a palatial non mansion,
Speaker 1: like you spend a lot of time thinking about how
Speaker 1: to kill Bert's and that's why we shouldn't have mentioned
Speaker 1: in When I was twelve, his parents finally divorced. Ramirez
Speaker 1: later explained, this is his dad. I got divorced because
Speaker 1: in my house, I thought I was the only one
Speaker 1: who did anything right. Um. Oddly enough, his parents continued
Speaker 1: to live together, largely because Ramirez needed his ex wife's
Speaker 1: unpaid labor to high handle child rearing. He was the
Speaker 1: only one who did anything right and also a great communist. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote next from the biography Jackal. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty two, just as she had lost the battle over
Speaker 1: her children's first names, so Elba failed to stop her
Speaker 1: husband from sending Illige to the sprawling ferment toorro Lyce
Speaker 1: in Caracas, which was a nursery to bunding budding radicals
Speaker 1: At the time when the capitol streets often resounded with
Speaker 1: violent left wing demonstrations, The more enterprising students skipped classes
Speaker 1: to Martian protest at the liberal government's ban on the
Speaker 1: Communist Party. The school wasn't renowned. All the revolutionaries had
Speaker 1: studied their electric halt. It was my father's decision. As
Speaker 1: for my mother, she was hardly enthusiastic about the choice.
Speaker 1: Did my father choose the school on purpose to annoy
Speaker 1: my mother. By his own testimony, it was in January
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four, when he was fourteen that ellectified authority
Speaker 1: for the first time. He joined an organization banned by
Speaker 1: the authorities, then the Venezuelan Communist Youth. That's where I
Speaker 1: made my debut in the revolutionary movement. I was one
Speaker 1: of those in charge of the organization at in Caracas
Speaker 1: in n nineteen sixty six. That young flock counted some
Speaker 1: two hundred members, and Elich claims that he helped to
Speaker 1: organize anti government street marches which scared the president. The
Speaker 1: protest also taught how to make Molotov cocktails and set
Speaker 1: cars on fire. Well. Visits to the shanty towns on
Speaker 1: the outskirts of Gracas, he later claimed, revealed to him
Speaker 1: the plight of the poor. Wait. Wait, so it's like
Speaker 1: your debutante ball, but instead you like come out, organize
Speaker 1: a march for the first time, and everyone presents you
Speaker 1: with instructions on bomb making and a fancy tour of
Speaker 1: all of the slums that you're probably semi responsible for
Speaker 1: because of the types of labor that your dad does. Now,
Speaker 1: this is that's exactly how this guy a liar described
Speaker 1: his birth as a communist, or his birth as the
Speaker 1: liar and terrorists says. By the time I was seventeen,
Speaker 1: I was learning how to light cars on which I
Speaker 1: gotta say, maybe like or maybe there was that sounds
Speaker 1: like teenagers in Portland today it does. It does sound like, well,
Speaker 1: not cars. That was the police car on fire? Was
Speaker 1: the police I also, I gotta say, like, I've heard
Speaker 1: a lot of absurd drifters talk about things that they
Speaker 1: think will sound very impressive, yes, and things like trained
Speaker 1: to make Molotov cocktails kind of one of those things,
Speaker 1: because Molotov cocktails famously not that hard to make. I
Speaker 1: was trained and how to make grease fires in that time,
Speaker 1: I burnt my friends kitchen anyway, fifteen, in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: his father sent him off to Cuba to complete the education.
Speaker 1: His weird private communism tutors had begun it. And and
Speaker 1: this is like one of those private communism. Yeah, people
Speaker 1: talk a lot about and they should and we should
Speaker 1: talk more. We talk about him a bit in the
Speaker 1: border patrol. How there's all those like sketchy u s
Speaker 1: academies where we would like take cops from other countries
Speaker 1: and train them and how to like murder, dissidence and
Speaker 1: cool being America. Yeah, yeah, that kind of ship and
Speaker 1: how terful it is and how many governments and millions
Speaker 1: of people's deaths can be traced to things that started there.
Speaker 1: Just un really tremendous, tremendous evil. Um. There were equivalents
Speaker 1: of that stuff though in the U. S. SR. During
Speaker 1: the Civil War or during the Cold War and whatever.
Speaker 1: And the kind of Cuban equivalent to the School of
Speaker 1: the America's was Camp Montana Montanzas, uh, and yeah, it
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, where you you trained people to go
Speaker 1: to other countries to like foment revolution and stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: And so Illage goes there and he learns how to
Speaker 1: like commit acts of sabotage and start revolutionary cells and
Speaker 1: do all that good stuff, or he doesn't. And that's
Speaker 1: all a lie because the CIA, when this guy becomes
Speaker 1: a big deal, really wants to tie him more to
Speaker 1: the U. S s R. Than he was already tied.
Speaker 1: And so they lied about it. But then later one
Speaker 1: of the CIA guys was like, there's actually no evidence
Speaker 1: that's happened, but also it might have happened, So who
Speaker 1: the funk knows? And also probably illage is not gonna
Speaker 1: be like no, no, no, I was not trained. My
Speaker 1: life is less cool than you think. Yeah, he's not
Speaker 1: that kind of dude, So who knows. Um. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: his family sent him to London later that year, which
Speaker 1: does kind of make you think maybe he didn't go
Speaker 1: to elite communist guerrilla school, because that does seem like
Speaker 1: it would take some time. Took the did like a semester.
Speaker 1: It was like course, like a minimester, like a month
Speaker 1: and a half. Yeah, I mean, you know, you take
Speaker 1: a five week course over the summer and you can
Speaker 1: learn a lot about overthrowing the government in five weeks. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: correspondence course. Sure, there's options. So his his dad sends
Speaker 1: the family to London, and his main reason for this
Speaker 1: is because he wants his kids to learn English and
Speaker 1: he wants him to experience a new culture. So again,
Speaker 1: his Marxist dad takes him at a communism fighting school
Speaker 1: and sends him to London to hang out in nightclubs
Speaker 1: flirting with European women. Because again, Ramirez Novice incredible Marxist,
Speaker 1: I mean just an amazing On the other hand, I
Speaker 1: don't feel like that's a bad. Yeah, I'm not. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying it's a bad If you can in one
Speaker 1: summer do communism fighting in the government school and hanging
Speaker 1: out in night gloves in London, do both of those
Speaker 1: it correspondence course. Maybe he did both at the same time.
Speaker 1: It's hard to do a bomb making correspondence course. You
Speaker 1: could like outline the bomb on the back of the society.
Speaker 1: When you send your final project in the mail, you
Speaker 1: get in trouble. That's my impression. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: you have a wonderful career until it's cut cruelly short
Speaker 1: by the FBI for some reason. Are we talking We're
Speaker 1: talking about Teddy Um. So, yeah, Ramirez got his son
Speaker 1: admitted to a fancy British boys school, which is basically
Speaker 1: the opposite of having private communism tutors. Um is it
Speaker 1: the kind of I think the opposite of having private
Speaker 1: communism tutors is something that doesn't involve huge amounts of money. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: fair enough. He was not popular among his teachers and
Speaker 1: was generally seen as being a lazy, smartass. One teacher
Speaker 1: recalled he was a snide little blighter. He was quite
Speaker 1: convinced he was God's gift to everyone. He was poggy
Speaker 1: and pasty, but was always incredibly elegantly and expensively dressed.
Speaker 1: He was a cheat and would avoid doing work whenever
Speaker 1: he could. Um. So yeah. He was also though, really
Speaker 1: smart and he did great on his exams, so he
Speaker 1: kept stayed in school. Uh. Nineteen sixty eight was of
Speaker 1: course one of the more revolutionary years in modern memory. Um.
Speaker 1: Kind of not all that different from this year except
Speaker 1: for the Internet and all of the additional guns, um,
Speaker 1: and all of the additional fascism and all of the
Speaker 1: additional environmental degradation. But anyway, very revolutionary year. A lot
Speaker 1: of protests and movements and ship going on all over
Speaker 1: the damn world. Uh. And in that year, Illige and
Speaker 1: his dad were in Paris because again his yeah, it
Speaker 1: was going down in Paris, and they saw none of
Speaker 1: it because his dad was like, this seems scary. Let's
Speaker 1: go to Moscow. Okay, hold on, communism, dad, communism lawyer, Dad,
Speaker 1: You're gonna take your kid out of communism fighting school
Speaker 1: and bring him to fucking hang out in nightclubs and
Speaker 1: then you're going to go to Paris in nine. There
Speaker 1: is nothing to learn here, kid, who I have exposed
Speaker 1: to the nightclubs of London and communism fighting. Actually, if
Speaker 1: you are a communist in the idea of like status communism, yeah,
Speaker 1: the situation is don't really scratch. But also as as
Speaker 1: a child of the nineties, when like everything from the
Speaker 1: sixties was very very like interesting and kind of cool again,
Speaker 1: and they were making all of the documentaries about the
Speaker 1: Beatles and everything else, like very weirdly, like as a
Speaker 1: middle schooler, was the one thing that I read about
Speaker 1: like all like stuff like wow, if I could have
Speaker 1: gone back in time to one place, and so hearing that, yeah,
Speaker 1: his dad is like, now we're not gonna take it.
Speaker 1: You know where I'm not rolling you at the Sorbon
Speaker 1: and this ship is like scary, Let's go to Moscow.
Speaker 1: I mean, have you seen bard which Moscow notably in
Speaker 1: one of the places where absolutely funk all was happening,
Speaker 1: not a goddamn thing, whereas they're pulling up fucking paving
Speaker 1: stones throwing them at cops in Paris and also making
Speaker 1: funny comics about it, like they didn't go hungry, none
Speaker 1: of these things. We yeah, that does happen. So Patris
Speaker 1: Lamumbo university is where the Soviet Union is where he goes, Like,
Speaker 1: that's the college he goes to. Patrice Lammbo. If you
Speaker 1: remember our episode about the Congo, he was the democratically
Speaker 1: elected socialist leader of the Congo who was very quickly
Speaker 1: murdered for the pro Us dictator who looted the country
Speaker 1: for like forty years, which I gotta say, you know
Speaker 1: this is this is in Moscow. Yeah, kudos kudos Tom
Speaker 1: for naming a university after Patris Lamumba. I'm sure that
Speaker 1: that was pretty much where any engagement with you know,
Speaker 1: progressive socialist politics from the Congo stopped. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know it was a stab um. So, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: where the Soviet Union sent its foreign exchange students and
Speaker 1: communists from outside of Russia would go there to like
Speaker 1: learn Marxism so they could bring their nations and of
Speaker 1: origin better in step with the uss are or like
Speaker 1: revolutions that were So anyway, Illege did terribly here um
Speaker 1: because again he's been raised to be a revolutionary and
Speaker 1: the one thing that they hate in the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: is a revolutionary. Yeah, when you're outside the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: they might like you, but not inside, not a story. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the fundamental problem is that I had been raised
Speaker 1: from birth to like, yeah, fight the state. Um, And
Speaker 1: yeah that doesn't that doesn't send him over world. This
Speaker 1: is actually the year that he moves to Moscow is
Speaker 1: the year that the Soviet Union sent tanks to the
Speaker 1: Czechoslovakia to brutally suppress a popular uprising. Um. Famously just
Speaker 1: where that's people who think that everything the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: did was cool as a cucumber. So they have to
Speaker 1: justify crushing people with tanks. Um. They're yeah, they're like
Speaker 1: they're like the people who were They're like, they're like
Speaker 1: most Americans, um, but for communism, like half of them. Maryan. Sorry,
Speaker 1: so revolutionaries were still occasionally useful to the U. S SR.
