The story of the world's first super-terrorist

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Find the Empire Politics podcast on the MPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. For decades now, we've become accustomed to living with the threat of terrorist attacks, were scanned by magnetometers and weight-through security lines at airports, concerts, and ball games. Our guest today, Veteran National Security correspondent, Joby Warwick,

has a new book that takes us back to the early days of modern terrorism in the 1970s, when hijacking airplanes was relatively easy and airlines and governments but often simply give in to terrorist demands. Warwick's book focuses on a man who in his day was the world's most famous terrorist, a man of many aliases who came to be known as Carlos The Jackal,

while leaving a trail of victims across Europe and the Middle East. He managed to enjoy the lifestyle of a wealthy playboy, wearing designer clothes, free-coating nightclubs and luxury hotels, and having multiple affairs with women. Tabloid journalists were fascinated, and Carlos became such a cult figure

that during one hijacking, a British pilot asked for his autograph. He would also inspire fictionalized villains and novels and films, including Robert Ledlem's Born Identity Series and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. Last year, Joby Warwick spoke with a now elderly Carlos at the French prison where he's lived for decades.

Joby Warwick spent three decades at the Washington Post. He was last on fresh air to talk about his Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Black Flags," the rise of ISIS. His new book is The Jackal, The Rise and Fall of Carlos,

the world's first super-terrorist.

Joby Warwick, welcome back to fresh air. It's so great to be back. Thanks, Dave. You know, you've been writing about contemporary national security issues for a long time. You did that great book on the origins of ISIS.

“What made you want to go back and cover this figure from an earlier era?”

I think maybe it has something to do with my age, and I'm in my 60s now. So I can remember a time before Al Qaeda, before 9/11, when terrorism meant something else. Al Qaeda redefined terrorism for our generation. But there was this earlier wave that you described at the time when any flight

anywhere on the world could potentially be hijacked by people demanding all kinds of things. And this was an era that, in many ways, kind of created templates for the terrorism that we came to know later on. But it also had many incredibly fascinating individuals and characters on both the terrorism side, but also on the law enforcement side, people who spent their careers chasing these guys.

It was a very different era, and I thought it was instructive really to get back into that, and remind people what happened before and how, in some ways, it set a precedent for what we came to know later as modern terrorism. Now, this got Carlos, he would have a long career of terrorism in Europe and the Middle East, really had a pretty young age as that, like college age.

But he actually came from South America and tell us something about his background. This is really extraordinary, because you have someone who became, essentially, the face of the Palestinian militant movement at that time. He wasn't a Palestinian at all. He was from Venezuela.

He was a son of a devolved Marxist, his father kind of brought up his kids in an environment with a worshiped linen, the man actually named three of his kids after linen, using various names, including Iliach, which became the real name of the man who became Carlos the jackal. But from that early age, he saw himself as, as having a destiny,

as being someone who was going to be a swashbuckling international revolutionary.

So he leaves college, and he heads to the Middle East to join a Palestinian resistance group, the popular front for the liberation of Palestine. No longer exists, right? And this was a Marxist, very radical Palestinian group. And he came to work with a leader there, Wadi Hadad.

This is an interesting moment in the Palestinian movement. This is 1970 or so, right? Just three years after the 1967 war, at which Israel defeated its Arab adversaries, expanded its territory. And the Palestinian movement was really new. Most of the world didn't really know about it.

Give us a sense of what this group did, and what the ambitions of this leader Wadi Hadad were. So it can be easy for us to imagine what that moment was like, because there are similarities.

“No, I think of the conditions we see in the Middle East.”

What you had is a moment when Israel had defeated a coalition of Arab armies. It had seized control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Gole on Heights,

There was no pathway toward a Palestinian state. Nobody was even talking about it at the time. There was a large, massive dislocation of millions of Palestinian citizens. And within that environment and that sort of the stress and the rage that I think many young Palestinians, particular felt, there arose these groups that saw the only possible recourse for them,

“who believed the only way for them to fight back in the world, was through terrorism.”

And so they developed a model which really was, that was the origins of modern international terrorism. It was the idea that you don't just attack your foe. You go outside your territory and you bring the rest of the world into your struggle. And you do that by attacking airports or hijacking planes. And essentially forcing the world to pay attention.

forcing TV stations and radio stations to cover whatever you're doing. So Carlos, he was then a young man, Iliat Shiramariah Sanchez. He had worked with this Palestinian movement. And then when it was purged by King Hussein of Jordan, he hung with them and fought for a while there. But essentially took up their cause, moved back to England, lived in his mom's apartment for a while.