Speaker 1: But mainly like in terms of you know, fighting this
Speaker 1: whole Cold War thing. Um. So one of uh, what
Speaker 1: Illage gets here and like he has a lot of
Speaker 1: trouble immediately. Um, the people at the school don't like him,
Speaker 1: the government doesn't like him. Um. But he does have
Speaker 1: a couple of friends. And one of his friends is
Speaker 1: a guy named Privlov, who years later described nineteen year
Speaker 1: old Illage this way. Illach was not at all the
Speaker 1: typical students sent by his country's communist party. Nothing to
Speaker 1: do with the good little soldier of Mao, who labored
Speaker 1: in the fields every summer. He was a handsome young man,
Speaker 1: although his cheeks looked swollen, and he was a great
Speaker 1: bon vivour. I don't know, I don't know French. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the biography Jackal John Fullane goes on to write,
Speaker 1: flush with cash sent by his parents, Illag could afford
Speaker 1: to spend lavishly on whiskey and champage, and the special
Speaker 1: stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies and which
Speaker 1: were off limits to most people. A lot of folks
Speaker 1: don't know. The USSR had those stars that only rich
Speaker 1: people could buy stuff in the Marxist in the Marxist utemp,
Speaker 1: they really got it right, more Russian than the Russians.
Speaker 1: The privileged student and his friends would throw glasses over
Speaker 1: their shoulders, not only empty glasses, but bottles as well.
Speaker 1: The university authorities, frustrated in their attempts to oppose discipline
Speaker 1: on Illage, reason that his freedom of action would be
Speaker 1: drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him
Speaker 1: were reduced. But when they asked Rameris naves to be
Speaker 1: less generous. The father, piqued, retorted that his son had
Speaker 1: never wanted for anything. Great communists, unbelievably good communists. Seriously,
Speaker 1: everyone child's behavior would be improved if he wasn't so
Speaker 1: entitled and constantly flush with cash. And the rebuttal is,
Speaker 1: but I have always given my child everything he wants. Yes.
Speaker 1: The other decision being made is the USSR saying it's
Speaker 1: a shame that this kid is getting drunk and misbehaving
Speaker 1: so much because of all the money he has. But
Speaker 1: we can't stop selling him expensive liquor a lot of
Speaker 1: he doesn't go quietly along with what the government wants.
Speaker 1: At Patrice University, this is the birth of actually luxury communism. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just for him though, I think that's called so like
Speaker 1: like Liberty University here in the United States, Patrice Lambo
Speaker 1: College had a vice squad which searched at night to
Speaker 1: try to stop them from having fun things, took away
Speaker 1: their liquor and whatever. Would not be down with that.
Speaker 1: I don't think he would. I think Patrice Lammbo would
Speaker 1: start some ship over that. I the administration universe. I
Speaker 1: think he might. That was kind of his deal. Um. So,
Speaker 1: continuing my reading from jackal quote. One night, the patrol
Speaker 1: entered Ilich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and
Speaker 1: glass is on the table, but he was apparently alone.
Speaker 1: The squad opened the coupboard door and a girl who
Speaker 1: was completely drunk fell out. She was naked and was
Speaker 1: clutching her clothes in her hands. They asked her what
Speaker 1: she was doing there, and she answered, I feel pity
Speaker 1: for the oppressed. She was obviously a prostitute. Another time,
Speaker 1: and with another girl, Illach didn't bother to hide her
Speaker 1: in the cupboard. He threw her out of the window.
Speaker 1: There's better ways to hide your date. This one was
Speaker 1: fully dressed and landed in two meters of snow a
Speaker 1: flora two below. She got up, unhurt and shouted abuse
Speaker 1: at him. There's something you can do when there's that much.
Speaker 1: I think it's also I did throw some people out
Speaker 1: of some windows, is all I would yell abuse windows.
Speaker 1: And that's why we're friends. Yeah, yeah, well we we
Speaker 1: have compatible attitudes towards definistration. Naked lady falls out of
Speaker 1: cupboard and they're like, what the funk are you doing here?
Speaker 1: And heard defence is I feel sympathy with the oppressed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, that's a great cover story. That's a
Speaker 1: great story. Yeah, she's a revolutionary. I need this covered.
Speaker 1: Almost passed that drunk for reasons. So this was kind
Speaker 1: of as a young man, was great at attracting women
Speaker 1: because he was very good looking, very charming, and he's Venezuelan, right. Um.
Speaker 1: He was what you might call a user though, um.
Speaker 1: And the only deep relationship he ever had was with
Speaker 1: a young Cuban woman he bonded with while in Moscow.
Speaker 1: She was older than him, with a marriage under her
Speaker 1: belt already h and so she was like kind of
Speaker 1: more experienced than him, which was not common for his relationships.
Speaker 1: Years later, Ilich would admit that her greater life experience
Speaker 1: was anomaly in his love life. Quote, I like girls
Speaker 1: very much, but I like to be in control. With Sonja,
Speaker 1: I wasn't a ruler. We were one Sonia talking how
Speaker 1: to smoke cigars, and Illige got her pregnant. They broke
Speaker 1: up shortly before after that, and she flew back to
Speaker 1: Havana to give birth. And it's very clear, unclear what
Speaker 1: happened to them. Um, But this is actually, oddly enough,
Speaker 1: not a deadbeat dad story. On Ilich's part. She went
Speaker 1: back home pregnant, cut off all contact with him, and
Speaker 1: had their kid. He wrote her letters repeatedly, just begging
Speaker 1: to know the kid's name, and she never responded, and
Speaker 1: we have no idea like what went down between them,
Speaker 1: Like presumably there is a story there that we don't know,
Speaker 1: especially given the kind of man that he turned into.
Speaker 1: But like it's a very sad story based on the
Speaker 1: details we have, which is that like she left and
Speaker 1: he never learned his kid's name. But you have to
Speaker 1: assume he did something horrible because he's Carlos the Jackal
Speaker 1: or else. It was just a total power move, like
Speaker 1: kind of a user, a little bit of a dick.
Speaker 1: I'm going to have this one thing over you that
Speaker 1: you will never control for the rest of your life. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And also somebody who has explicitly said I like to
Speaker 1: be in control of everybody I'm in relationships with, this
Speaker 1: is the person he couldn't do that too, which means
Speaker 1: she was hard as fuck. Yeah. And also he's going
Speaker 1: to have feelings about it forever. Yeah. No, I think
Speaker 1: it sucked him up for forever, but you know whatever. Uh.
Speaker 1: In nineteenth Patrice Lamumba University expelled uh and thirteen other
Speaker 1: members of the Venezuelan Communist Youth for anti Soviet provocation
Speaker 1: and in discipline. UH. Now there's rumors that this is
Speaker 1: also untrue, and that he was a secret KGB agent
Speaker 1: for from this point forward, and that they just faked
Speaker 1: kicking him out of the school. And that might be like,
Speaker 1: it's it's fun KGB, who knows, But as cover goes, Hey,
Speaker 1: you went to Cuban Communism Fighting School and then you
Speaker 1: went to Patrice Slam here's how to bring communism to
Speaker 1: your country university, and we kicked you out, so you
Speaker 1: can be a secret KGB agent. That's right up there
Speaker 1: with we're not trying to kidnap the Prime Minister. We're
Speaker 1: just building bombs in the mountain. I think the thing
Speaker 1: that we're all learning about the sixties and seventies is
Speaker 1: that you could get away with a lot. I mean historically,
Speaker 1: if they really hadn't liked him that much and he
Speaker 1: had gone to Cuban Revolutionary School, they could have just
Speaker 1: called him a Trotsky. Yeah, we're we are talking he
Speaker 1: had been in Cuba. We are talking the late sixties,
Speaker 1: early seventies, So like there's not as much of that
Speaker 1: going on, like the Fourth International was in n Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know. You know, you probably
Speaker 1: know more about what he was likely to just like
Speaker 1: I don't know. They didn't do anything to him, Like
Speaker 1: he just gets kicked out of the country, which probably
Speaker 1: just means his dad was a real rich Communist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they were like, you're kind of a spoiled dick
Speaker 1: Communist kid, and he wasn't like a Soviet citizen, right,
Speaker 1: Like he hadn't done anything other than be a drunk asshole.
Speaker 1: And so in the style of communists college administrations for
Speaker 1: time and Memorial, they said, you're a drunk asshole and
Speaker 1: you're kind of sucking up all of our ship. So
Speaker 1: we just want you to go to a different school. Now, Well,
Speaker 1: they just wanted him out of the U s s R.
Speaker 1: Um or he left the USSR to go fighting Lebanon
Speaker 1: and then they wouldn't let him back in again. Who knows.
Speaker 1: Uh kind of some debate around this um. But whatever
Speaker 1: happens or whatever happened, the kind of thing that happens
Speaker 1: next is that uh I winds up in uh Clebanon
Speaker 1: because while he was at Patrice La Mumbia University. He
Speaker 1: did meet some real revolutionaries, a bunch of young Palestinian
Speaker 1: dudes who were affiliated with the Popular Front. So the
Speaker 1: Popular Front a little bit of brief history. Uh, the
Speaker 1: early nineteen seventies pretty rough time to be a Palestinian
Speaker 1: liberation activist. Not that there's ever been a good time
Speaker 1: to be a Palestins kind of always been a hard, hard,
Speaker 1: hard gig. But the Six Day War had happened in
Speaker 1: June of nineteen sixty seven, and it had ended with
Speaker 1: every Arab military force or rate against Israel being like,
Speaker 1: you know, it didn't go well for everybody else. Palestine lost, um,
Speaker 1: like like a lot of Palestine UM. And the failure,
Speaker 1: the total, massive failure of traditional military tactics on behalf
Speaker 1: of all of the Arab forces UM led to an
Speaker 1: increasing embrace in irregular warfare. So this is like the
Speaker 1: period where a lot of UM, all right, we're gonna go,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do some we're gonna do some grilla ship now, um,
Speaker 1: you know, the fed Ayeen and stuff like become more
Speaker 1: of a deal after this. So a lot of the
Speaker 1: most of the group's kind of fighting and advocating politically
Speaker 1: for Palestinian liberation at this time kind of we're under
Speaker 1: the broad umbrella of the p l O or the
Speaker 1: Palestinian Liberation Organization, and their charter stated armed struggle is
Speaker 1: the only way to free Palestine. It embraced commando action
Speaker 1: to further this end. Uh. And the Popular Front was
Speaker 1: one of the organizations under the PLO. It was explicitly
Speaker 1: Marxist and militant um and Yeah, one of its like
Speaker 1: leaders summed up its purpose when he observed, to kill
Speaker 1: a Jew far from the battlefield has more effect than
Speaker 1: killing hundreds of Jews in battle. That's kind of the idea, right, Um.
Speaker 1: So Illach goes to Beirut, which was a place you
Speaker 1: know where you're gonna be if you're a Palestinian freedom fighter, um,
Speaker 1: because it's kind of the safest place where a bunch
Speaker 1: of them are gathering. Uh, And it's right there. It's
Speaker 1: very close, you know, the whole of all of the area.
Speaker 1: Whenever people talk about conflicts in the Middle East, it's
Speaker 1: like driving from Jersey to Connecticut. In a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: Like one of the things about the Goal on Heights Yea,
Speaker 1: which is one of the disputed territories, certainly in this period,
Speaker 1: it's the goal on heights, which means you can see
Speaker 1: into Israel, like, you know, you're standing on a hill
Speaker 1: and you can see a lot of what's downhill from you.
Speaker 1: It's just one of those the lesson you continuously get
Speaker 1: as an American reading about the rest of the world
Speaker 1: is it's tiny, unless you're reading about Africa, in which
Speaker 1: case it's so much bigger than you have any like,
Speaker 1: it's incomprehensibly large. So ill it's traveled to Beirut, which was,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, a cool place. Uh still cool. Well,
Speaker 1: kind of a bummer at the moment, but that's not
Speaker 1: their roots fault. Um. He fell in with the Popular Front,
Speaker 1: and he found himself drawn to a movement where political
Speaker 1: theory and rigid social organization took a back seat to
Speaker 1: shooting people repeatedly in the face, which he was great at. Oh,
Speaker 1: he was so ready to be in the shooting people
Speaker 1: repeatedly in the face. I mean, if you were raised
Speaker 1: a theory and theory and theory, being a rich kid
Speaker 1: with theory, for someone to just say, funck theory, want
Speaker 1: to shoot people people? Yeah, And you know a lot
Speaker 1: of these folks, these Palestinian fighters were kind of the
Speaker 1: sort of people who saw like they wanted the destruction
Speaker 1: of Israel and the liberation of Palestine. But most of
Speaker 1: them would have seen that as like the first step
Speaker 1: on a journey towards like toppling all of the regimes
Speaker 1: of the Middle East and like bringing Marxism, Like it
Speaker 1: was a pretty calm That's why the Japanese Red Army
Speaker 1: like got along with these dudes. So it's also why
Speaker 1: the p l O had kind of a hard time
Speaker 1: because like, yeah, they were they got used as a
Speaker 1: pawn by other governments in the region. I mean, and
Speaker 1: to some extent still do. But that like uncomfortable, that
Speaker 1: uncomfortable tendency of like and then we want to overthrow
Speaker 1: all these other governments. Like governments don't like it when
Speaker 1: you say you want to overthrow all the governments. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why anarchists are only popular sometimes. The pop their
Speaker 1: front operated a bunch of training camps out in the
Speaker 1: Jordanian desert um, and Jordan was like, you can keep
Speaker 1: your revolutionaries here in Jordan's We're cool with that, um.
Speaker 1: But as that way, yeah, they weren't wild about it, um.
Speaker 1: But you know, Illage was pretty wild about learning how
Speaker 1: to do cool stuff, like they had like airplanes out
Speaker 1: there that you would like do training into, like how
Speaker 1: to get into gunfights on airplanes. And he thought that
Speaker 1: was did you practice hijackings? I think you probably did
Speaker 1: a lot of practice jacking. I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people were jacking it in the Jordanian desert back in
Speaker 1: those days. Um so yeah. And his initial plan like
Speaker 1: he didn't really want to fight for Palestinian liberation a
Speaker 1: whole bunch. He wanted to learn from them and then
Speaker 1: take a bunch of other Venezuelans who were doing the
Speaker 1: same thing, uh, and go back home to Venezuela and
Speaker 1: do some revolutions in um. Yeah. And when he joined
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy, the PLO recruiting officer who inducted him
Speaker 1: give Illage the nickname Carlos. And the only reason for
Speaker 1: this was that he came from South amera Rica and
Speaker 1: that was the only Spanish name that his recruiter really knew. Um.
Speaker 1: So he was like, you're Carlos because you come from
Speaker 1: Latin America. And that's why he's Carlos from here on out.
Speaker 1: That's how we give nicknames. Now, that's how we give
Speaker 1: name It's like everybody you've ever met who has a nickname,
Speaker 1: like you know, Texas or yeah. Yeah. So he goes
Speaker 1: to this training camp in the desert with like ninety
Speaker 1: other guys and a lot of them are fringe in
Speaker 1: Belgium or other Europeans, and they all start learning, uh,
Speaker 1: like a bunch of there's like a mix of like
Speaker 1: political lectures and also courses on like how to handle
Speaker 1: guns and make bombs and stuff. One popular test of
Speaker 1: like how brave the trainees were, which you would make
Speaker 1: them stand in the open air about a meter away
Speaker 1: from a plastic bomb that detonated something not wildly different
Speaker 1: from like the distraction devices the polls giving us, like
Speaker 1: the flash bang renames. Yeah, um, so you have to
Speaker 1: like stand and not and try not to flinch when
Speaker 1: that thing explodes New Saturday. Yeah yeah we do it
Speaker 1: and like a lot of Tuesdays flames. That's I don't
Speaker 1: want to take videos that often. Yeah, so um yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's uh yeah, he does really well with this.
Speaker 1: Carlos is just like seen as like, oh, you're not
Speaker 1: scared of things exploding near you and you're good at
Speaker 1: shooting people. Um, we should fast track you to go
Speaker 1: do cool stuff there. Yeah, exploded. Carlos himself didn't really
Speaker 1: like it much. He thought there was too much propaganda
Speaker 1: and not enough learning how to shoot people right in
Speaker 1: their faces. It seems like after an entire lifetime of
Speaker 1: being raised by private communism tutors and sent to special
Speaker 1: Communism in Doctor Nation school, he's kind of good on
Speaker 1: the communist in doctrine. He does know some Communism and
Speaker 1: he's like, cool, I got it. But when do we
Speaker 1: get to shoot stuff? You know, though, who is knowledgeable
Speaker 1: about communism? Be I was going to say in Doctor
Speaker 1: Nation that you know, in doctrinate you in communism, you
Speaker 1: want to get indoctrinate products services. It is Raytheon communism.
Speaker 1: But you know what they love more than communism shooting
Speaker 1: people right in the face. You know. The best thing
Speaker 1: about Raytheon is that they're responsible for and it only
Speaker 1: took twenty years of a global war on terror and
Speaker 1: launching thousands of missiles at weddings and schools and school
Speaker 1: buses and villages full with women and children. Before Raytheon,
Speaker 1: the humanitarians that they are, had the brilliant idea of
Speaker 1: what if we made a missile that was just full
Speaker 1: of knives and shotted only at cars of people were
Speaker 1: pretty sure bad. And that's the best idea anyone's ever
Speaker 1: had in the entire war on terror. And I'm not
Speaker 1: joking about that. That's where we are. That's the best idea.
Speaker 1: That's the best idea of the whole war. And they
Speaker 1: are sponsoring this podcast, as are these other people and
Speaker 1: their products, and I'm so they're all raytheon subsidiaries. So exciting.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. Ah, what a good time to
Speaker 1: be a human. I feel optimistic about the future. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about the past where things were also great. So
Speaker 1: in early nineteen seventy, the King of Jordan's again, you know,
Speaker 1: he's letting all these Palestinian freedom fighters and such hang
Speaker 1: out in Jordan's but he's not like he's not jazzed
Speaker 1: about it, because again he's a king, and these people
Speaker 1: are trying to overthrow governments. And even if you don't
Speaker 1: like the government, they're trying to overthrow. If you're a
Speaker 1: king and there's a bunch of people trying to overthrow
Speaker 1: a government all hanging out near you, you probably like,
Speaker 1: I gotta keep an eye on them, just at a curiosity.
Speaker 1: How do Marxists feel about monarchies, not wild about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's it's a it's a rocky situation and there's
Speaker 1: like fights between his soldiers and them, like it's not
Speaker 1: it's not the smoothest situation in the world. Um and
Speaker 1: yeah it got rocky. Or that September when in the
Speaker 1: Popular Front attempted to hijack four airliners bound for New
Speaker 1: York at the same time. Um. And to their credit,
Speaker 1: they succeeded in taking two planes, which is not bad
Speaker 1: for four planes. Yeah, but they just did the boring
Speaker 1: ship with Yeah. They they've got like three D sixty
Speaker 1: captives and they actually they flew them to an abandoned
Speaker 1: airfield in the Jordanian desert and like stamped their passports
Speaker 1: with like liberated like like like free territory or something
Speaker 1: like that. It was really weird. Um, I like that
Speaker 1: as a choice. Yeah, yeah, they weird. Performance are yeah,
Speaker 1: not quite performance. So whenever when they started the hijacking,
Speaker 1: the dudes in charge on each plane would tell the passengers, look,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, we have just hijacked you to a desert
Speaker 1: in Jordan's this is a country in the Middle East
Speaker 1: next to Israel and Syria. We're fighting a just war,
Speaker 1: a war for the liberation of our country from Israeli occupation.
Speaker 1: You relaxed tonight. There is food and drink here for you.