But he ended up getting assignments, right, from the leader of this Palestinian group. This was a man with some interesting capabilities as far as the Palestinians were concerned.

“They saw a young man who was brave and willing to do anything.”

willing to risk his life. And he also had talents. He spoke multiple languages. He didn't look like a Palestinian because he wasn't. He was a man of the West.

He could travel anywhere without attracting suspicion. And so they decided to create a situation where he was a bit of a sleeper agent.

And his first assignment was, well, to do you tell us about it.

So this is 1973. It's between Christmas in New Years that year. And Carlos was just begging for a chance to do something. And then finally he got his chance. His boss said, okay, well, we're going to give you a assignment.

You need to kill this one individual. And the person they identified happened to be a wealthy Jewish British citizen who was a president of a department store chain. The assignment was to go into that man's house. A confronting person and shoot him. And it was as simple as that because the Palestinians didn't quite know if Carlos was up to the task.

They gave him an old gun and five bullets. It's all he had. So he essentially had a one one chance at this. But Carlos accepted the job and in late December 1973 he found the address and walked inside and confronted the man in person with his gun. And he found that this band, his name was Joseph Seef in his bathroom in his house.

And without saying a word, he lifts the revolver and shoots him once in the face. And as it turns out, very luckily for the victim, the bullet strikes him and his teeth and is deflected by his teeth. And so he's wounded but he's not mortally wounded. The second one jammed. And so that was the point when he panicked and decided to run away.

So it was an attempted assassination that didn't actually work. But in a way Carlos was able to prove himself and showed his Palestinian bosses that he was a man who could look someone else in the face and pull the trigger.

But he passed his first test as far as as the Palestinian leaders thought.

Yeah, the tough part was supposed to actually do the shooting. And as Carlos would say later, it's not that easy to snuff out a human life if you're looking into the eyes of your victim. Even for someone like Carlos who I must say having met the guys seems to have no ability to empathize. With other human beings, he describes it as a difficult moment. But he did carry it out. He did shoot the man.

So this guy would be known as Carlos. He's a young man and he's working with this Palestinian group. Which also connected with revolutionaries from many other countries, particularly German and also the Japanese Red Army. And I wanted to focus on a moment in 1974 when a group of these terrorists, particularly the Japanese Red Army, was supposed to kidnapped the French ambassador to the Hague. And Carlos, who was in Europe, was supposed to be a part of this operation.

The plans went a bit awry and the group ended up shooting their way into the French embassy taking the ambassador and others hostage and demanding the release of a prisoner and a million dollars on a plane. But there was a standoff. Carlos wasn't there.

“And while the negotiations were happening on his own, he decides to support this operation with some initiative what did he do?”

So here's a moment that it seems a standoff has developed between these hostage takers. Carlos sees it going nowhere. He thinks he needs to do something to pressure the French government and caving in.

And his idea was to go to, was essentially a shopping center, a fairly affluent part of Paris. He walks in wearing a suit, goes up to a balcony on second floor.

And he takes out of his pocket a small hand grenade and just drops it into the crowd.

And then stands there and watches as the explosion takes place and bedlam results. You know, people were killed. There's a great chaos. There are, you know, many people wounded, the childhood loses a hand. So it's a trotace scene. And what's remarkable as you kind of, the camera pans through all this terror and horror that's been created is this young man Carlos just turns and walks away. During a suit, he looks like he could be French or European and he's able just to walk straight through the chaos he created and out into the street and slips away.

Yeah.

And one of what insight you have into the psychological makeup of this guy, this, this casual willingness to inflict terrible damage on civilians, including children.

“What permits him to do this? Did you ever feel like you got to read on it?”

I tried to press him on that later on, but even without meeting him, you pick up this pattern throughout his life. Here's someone who can take life without flinching and he can do it in part because his entire world is himself. He's the classic definition of a narcissistic criminal who can inflict violence who can do terrible things to other people and not,

it's seemingly not feel any kind of remorse or empathy and he's able to do this again and again. And it's partly why he is someone who's so attractive to the people that hiring because they know that,

Yeah, you assign Carlos to kill someone, he can do it. He will not flinch, he'll carry out the command and that turns out to be true throughout his life. You know, it's interesting because people who become revolutionaries, they can get there a lot of different ways and sometimes they're simply intellectuals who are, you know, convinced of the unfairness of the existing system and the unfairness of the capitalist system and that only a socialist revolution can change that.

“It doesn't seem that Carlos had any particular contact with the oppressed people, his revolutionary efforts were supposed to help, did he?”