Speaker 1: So this was the guys that got captured, which is
Speaker 1: like nice get started. Yeah, like that way better than
Speaker 1: I do. Very very fitting for the region. Uh and
Speaker 1: also like, uh kind of funny that, like you kidnap
Speaker 1: a bunch of Americans and you're like, okay, the first
Speaker 1: thing we gotta do is let them know, like they
Speaker 1: don't know, they need to know, like is this part
Speaker 1: of Africa? No? But yeah, three hours later, alright, so
Speaker 1: everybody clear under the Mongols in Vadue. Now this is
Speaker 1: really when it's the Mediterranean, the mediterrane It's where pizza
Speaker 1: comes from. Okay, we're near the pizza place. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they have a very nice kidnapping um, which most
Speaker 1: is as a rule you read every time when you
Speaker 1: start reading through a bunch of stories of plane hijackings,
Speaker 1: most people on the planes talk very highly about the hijackers,
Speaker 1: which seems like a good tactic if you can hijack
Speaker 1: the plane and everybody on the plane is like, you know,
Speaker 1: that didn't seem so bad. That guy who's that guy
Speaker 1: who threatened our lives with the bomb was quite pleasant.
Speaker 1: What a nice and exciting detour. Yeah, um, yeah, you'll
Speaker 1: never guess, Marcia, what happened when we worked, when we
Speaker 1: were traveling. Yeah, most people like would love to be hijacked.
Speaker 1: As long as it was this kind of hijack. We
Speaker 1: get to spend some times. Stamp on the next slide.
Speaker 1: I took another picture. Yeah, and this is where the
Speaker 1: nice young pl O man gave me some tabula and
Speaker 1: showed me the bomb around his neck. Yeah. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the Popular Front eventually succeeded in trading the passengers for
Speaker 1: seven of their arrested comrades. Um and yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a big whole success, and for a while it was
Speaker 1: probably the most impressive airplane related act of terrorism in
Speaker 1: history until some assholes. You know, I would say that,
Speaker 1: by some standards, still more successful. I like it a
Speaker 1: lot better than you know, all those people, they seem
Speaker 1: like they had a pretty okage. It seems like it
Speaker 1: went all right. I would say the people flying the planes,
Speaker 1: the people hijacking the plans, and the people riding on
Speaker 1: the planes all felt better about it afterwards. I would
Speaker 1: I would say so. A lot of people had stories
Speaker 1: they told for the rest of their lives which they
Speaker 1: got to have. UM. So yeah, it was. It wasn't
Speaker 1: It was not the worst act terrorism history, you could
Speaker 1: say that for sure, UM. But it was a big
Speaker 1: old deal at the time, and it put the King
Speaker 1: of Jordan in a pretty rough situation. UH. And he
Speaker 1: eventually was like, I'm expelling y'all from Jordan's UM, which
Speaker 1: led to a horrific war UH in Jordans between the
Speaker 1: Palestinians called Black September and the Jordanian military UM. And
Speaker 1: the Palestinians were again, as is pretty usual in the
Speaker 1: long saga of Palestinian liberation, fucked from the jump UM.
Speaker 1: But they fought tenaciously UM. Eventually, though, casualties were so
Speaker 1: high that Carlos, the young Venezuelan recruit was sent into battle. UM.
Speaker 1: He described it as a sheer massa thousands of dead.
Speaker 1: I fought until nineteen seventy one. I was on the
Speaker 1: front line in the mountains. The enemy was trying to
Speaker 1: force us down the banks of the river Jordan's. His
Speaker 1: commanding officer noted that he was nerveless under fire and
Speaker 1: could take life without blinking. By the end of the
Speaker 1: whole DISASTERUS conflict, more than three thousand Palestinian fighters were dead,
Speaker 1: and Carlos, who had once been planning to return to Venezuela,
Speaker 1: was utterly committed to their cause. No more did he
Speaker 1: talk about going home. Instead, he went back to his
Speaker 1: old stomping grounds in London, this time as an agent
Speaker 1: for the Popular Front. This is when the James Bond
Speaker 1: shit starts. Yeah. So a life of wealth and travel
Speaker 1: had prepared him pretty well for his next job, which
Speaker 1: was pretending to be a socialite. So we could make
Speaker 1: a list of high profile pro Israel targets to kidnap
Speaker 1: and murder in London, which there if you cut out
Speaker 1: some of the stuff we were just covering here, there's
Speaker 1: a way to spend this where he is in fact
Speaker 1: a socialite. Yeah, yeah, kinda, uh yeah, I can't wait
Speaker 1: till he meets Roger Moore. Yeah. I've been waiting for
Speaker 1: two episodes now for this. So Carlos became a fixture
Speaker 1: in certain London social circles, using his easy charm and
Speaker 1: the facility with languages to build connections. He was most
Speaker 1: successful when it came to wooing young women, which he
Speaker 1: did constantly. Now, to say that Carlos used women would
Speaker 1: be putting it lightly. His most common move was to
Speaker 1: flirt with a girl until she fell for him and
Speaker 1: then asked him to hold a bag of his things
Speaker 1: in her attic whenever he went out of town on business.
Speaker 1: The bags would contain machine pistols usually, and large amounts
Speaker 1: of explosives like jelly n gelic, knight and uh yeah, dynamite.
Speaker 1: I mean, I would rather if some dude left some
Speaker 1: ship at my house. I would rather it was that
Speaker 1: than like a bunch of his spare underpant's just gonna
Speaker 1: put it out there. Don't really know how to play.
Speaker 1: He is that guy, but with bags of he has
Speaker 1: an endless supply of Yeah, he's he's we will learn
Speaker 1: very soon, very good at them, um so. And again
Speaker 1: though there's consequences for the women that he does this too.
Speaker 1: At least one of his women did a year in
Speaker 1: jail when she found weaponry that he'd stashed there and
Speaker 1: reported it to journalists before the police. Um yeah. He
Speaker 1: also endangered these women due to the fact that he
Speaker 1: left bombs in their houses that were always stored im properly,
Speaker 1: so like people would like become aware of the arms
Speaker 1: caches he'd left because the stink of rotting dynamite would
Speaker 1: start to overwhelm there. So he was not didn't really
Speaker 1: give a ship about these people. Yeah, that's that's not
Speaker 1: another level above and beyond, Like maybe you got a
Speaker 1: yeast infection and now your couch has gave you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like this guy left some decaying dynamite and my attic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I got a fucking cat from an ex
Speaker 1: girlfriend once, which is a lot better, I think than
Speaker 1: an illegal arms cash. I don't know. I mean I
Speaker 1: had my own flavor of toxic relationships that I prefer. Yeah. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: he's not, he's not, he's not. This is what he
Speaker 1: does with relationship. You know, it's not going to help
Speaker 1: you hijack the plane. Robert a cat. I mean it might,
Speaker 1: it would if it could. So I have some cats
Speaker 1: that you should need later on in life. Musing on
Speaker 1: the nature of his relationship to women, Carlos said this,
Speaker 1: I love women, I mean the good life, but not
Speaker 1: only sex. In the end, I love friendship a great deal.
Speaker 1: I haven't lived many love stories in my life. At
Speaker 1: the same time, I can fall in love easily like
Speaker 1: any old school boy. I can love several women at
Speaker 1: the same time. He also stated in another interview, to
Speaker 1: succeed in missions, you must have the supportive girls. You
Speaker 1: must strike up friendships with these apparently inoffensive creatures because
Speaker 1: they are very useful in supplying havens and warding off suspicion.
Speaker 1: So so I like to hang one around my neck
Speaker 1: and it keeps the vampires away. So there's there's part
Speaker 1: of that that seems like, okay, so you're kind of
Speaker 1: a slut, and and that's okay, that's a fine thing
Speaker 1: to be. It's the part where you leave decaying dynamite
Speaker 1: and their attics. That's the thing that I don't like.
Speaker 1: You know. You just want ladies to be treated like people,
Speaker 1: I mean, and not and not arms, caches or me
Speaker 1: objects to ward off evil. I'm fine with being a
Speaker 1: tetemic object to ward off evil. I don't feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, but if you start leaving to Kaine Dynamiter
Speaker 1: around the house, he might have to have a talk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's more that he hit it from them and they
Speaker 1: never knew that it was there in the first place,
Speaker 1: which is another level. Yeah, it's like a special Valentine,
Speaker 1: they treat So there were some women that he seemed
Speaker 1: to have more real relationships with generally, so he could
Speaker 1: trust them to like actually know that he was living
Speaker 1: weapons at their house, or he could trust them to
Speaker 1: act as a safe house once he started committing all
Speaker 1: the primes, and he was going to be committing now,
Speaker 1: depending on who you ask, the whole crimes thing may
Speaker 1: have started right away as soon as he got back
Speaker 1: to Europe in nineteen seventy two, with Carlos providing critical
Speaker 1: support to help hijack a Lofton's a jet and carry
Speaker 1: out the abduction of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. Now,
Speaker 1: Munich was like it was like the nine eleven of kidnapping,
Speaker 1: really the brass ring of mur during people at the Olympics. Um,
Speaker 1: it was it was it was, you know, a big deal, um,
Speaker 1: and there's a zero evidence that he had anything to
Speaker 1: do with it. Um. This was the thing he started
Speaker 1: claiming later because again, very famous act of terrorism, and
Speaker 1: if you're if you're a famous terrorist and there's a
Speaker 1: famous terrorism, it's you know, you don't you don't want
Speaker 1: people to not think you had anything to do with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then the next thing you know, people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: were you in that band and you were like, um, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we played a show together or whatever. Yeah, he's like
Speaker 1: the Ringo of Munich where he didn't actually do anything,
Speaker 1: but he takes credit. Ringo did Octopus his garden. No,
Speaker 1: we're not talking about Ringo today. Carlos had his first mission.
Speaker 1: We're talking about Carlos the Jackal today, not Ringo and
Speaker 1: equally terrorists. So Carlos had his first real act of
Speaker 1: terrorism that he committed on December thirtieth, nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: when he tried to murder one of the men he'd
Speaker 1: been stalking for months, Joseph CF, vice president of the
Speaker 1: British Zionist Foundation. He successfully broke into CF's house and
Speaker 1: shot him once, but then his revolver malfunctioned and most
Speaker 1: books say it jammed, which I don't. I it's hard
Speaker 1: to get him that it may have been an ammunition problem.
Speaker 1: Exactly what happened to take out I mean, famously, Ringo's
Speaker 1: attempt uncer top him hat and was foiled when his
Speaker 1: revolver jammed. And that's why George Carlin took over the series.
Speaker 1: I don't. Okay. Um, so yeah, Carlos tries to shoot
Speaker 1: this guy to death and it doesn't work, and Carlos
Speaker 1: leaves uh and CFS badly injured, but you know, he
Speaker 1: makes it. So it was a little bit of a
Speaker 1: ship show as far as acts of terrorism go. But
Speaker 1: it was like his first try and he got away.
Speaker 1: So that's what George Carlin knew. You gotta keep your
Speaker 1: powder dry. That's what Bernie another Bernie Sanders. So when
Speaker 1: he killed Robert F. Kennedy and another a month later, Uh,
Speaker 1: fucking Carlos tried again. Uh in this time instead of
Speaker 1: trying to shoot Yeah, no, no different that he doesn't
Speaker 1: even go after a guy. This time, he goes after
Speaker 1: a an Israeli bank, the Halfwall Limb Bank in London. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in Carlos's mind and made a good target for
Speaker 1: the two hundred grand plastic explosive charges he built after
Speaker 1: storing materials in some nice ladies house. He later recalled,
Speaker 1: I threw them through the main door towards the tills,
Speaker 1: but one of them landed in front of an employee
Speaker 1: before sliding over the parquet floor and exploding. He wasn't
Speaker 1: killed because he pulled back in time that said the
Speaker 1: bomb destroyed the entire facade of the bank. The operation
Speaker 1: created a big stir in the media, although there were
Speaker 1: no victims. Okay, so again this is one of those
Speaker 1: he just threw a bomb through a door like a bank.
Speaker 1: But he's not gonna like walk in Biell swave, like
Speaker 1: put it somewhere extra good, like just just he's new
Speaker 1: to this. He's new to this. He's trying um practice
Speaker 1: makes perfectly and characteristically when he says that there were
Speaker 1: no victims, he's not quite accurate because he actually injured
Speaker 1: a nineteen year old woman with shrapnel. Um. But he
Speaker 1: just doesn't like to talk about Yeah, we've already established
Speaker 1: that hurting women doesn't seem to bother him in their feelings,
Speaker 1: their addicts full of explosives, or their bodies in bank explosions.
Speaker 1: I don't think a lot of other people's feelings matter
Speaker 1: to Carlos Um. But yeah, so I will say, though,
Speaker 1: it is weird reading about him because, like by the
Speaker 1: standards of modern terrorists, all of the terrorists in this
Speaker 1: period avoid well, they avoid murdering as many people as
Speaker 1: they could. I suppose it's not fair to call that
Speaker 1: sucking at it. No, I would prefer terrorists who are
Speaker 1: more targeted in their violence, although not always but still
Speaker 1: not like We're not not like isis right, Like terrorism
Speaker 1: is a different matter today a little bit so, to
Speaker 1: quote from a maray of Carlos's life by researcher Mitchell Barth, Uh,
Speaker 1: soon after he set off car bomb attacks of three
Speaker 1: French newspapers accused of pro Israeli leanings, cars full of
Speaker 1: explosives were left outside the offices of um I'm not
Speaker 1: even gonna try to read those names, three French newspapers.
Speaker 1: The bombs were set to explode at two am, and
Speaker 1: Carlos later claimed that the hour was selected to limit
Speaker 1: human casualties. In addition, he advised the papers of the
Speaker 1: attack at the appointed time. Three of the four bombs exploded,
Speaker 1: causing massive damage. There were no casualties. The only paper
Speaker 1: to escape damage, uh did so when the vehicle bomb
Speaker 1: left in front of it failed to detonate. So three
Speaker 1: out of four not bad. Fox up three newspapers that
Speaker 1: are like pro Israel. He does. Like the thing he's
Speaker 1: trying to do. You know, he's getting better at terrorism, right,
Speaker 1: Like this is his montage where he's like he's like
Speaker 1: he's like running up the steps of the of the
Speaker 1: rude is something or other and like learning how to
Speaker 1: plant bombs in random places. I mean there's a little
Speaker 1: bit too of it. It's very much a targeted like
Speaker 1: I could blow you up, but I'm not. I'm just
Speaker 1: blowing up these vehicles with no one in them. Yeah
Speaker 1: right now, and I'm gonna you know, Sun your building
Speaker 1: up a bit. So you know, by this point he
Speaker 1: was getting seasoned at attempting terrorism, but his identity was
Speaker 1: still unknown, so he got to still be like a playboy,
Speaker 1: like living around Europe acting as a fixer for the
Speaker 1: Popular Front and allied left wing groups. So he's also
Speaker 1: kind of a batman villain. Yeah he is. He would
Speaker 1: people would tell him that he would like, well, he was.
Speaker 1: He's kind of like que for the Popular Front in
Speaker 1: this period because like other terrorists will come in, they'll
Speaker 1: say like we need this, and he'll like open up.
Speaker 1: He had closets full of weaponry and grenades and explode
Speaker 1: like all sorts of cool ship. So period wise, keeping
Speaker 1: the Bond theme, did he have a cat? I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't think so, I don't think. I can't imagine
Speaker 1: him taking care of a cat. He's moving around a
Speaker 1: lot too. Um. And he's really good at getting weaponry,
Speaker 1: like particularly just fucking sacks of these machine pistols. He
Speaker 1: loves machine pistols. Um. A lot of easy fifty twos
Speaker 1: and a lot of scorpions um. And he gets a
Speaker 1: shipload of hand grenades too, and again you know, puts
Speaker 1: him in the houses of women that he likes. Um.
Speaker 1: And in some cases when he trusted the women, he
Speaker 1: was very open about what he was doing, as this
Speaker 1: passage from the book Jackal makes clear. Nidia was the
Speaker 1: girl friend to whom Carlos felt closest, and he turned
Speaker 1: to her for help as he slowly built up a
Speaker 1: stock of arms for operations in Europe. One evening in
Speaker 1: July nineteen seventy four, he called Nydia from Paris and
Speaker 1: asked her to join him as soon as possible. She
Speaker 1: flew over and Carlos handed her a heavy black suitcase.
Speaker 1: All her boyfriend told her was keep this with you
Speaker 1: until I come and join you, or until somebody calls
Speaker 1: your flat and gives you a precise state the date
Speaker 1: of my birthday. According to Nydia, who took the suitcase,
Speaker 1: back with her to London. It was only sometimes later
Speaker 1: that she found out what it contained. Look, my love,
Speaker 1: this beauty is a check pistol, a high speed in
Speaker 1: fifty two automatic. It's marvelous, Carlos told her as he
Speaker 1: guided her through the suitcase's contents with childish gleet delight.
Speaker 1: When they met again, Carlos brought the barrel to his
Speaker 1: mouth and blew on it with a tender gesture, as
Speaker 1: if it had been a first kiss of love. Then
Speaker 1: he seized a grenade and put it in my hands,
Speaker 1: showing me how I should remove the primer and throw it.
Speaker 1: Forget that you are a woman, he added, with a
Speaker 1: certain arrogance. Don't close your eyes. That's I've had better dudes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Forget that you're a woman, because surely a woman could
Speaker 1: not handle the complex operation of pulling a pin out
Speaker 1: of a grenade and throwing it out a thing. Real
Speaker 1: feminist icon, Carlos just the jackal. Yeah, I know you.
Speaker 1: You you all were really hoping that he was going
Speaker 1: to wind up being being a real gender gender equality
Speaker 1: but instead he's a terrorist. Who is He's He's an
Speaker 1: entitled rich boy who was raised by the best Marxist
Speaker 1: and a shitty lawyer dad. So now is about the
Speaker 1: time in late summer nineteen seventy four, the small friends
Speaker 1: of ours come back into the story. The Japanese Red Arm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now this is and this is and this is non
Speaker 1: no non murdering all their friends non trapped in North
Speaker 1: Korea like the people who are committing tons of terrorism
Speaker 1: and really good at it, the fucking scary as hell. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So one of their members, their leader, actually had been
Speaker 1: arrested by French border patrol bearing a suit case with
Speaker 1: three fake passports and ten thousand dollars in counterfeit bills.
Speaker 1: And that may sound like he was like being kind
Speaker 1: of lazy, but again, everyone just flew with whatever illegal
Speaker 1: things they wanted to fly with, and nobody took any
Speaker 1: precautions back then. So he wasn't he wasn't out of
Speaker 1: the norm here. Um. So he gets caught though in
Speaker 1: this case for some reason, um, and gets put in prison.
Speaker 1: He probably knew the words national Yeah, he started playing
Speaker 1: it and he started saying so yeah he uh, they
Speaker 1: want him out, um, and they plan their Their plan
Speaker 1: to get their boss out is to carry out a
Speaker 1: daring attack on the French embassy in the Hague um
Speaker 1: and like occupy the entire French embassy and take everyone
Speaker 1: inside of a prisoner and then ransom them out for
Speaker 1: their captured boss and a plane. I mean, which is
Speaker 1: cool as Hell's like a hard plot, and also all
Speaker 1: of the die hard plots and everything else make a
Speaker 1: lot more sense given what you were talking about with
Speaker 1: the sixties and early seventies, because it seems like governments
Speaker 1: would have been like okay, yeah, it seems fair good, okay, good, yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: it's some I have to imagine at this point that
Speaker 1: it was in like a Bruce Willis movie that the
Speaker 1: phrase we don't negotiate with terrorists was uttered for the
Speaker 1: first time, because it certainly was not. Everyone negotiates immediately
Speaker 1: with terrorists, negotiates, gives them the one yeah now, so yeah,
Speaker 1: they they Carlos and his boss with a popular Front
Speaker 1: is like contact with the actual like organization is a
Speaker 1: is a dude named him Carbal who's an a Lebanese
Speaker 1: guy um and they provide the Japanese Red Army with
Speaker 1: all the guns and grenades they need, and the Japanese
Speaker 1: Red Army takes control of the embassy and kidnaps the
Speaker 1: ambassador um and here's how Michelle Barth summarizes what happens next.
Speaker 1: The j R commandos held the French ambassador, as well
Speaker 1: as ten other members in the French embassy hostage in
Speaker 1: order to force the release of their leader. While these
Speaker 1: negotiations persisted, Carlos, in conjunction with these attacks, devised a
Speaker 1: plan that he hoped would force the release of the terrorists.
Speaker 1: On a busy Sunday afternoon, he entered a trendy cafe
Speaker 1: in Paris, and he made his way to the forced
Speaker 1: floor balcony and threw a fragmentation grenade down into the
Speaker 1: crowd that milled around the boutiques on the ground floor.
Speaker 1: Carlos left just before the blast scattered hundreds of lethal
Speaker 1: fragments through the crowd, killing two and injuring thirty four
Speaker 1: or thirty four innocent shoppers. The French government cave to
Speaker 1: the jp A demands two days later, providing both the
Speaker 1: release of the organization's leader as well as a jet
Speaker 1: that would fly them to safety. So that's a terrible
Speaker 1: act of terrorism. Also makes him a big deal because
Speaker 1: it worked like fucking game. He threw a grenade and
Speaker 1: they were like, here's a jet and we're letting this
Speaker 1: stud and all of his friends who occupied, like who
Speaker 1: conquered our embassy? And he yes, different era, it's I
Speaker 1: mean it's a very different period of time. Um, so yeah,
Speaker 1: he's famous now. Like now, he's not famous in terms
Speaker 1: of like his identity is still a secret, but like
Speaker 1: within the world of people who are like you know,
Speaker 1: terrorists and stuff or freedom fighters ever you wanna call him,
Speaker 1: he's like a big deal. Now he's like a big
Speaker 1: fucking operation. Uh. Now, The problem though with getting famous
Speaker 1: is that tasting your first dose of fame makes you
Speaker 1: want it more. And Carlos set for his next attack
Speaker 1: a spectacular goal. There were some LLL airplanes on the
Speaker 1: runway at Orly Airport near Paris, and instead of hijacking them,
Speaker 1: he wanted to blow them up because he had acquired
Speaker 1: a sack full of rocket propelled grenades. Now, so their
Speaker 1: plan was just to like shoot taxiing LLL aircraft and
Speaker 1: load them up, um while they were on the runway
Speaker 1: filled with hundreds of American tourists, which was quite a plan.
Speaker 1: And also it's getting a little bit more into like
Speaker 1: modern that seems like he was talking about killing like
Speaker 1: a hundred and seventy people, right, Yeah, that's actually quite
Speaker 1: a bit different than all of his previous actions because
Speaker 1: I think one thing that's been getting me over a
Speaker 1: lot of this is there's all sorts of wars going on,
Speaker 1: and we're in a period of time when everyone kind
Speaker 1: of low level thought that they could die any minute.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, the idea that you were
Speaker 1: that you killed more than like four people in a
Speaker 1: single action for anything is like, oh my gosh, loss
Speaker 1: of life is incredible. It is weird. There's probably a
Speaker 1: lot of reasons for it that we're not going to
Speaker 1: delve into now because it's kind of a bummer to
Speaker 1: think about. So, uh yeah, I'm going to read a
Speaker 1: quote from the book Jackal talking about how this attack
Speaker 1: went because it's it's a fun it's a fun story.
Speaker 1: The Allal plane was a hundred thirty meters away when
Speaker 1: wine Rich, who was his partner on this, who was
Speaker 1: a German guy who was like, I think the son
Speaker 1: of Nazis and stuff and like became a left wing activist. Anyway,
Speaker 1: iybe that's the guy that that is. So he's with
Speaker 1: he's he He and wine Rich have like this truck
Speaker 1: full of rocket propelled grenades. UM so yeah. The l
Speaker 1: plane was unders away while within the weapon's maximum range
Speaker 1: at three, but the missile sword wide of the nose
Speaker 1: of the plane. Without waiting to see the rocket's final impact,
Speaker 1: wine Rich hurriedly consulted Carlos before reloading and taking aim
Speaker 1: as second time. The first rocket hit a parked car
Speaker 1: and then smashed into an empty workshop where the black
Speaker 1: boxes recording flight data were manufactured. It failed to explode.
Speaker 1: A moment later, the radio and the cockpit of the
Speaker 1: Allal jet crackled with an urgent order from the control
Speaker 1: tower for all planes on the tarmac to come to
Speaker 1: an immediate halt. The Israeli captain, a former fighter pilot
Speaker 1: with combat experience, had no intention of obeying the order,
Speaker 1: which would have offered his attackers an easy target. He
Speaker 1: accelerated sharply and made straight for the runway, and his
Speaker 1: haste to fire a second rocket, wine Rich to brace
Speaker 1: himself for the recoil, which punched him backwards, and the
Speaker 1: Bazuka steel tube shattered their car's windshield. The rocket pierced
Speaker 1: the fuselage of a parked in virtually empty Yugoslav plane
Speaker 1: before exiting. On the other side, flying metal slightly injured
Speaker 1: a steward, a policeman and a baggage handler, but the rocket,
Speaker 1: like the first, failed to explode and burrowed its way
Speaker 1: into empty kitchens. The only damaged cause was a few
Speaker 1: broken plates. Wine Rich and Carlos jumped into the car
Speaker 1: and sped away, leaving behind a Soviet made automatic pistol
Speaker 1: on the edge of the road outside a cemetery a
Speaker 1: few miles away. They abandoned the car and paused only
Speaker 1: long enough to throw a cover over the launcher, a
Speaker 1: third unused rocket, two grenades, and another Soviet made pistol
Speaker 1: lying on the back seat before switching to another rental car.
Speaker 1: Carlos blamed his teammate for the fiasco. Wine Rich, she explained,
Speaker 1: was courageous and experience, but the last second he broke down.
Speaker 1: Shortly afterwards, someone called the Reuters news agency in Paris
Speaker 1: to claim responsibility for the attack. The message ended with
Speaker 1: the promise, next time, we'll hit our target. So every
Speaker 1: comedy made during the eighties makes a lot more sense. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is They're not great at it, like one Us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like Sad Tuba. Throughout it's just like the casualness with
Speaker 1: which they're leaving rocket launchers and machine pistols behind is
Speaker 1: they're like, well, I guess we're fucked right. Well, And
Speaker 1: because I was really picturing these two guys as like
Speaker 1: suave eighties villain motherfucker's up until you described all that,
Speaker 1: and now I'm picturing them as like, you know, like
Speaker 1: Kerry Elwis and like John Clice, just like flying backwards
Speaker 1: into the windshields in their cars because they're not properly
Speaker 1: raised and two rockets in a row that don't blow up,
Speaker 1: and yeah they're not. It doesn't go well. They're just
Speaker 1: littering their trail with pistols like Red Cromes dan akright
Speaker 1: is in this movie, dan Acred is definitely He's the
Speaker 1: security guard who is like comically unaware of what's going on,
Speaker 1: yet somehow still manages to foil the plot. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: they promised to come back and not to miss in
Speaker 1: the future, but they don't keep this promise. Uh. They
Speaker 1: try again like a week later with a bunch of
Speaker 1: Palestinian guerrillas to help them, but this is also a
Speaker 1: cock up from the start. Carlos and his boss like
Speaker 1: they get spotted immediately and like wind up, like the
Speaker 1: guerrillas all wind up in a running gun battle with
Speaker 1: French candor terrorism police and take a bunch of hostages
Speaker 1: and like get an airplane to fly them safely back home. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Carlos and his partner like drive away, did they successfully
Speaker 1: get the okay to blow up planes on the tur back?
Speaker 1: And then instead they hijack a plane because that's the fallback,
Speaker 1: Because that's the fallback, because everyone can hijack a plane. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's really easy. Why didn't they just hijack the
Speaker 1: plane to begin because they wanted to kill people, but
Speaker 1: they're bad at it, but you know how you could
Speaker 1: kill people people? Did eventually have that idea and it
Speaker 1: didn't It wasn't great. Yeah. So on June Nive, Carlos
Speaker 1: is boss with a popular front Michelle Mukarbal, was captured
Speaker 1: and interrogated by French intelligence. He apparently turned and like
Speaker 1: you know, did you know did the he snitched? Uh?
Speaker 1: And he led the cops to Carlos's safe house, which was,
Speaker 1: of course the house that his girlfriend lived at and
Speaker 1: was currently holding a party. So everything about this is
Speaker 1: baffling because these three French intelligence agents have this Palestinian
Speaker 1: uh like p l O guy who they know is
Speaker 1: a big terrorist and has just committed big terrorism and
Speaker 1: they're going to meet his partner at a party. But
Speaker 1: it's the start of the weekend and it's like a
Speaker 1: holiday weekend, and they all have guns, but they all
Speaker 1: check them in at work because they don't want to
Speaker 1: deal with like going back to the office later to
Speaker 1: drop their guns off afterwards. With guns is France in
Speaker 1: the seventies. Yeah, Like there's the chance that the party
Speaker 1: was going to be really good and maybe he wouldn't
Speaker 1: find him, and then there was gonna be a convoy
Speaker 1: of cars heading to an orgy afterwards, and were they
Speaker 1: started drinking while they're talking to Carlos. So they start
Speaker 1: drinking while they're talking to Carlos, but then one of
Speaker 1: them brings Mukarbo into the room, and Carlos realizes instantly like,
Speaker 1: oh shit, he fucking he fucking turned on me. And
Speaker 1: while until then they just thought Carlos just thought they
Speaker 1: were having a nice conversation, thought, oh, these two cops,
Speaker 1: when I ask me some questions, I can get out
Speaker 1: of this because I'm a charming motherfucker. And we're all
Speaker 1: at a party, and we're all at a party and
Speaker 1: like they seem chill, like I think I can get
Speaker 1: out of this. Then they bring in his business partner,
Speaker 1: and Carlos did not leave his gun at home, and
Speaker 1: he immediately pulls a CZ fifty two automatic pistol. He
Speaker 1: shoots Mukarbo in the throat, and he shoots two out
Speaker 1: of three cops dead. Um just immediately um wounds the
Speaker 1: other I think, uh, and then fucking books it um
Speaker 1: and makes it away with like as like the whole
Speaker 1: country of France turning on to like chase him. He
Speaker 1: makes it all the way back to fucking Beirut without
Speaker 1: his face even getting like exposed during the He's he's
Speaker 1: very good at some parts of being a terrorists, like
Speaker 1: running away, very shooting a bunch of people in the face. Um,
Speaker 1: so yeah he gets away, uh, And like things are
Speaker 1: rough at first and Lebanon because people are like, you
Speaker 1: shot one of our heroes in the face. But then
Speaker 1: he's like that guy was a snitch, and then they're
Speaker 1: like all right, so things are good after that. Um yeah.
Speaker 1: International authorities do eventually put two and two together, and
Speaker 1: Carlos's name, you know, suddenly is all over the world
Speaker 1: news and like right around this time, by coincidence, a
Speaker 1: big heat wave hits London and one of the packages
Speaker 1: of high explosives that he just left in an ex
Speaker 1: girlfriend's flat started to smell weird and they opened it
Speaker 1: and found a list of local Jews, a machine pistol,
Speaker 1: a silencer, and a bunch of bomb makers. He's a
Speaker 1: he's he's a whole auntie is ay thing like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're gonna run into sometimes. I understand that we shouldn't expect,
Speaker 1: you know, find the stations between these people are Jewish,
Speaker 1: and yes, the State of Israel policies I don't like
Speaker 1: from a guy who he is terrorist just shot his
Speaker 1: friend right in and he shot his friend in the
Speaker 1: face a second after seeing him and realizing what had happened,
Speaker 1: like there's a zero, like there's yeah, so uh. They
Speaker 1: this this girlfriend and like her boyfriend at the time,
Speaker 1: find all this stuff. Um, And instead of calling the
Speaker 1: cops because they're both like far left activists, they called
Speaker 1: the guardian UM and the reporter who goes over to
Speaker 1: their house to do the story notices a copy of
Speaker 1: Frederick fourth Sithes book The Day of the Jackal and
Speaker 1: if you remember from our episodes about the about Guinea
Speaker 1: and the coup's there, Frederick forsythe was the guy who
Speaker 1: wrote that book about how to do a coup that
Speaker 1: then people uses the like to do. So they find
Speaker 1: a copy of Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal on
Speaker 1: the bookshelf. The reporter does and this is like while
Speaker 1: he's getting ready to write this story, and it gives
Speaker 1: him the idea for Carlos nickname, he starts calling him
Speaker 1: Carlos the Jackal. So that's this point forward and this
Speaker 1: is carlome jack So Carlos and this is the same
Speaker 1: attic where there's a bunch of there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: guns and decaying dynamite and gelic night local. Yeah it's
Speaker 1: not Look, man, I wasn't standing Carlos the Jackal until
Speaker 1: this point, but like he's one of those guys who
Speaker 1: there's moments in his life because it's so outrageous, like
Speaker 1: the kind of like the way everything worked in the
Speaker 1: seventies and the kind of terrorists he is where you're like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, that's so cool, and then you remember, like, oh,
Speaker 1: and this is also a guy who dropped a grenade
Speaker 1: into a crowd of strangers like I need to I
Speaker 1: need to cool it a little. Yeah. Yeah, and he was.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess that list was not for giving people
Speaker 1: nice notes about how No he wasn't like keeping track
Speaker 1: of Yeah, no he was. It was not stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was for his earlier job trying to kill a
Speaker 1: bunch of random you know, people who supported his reel. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, now, from this point forward, Carlos is, you know,
Speaker 1: the most wanted man on earth. This is when he
Speaker 1: becomes like the the most like wanted person by international
Speaker 1: law enforcement on the part for a while. Um, but
Speaker 1: you know what also is the most wanted thing by
Speaker 1: international law enforcement? The manufactured demands of capitalism. I was
Speaker 1: going to say the products and services that support this podcast,
Speaker 1: but they are one and the same. Here we go,
Speaker 1: We're back. We're talking about Carlos the jackal uh seat
Speaker 1: of the j Uh. And as the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: turned into fall, he was sitting in Beirut. He just
Speaker 1: had a whole big string of cool successes and some
Speaker 1: failures related to rocket launcher. Cool successes. Yeah, he killed
Speaker 1: people with a grenade and they got a jet. The
Speaker 1: seventies were quite a decade at that time. He shot
Speaker 1: his friend in the face instantly, instantly, immediately. So he's
Speaker 1: sitting in Beirut and he's planning his most ambitious attack yet,
Speaker 1: an assault on OPEQUE headquarters in Vienna and opecer the
Speaker 1: guys who run you know, oil um, they produced it
Speaker 1: and explored it. Yea, yeah, that's opec UM. So on
Speaker 1: December twenty one, he led a six person team that
Speaker 1: raided the annual OPEC leadership meeting and took more than
Speaker 1: sixty people hostage, including most of the people running OPEC.
Speaker 1: Three people were killed in doing a libbyan delegate and
Speaker 1: the opening stages of the attack now once yeah, which
Speaker 1: also this is one of those things where he's now
Speaker 1: there will be some consequences for Yeah, it's one thing
Speaker 1: to be p l O and be with Israel and
Speaker 1: everybody's like, you really want Kadafi on your side if
Speaker 1: you're all in this period, Yeah, you just fact with
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of people who might have been down
Speaker 1: with you. You might have let you hide in their country. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so, it didn't it's not perfect. You know, you're
Speaker 1: ray to OPEC, You're gonna going to crack them. That's
Speaker 1: the only part of a plan where several people die.
Speaker 1: It's not perfect, but you know, yeah, so um yeah.
Speaker 1: They they take over opec uh and take a bunch
Speaker 1: of people hostage, and once their hostages are secure, Carlos
Speaker 1: and his comrades make the same familiar demand for a
Speaker 1: plane in money that every other group of terrorists does,
Speaker 1: but they add something new to this. They demand that
Speaker 1: Austrian authorities read a letter about the Palestinian cause on
Speaker 1: their radio and TV networks every two hours. If Austria doesn't,
Speaker 1: Carlos promises to execute a hostage every fifteen minutes. I
Speaker 1: just love how much of this terrorism has boiled down to.
Speaker 1: We got some pamphlets for you. You gotta read this letter.
Speaker 1: We're gonna like, Yo, there's like libraries and like, can
Speaker 1: you imagine this sort of ship couldn't happen in the
Speaker 1: era of YouTube. Yeah, because YouTube is just there. You
Speaker 1: could just like and you know what, back when things
Speaker 1: were done this way, a lot of people had interesting
Speaker 1: plane experiences, and now we have tons of fascists. So
Speaker 1: so you're saying YouTube didn't I do it. I I
Speaker 1: am saying that we should go back to a hijacking
Speaker 1: based economy like things were in the Seube and ban
Speaker 1: the internet, ban the internet, make hijacking legal. It'll fix
Speaker 1: a lot of problems. That's all I'm gonna say. There's
Speaker 1: nothing wrong with that plan. Yeah. So Austria is like,
Speaker 1: I guess we're going to broadcast a bunch of pro
Speaker 1: Palestinian stuff because you have all of OPEC captured, so
Speaker 1: we don't really have a lot of options here. Um.
Speaker 1: So they give him a plane, uh, and it flies
Speaker 1: to out Years. Well, that's the baseline. You gotta no
Speaker 1: matter what happens, you get a plane. You get a plane,
Speaker 1: like we're having a terrorism one second. Let me, let's
Speaker 1: get you seven thirty seven. Come on, now, what do
Speaker 1: you have? What a bottle of hair spraying? You're getting Assessna.
Speaker 1: So yeah, they fly out Years where Carlos freeze thirty
Speaker 1: and non Arab hostages in exchange for refueling the jet,
Speaker 1: which then flies to Tripoli. Uh. Now Tripoli isn't wild
Speaker 1: to have them there because of the Libyan they killed
Speaker 1: Um and a number of other reasons, minor details they
Speaker 1: didn't ask. Kadafi was a big asking guy. He did
Speaker 1: do authoritarian dictators like it when you you know, maybe
Speaker 1: get permission from them to do things. He's not psyched. Uh.
Speaker 1: So the Carlos and is like, okay, well, could you
Speaker 1: at least give us a plane that can like go
Speaker 1: further so that we can like get away with all
Speaker 1: these hostages we still have, And Kadafi's like, no, you
Speaker 1: all you killed my guy, Like fuck you. Um, I'm
Speaker 1: momar Kadafi. I'm not famous for being reasonable. Um. So
Speaker 1: you know. Eventually though, in exchange for releasing all the
Speaker 1: Libyan hostages and five other delegates, the plane was refueled
Speaker 1: and returned to Algiers, where Carlos agreed to release everybody
Speaker 1: else in exchange for political asylum and a huge pile
Speaker 1: of cash which was provided by either Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Speaker 1: Uh Now, this was supposed to this cash was supposed
Speaker 1: to go to the movement, but Carlos took a bunch
Speaker 1: of it um, which got him kicked out at the
Speaker 1: Popular front. Um. So you know, this is kind of
Speaker 1: the end of that part of his career, which also
Speaker 1: you gotta well, yeah, you also you gotta respect a
Speaker 1: terrorist organization that's like, okay, that time that you had
Speaker 1: a list of Jews you were going to kill. That's fine.
Speaker 1: All those times you left decaying dynamite and those ladies attics.
Speaker 1: At that time you just threw some grenades off of
Speaker 1: a balcony into a random crowd of strangers, totally fine.
Speaker 1: The time you totally funked up trying to shoot down
Speaker 1: those jets also totally fine. But you kept a bunch
Speaker 1: of money that we were going to use to keep
Speaker 1: doing those things. And that's where we draw. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: kind of where things go here. So yeah, Carlos, you know, Um,
Speaker 1: he winds up kind of on the run for a while.
Speaker 1: He flees to the Balkans, where he's detained by the
Speaker 1: Yugoslavian government and then sent to a rack. For some reason,
Speaker 1: it's never been clear to me. I mean, it's out
Speaker 1: of the Balkans, it's out of the Balkans. It's out
Speaker 1: of Yugoslavia. Yeah, that's that's what they say in the
Speaker 1: touris and brochures for Bagdad, not the Balkans. Ye. Well,
Speaker 1: and he successfully he had successfully piste off quite a
Speaker 1: few other countries. You getting kicked out of the Balkans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he wound up kind of wriggling out of this
Speaker 1: and sitting up and uh Adden, where he tried to
Speaker 1: form his own terrorist group made of Syrian, Lebanese and
Speaker 1: German rebels UM and he winds up getting the attention
Speaker 1: of the s Gerban government UM and their secret police,
Speaker 1: the Stazi, who offer him in office and a safe
Speaker 1: house in East Berlin. Wa like yeah, they hire him now, yeah,
Speaker 1: They're like, you're pretty good at this terrorism thing. Come on,
Speaker 1: live in Berlin. Here's this house and here's this apartment
Speaker 1: that we've prepped for you. Don't worry, don't bother opening
Speaker 1: up the walls were only the Stasie. You don't even
Speaker 1: know how to record things. That's what everyone says about
Speaker 1: the Stazi. Also the Stai famous lovers of guys who
Speaker 1: want to overthrow government. I don't think it really doesn't
Speaker 1: in Prague pretty soon, yeah, I mean, considering who they
Speaker 1: are and who he is, do you know about it
Speaker 1: before he did? And they he spent some time as
Speaker 1: like a semi legitimate agent of the you know, of
Speaker 1: the USSR, and of of East Germany and like kind
Speaker 1: of just like global you know, all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: He lives in Prague. He gets seventy person support staff,
Speaker 1: a car and the right to carry a handgun anywhere
Speaker 1: he wants, which is a fun thing to get to
Speaker 1: have to get to do in Prague in the seventies. Uh,
Speaker 1: this was not a great actually freedom for them to
Speaker 1: give him because he drank very heavily and would lock
Speaker 1: himself out of his hotel room and then wave a
Speaker 1: handgun around wildly, screaming at everyone around him. The staff
Speaker 1: of seventy to come in out's going to say, that's
Speaker 1: probably a good way to get people to let you
Speaker 1: into your apartment. I mean I could page my secretary
Speaker 1: or I could scream wildly and wave a hand. That's
Speaker 1: what do you think He's going to get a quicker response?
Speaker 1: So he he keeps running his terrorist group. Um, and
Speaker 1: obvious they do. They do some cool stuff and not
Speaker 1: tinnity too. They carry it an attack on a French
Speaker 1: nuclear reactor. Um, it didn't work out, but famous good
Speaker 1: targets for terrorism. And yeah, I'm as someone that really
Speaker 1: loves seventies Roger Moore Bond movies, I'm really pressed by
Speaker 1: how well this all lines up. It's amazing. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: part of why those movies got made. It's because Carlos
Speaker 1: the Jackal was doing this ship and now he goes
Speaker 1: to the move and he goes he went to the
Speaker 1: Moon in the seventies too, and it was great. No notes,
Speaker 1: so um, yeah, he tries to carry his group, carries
Speaker 1: out an attack on a nuclear reactor. It doesn't work. Uh,
Speaker 1: he's married at the time, and his wife gets arrested
Speaker 1: and Carlos demanded her release from France, which is kind
Speaker 1: of a bold move, which it sounds like we're just
Speaker 1: gonna move on past this. But you say it doesn't work,
Speaker 1: which I assume means they didn't blow and they did
Speaker 1: not do that. And also his wife is just a footnote. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he got married at some point. He got married at
Speaker 1: some point. Sometimes we're fucking page twenty two here, there's
Speaker 1: gotta be some throw a Duffel bag full of the
Speaker 1: King dynamite and somebody's attic. There's a special connection. It's
Speaker 1: different than all the other Duffel bags you've thrown and
Speaker 1: all the other attics. I'm just know though, that once
Speaker 1: you marry someone, it makes it harder to hide Duffel
Speaker 1: bags of bombs and other people's attics. That really depends
Speaker 1: on the nature of the relationship. I was going to say,
Speaker 1: based on the Jackal's dead, I would say being married
Speaker 1: is not an impediment of throwing your whatever in anywhere
Speaker 1: you want. So uh, yeah, he demands his wife's release
Speaker 1: of France after trying to blow up their nuclear reactor,
Speaker 1: and France shockingly is like, we we were not going
Speaker 1: to be doing that really, And so Carlos the Jackal
Speaker 1: bombs their cultural center in Beirut, and then he bombs
Speaker 1: a train in France that was supposed to be occupied
Speaker 1: by Jack Sharrock, who was the president of France at
Speaker 1: the time. Recently so something and they didn't give it
Speaker 1: to him, and so he bombed a train in a
Speaker 1: cultural center. And this is also now an interesting turn though,
Speaker 1: because at this point he's like, specifically, I was going
Speaker 1: to blow up a nuclear uh nuclear plant, and now
Speaker 1: you arrested my wife. So they were just trying to
Speaker 1: steal stuff from the plant. But okay, well whatever, but yeah,
Speaker 1: like you arrested my wife and now I'm on a
Speaker 1: series of terrorisms to get my wife. Is it personal
Speaker 1: or was he actually planning on blowing those things up anyway?
Speaker 1: And he's just using it a justification because if it
Speaker 1: really is about his wife. It might be one of
Speaker 1: the only he's done. Yeah. So he bought blows this plant,
Speaker 1: this train up that the President of France is supposed
Speaker 1: to be on, and he kills five passengers, he injured thirty.
Speaker 1: The next year he bombs two more French trains. Is
Speaker 1: payback for a French bombing of Lebanese training camps. Okay,
Speaker 1: so moved from and for like yeah, for more than
Speaker 1: a decade, Carlos the Jackal. You know, it was like
Speaker 1: the most famous terrorist on earth, the inspired movies and
Speaker 1: a lot of villains and now forgotten TV action dramas. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, in Prague, his drinking and his whurring in
Speaker 1: his increasingly unfocused attacks on civilian targets started to get
Speaker 1: like on the nerves of the power wars to be
Speaker 1: And in nineteen eighty six check security forces told him
Speaker 1: that French intelligence had sent a hit squad after him.
Speaker 1: He fled Prague and went on the start of an
Speaker 1: eight year long flight from Western justice. So he is
Speaker 1: completely unbacked and he makes it eight years. He's very
Speaker 1: good at running from the law. Yeah. It's also that
Speaker 1: might be the longest stretch that he didn't blow something up.
Speaker 1: It is he's this is like in there's a reason
Speaker 1: he's famous, Like he wasn't bad bad guy. So he
Speaker 1: winds up in Syria, where he lived in the mansion
Speaker 1: of a Mexican millionaire for again reasons I don't know
Speaker 1: how to explain to you, uh, and kind of retired
Speaker 1: for a while. UM. France was content to give up
Speaker 1: on catching him, but in nineteen nineties, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Speaker 1: Uh that didn't work out great. And you know, once
Speaker 1: he was licking his wounds and angry in America, he
Speaker 1: reached out to fame terrorist Carlos the Jackal and was like,
Speaker 1: what have you did some terrorism on America? UM and
Speaker 1: Carlos I don't think really got around to it. But Uh,
Speaker 1: Syria was you know, got kind of nervous about that
Speaker 1: whole deal and was like, we don't really want to
Speaker 1: piss off the United States right now because we were
Speaker 1: watching so we're you can't be in Syria anymore. So
Speaker 1: by the end of it, the only country in the
Speaker 1: world willing to shelter Carlos the Jackal was Sudan, and
Speaker 1: Carlos immediately didn't. If you're if you're down to Sudan,
Speaker 1: that's your that's your last place. Um. And he wore
Speaker 1: his welcome out there basically instantly because again you got kicked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all of the drinking and whorring and then like a
Speaker 1: pretty fundamental Yeah, he just couldn't stop drinking and whoring.
Speaker 1: So Sudan gives him up an extradit. Sudan extradites him
Speaker 1: to France. God damn ship uh in August of nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four o nine. He had a good run, he
Speaker 1: had a asked run. But that also explains why there's
Speaker 1: very few communist countries that he could. Yeah. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was a pretty fucking good run. Uh, pretty fucking good
Speaker 1: run of being the most wanted man in the world. Um.
Speaker 1: And this began. There was, of course, a series of
Speaker 1: trials for his many crimes that, like the last of
Speaker 1: them I think, just finished up. Like he was in
Speaker 1: court recently. Um, he's still alive. He still gives interviews
Speaker 1: sometimes in court. He's regularly defended his innocence when talking
Speaker 1: about specific crimes, while bragging about his involvement in general ones.
Speaker 1: He told a French court recently, no one has executed
Speaker 1: more people than me in the Palestinian resistance. Um. Hell,
Speaker 1: have the thing to brag about. He also bragged in court,
Speaker 1: I have been a professional revolutionary since I was a teenager.
Speaker 1: WHI was a little bit of a little bit of
Speaker 1: an exaggeration, but not all that much um insofar as
Speaker 1: being trained by private tutors makes you a profession Also
Speaker 1: in the way of like in age, he is profoundly
Speaker 1: a boomer at this point, and his teenagerhood versus his
Speaker 1: thirties are all very far away from him. She doesn't
Speaker 1: really matter. He was a professional revolutionary as a teenager
Speaker 1: in the same way that the current president was a
Speaker 1: businessman as a teenager. His dad gave him a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of ship. He didn't have to work. But unlike
Speaker 1: the current president, he did become a self made man.
Speaker 1: He and he did it by shooting people right in
Speaker 1: their faces and making bombs and making bombs and running
Speaker 1: from the police for like decades. So you know, uh.
Speaker 1: In the end, I'd like to read a quote from
Speaker 1: him that he gave to a journalist that sums up
Speaker 1: at least how he likes to portray his his philosophy
Speaker 1: on life. I like good food, I like to drink,
Speaker 1: and I like good cigars. I like to sleep in
Speaker 1: a comfortable bed which has just been made. I like
Speaker 1: to wear good shoes. I like to play cards, poker,
Speaker 1: and blackjack. Also like parties a dancers. But I'm against possessions.
Speaker 1: What I possess belongs to others as much as to me.
Speaker 1: So that's that's his That's that's we describes himself. I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna put it up there. That's like a luxury
Speaker 1: communists a whole bunch of explosives behind you. The things
Speaker 1: you possess will belong to you and other people equally
Speaker 1: as much. These are their explosives to and after they
Speaker 1: go off, no one has anything. Yeah. Look like this
Speaker 1: department that you own is also very soon going to
Speaker 1: be lots of other people's apartments. This is how we
Speaker 1: spread Marxism. Carlos. Yeah, so he's a there's a fun story. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I like this, honestly. I like this one more than
Speaker 1: the one where all of those Japanese college students co
Speaker 1: murdered each other on the mountain. So yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: story of Carlos the Jackal. Everybody learned something good. I
Speaker 1: sure did. I learned that everybody gets the plane. Everybody
Speaker 1: gets everybody the first no matter how badly your terrorism goes,
Speaker 1: you get plane. No matter what happens, you get a plane.
Speaker 1: Were you were you trying to blow up some planes unsuccessfully?
Speaker 1: Let's give you a plane to make me feel better.
Speaker 1: Well they did shoot a bunch of cops too, Well,
Speaker 1: okay again, let's give you a plane to make you
Speaker 1: feel better. Yeah, it was a cool era of terrorism
Speaker 1: was easily my favorite. Uh so, yeah, you gotta got
Speaker 1: Um we're on Twitter and Instagram and medium at Curtist.
Speaker 1: You can find things that you write and pictures that
Speaker 1: you take and random things that we post on all
Speaker 1: of those. And you know, if you find yourself in
Speaker 1: the streets of Portland's getting repeated tear gas and shot
Speaker 1: the impact munitions by law enforcement, um, come say hi. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well we'll we'll say you should not be here, there's
Speaker 1: tear gas or something along those and you'll say what
Speaker 1: because it'll sound like because yeah, it will be a
Speaker 1: good time for everybody, all right, godspeed, h