Yeah, absolutely right about that. You can't point to a single thing that he actually did to help the Palestinians that he professed to care about. You know, met them personally except for the other terrorists that he was involved with. And so it's a very sort of shallow kind of ideological crusade in some people who do care so deeply about a cause that they're willing to commit acts of violence or do something quite risky in the name of this cause that they're fighting for. Carlos just seems to be different. He wanted to impress his superiors, the people who were his bosses at the time, but more than that he wanted to kind of create this aura about himself that he was a dare devil that he was a guy who would do anything and just show ultimate commitment to a cause that really intellectually he didn't really care that much about.

Another attack I wanted to talk about was sometimes this isn't in the mid-70s and there was a decision to try and take down an Israeli airline or taking off at the early airport outside of Paris. And what's remarkable about this is that the way that we're going to do this was to bring rocket powered grenade launchers and try and actually hit the plane as it took off.

“They were able to get right next to the runway and fire or shot didn't take the plane down. I think did do damage to elsewhere on on the the airfield.”

And in six days later, they come back to try again and they're a police around the runway, but they're able to take these grenade launchers inside their trench coats into the airport terminal to try again again failed. I mean, it's just so striking how little security there was. It is such a different world and in relating these stories to the friends and colleagues there's this shocking surprise how lapses security was at the time there weren't metal detectors as we have them and those days they didn't exist.

And so you have hijackings with with Carlos's colleagues where a woman walks into a plane with two hand grenades concealed inside her bra. You know, metal detector, a pat down, you know, any, you know, very basic security precautions might have stopped that attack, but she was able to walk onto this plane with the grenades without being searched. And it was the same, you know, again and again during this period where Carlos would, and his colleagues would attempt something, would walk into, you know, to an airfield or drive onto an airfield with a very dangerous weapon.

And not be searched and no one even detects them or notices them until they've actually fired their weapon. Carlos had gotten a start in this business and then I'm in the mid-70s and he was still working with this Palestinian group. In June of 1975 there would be an incident which would really cement his fame. I mean, he was anonymous and anonymous guy to law enforcement at the time.

A guy who was sort of the director of the European operations who went by the name of Andre had been identified by French authorities and arrested and under interrogation.

“He told them too much and led them to the apartment of one of Carlos's many girlfriends.”

As it happened, there was a party going on. Carlos was there. And so three French policemen coming in remarkably none of them armed. Tell us what happened. So yeah, it's a party. It's kind of after hours, things are settling down a little bit. The party goers are pretty drunk. Carlos has had a lot to drink and suddenly there's a rap on the door and there's these police officers standing there. Two of them walk in, they demand identification. And they sing aloud Carlos is someone who's interested in them. He looks like a person who's been described by Carlos's boss as an operative.

“Someone who's who's working with the Palestinians and they begin to question him. They show him pictures of who they think he might be.”

And Carlos is resistant. He kind of lied. I don't know what you're talking about. But then he excuses himself goes to the bathroom, comes out, slicking back his hair, the conversation continues.

And then there's another knock on the door. And this time as a third police officer bringing in Carlos's boss, the man who apparently had betrayed him.

Carlos in a flash pulls out the pistol that's behind his waistband shoots his boss in the head and kills him and then is able to shoot all three of the other the French police officers. Two of the police officers plus his boss, the third police officer survives. But there's this moment of carnage and panic in this apartment, which allows Carlos once again, as he has also often done, is to slip out the back door, walk down the street, nobody gives him a second look and he's now a mass killer of police officers and he's able to get away.

And the death of those officers would follow him for the rest of his career. But it was a remarkable moment. But as things unfolded, this is the incident that made him famous or led to his fame. You want to explain how that happened.

Right. Up into this time, police were searching for someone. They had this suspect who had thrown a hand grenade into a shopping center.

They knew about a man who resembled Carlos who had launched rocket propelled grenades at airplanes. They didn't know the person's name or identity or anything about him. Now in this apartment, they had his crime had taken place. It was clearly connected to this person that was being sought. But they didn't know his real name. They didn't know he was ill each from Venezuela. All they had was a passport. They had a face on it and a name in Spanish, which was Carlos Martinez. So this suspect, the person who was now internationally sought, was known suddenly as Carlos. That was the name that police had. There was a photograph in the passport that was just really a fake photo that Carlos had made for a fake passport.

And that was the photo that that police had. But this becomes the identity of Carlos. And he's this man with tinted sunglasses, a bit of a jowly face. But that's the photo that becomes most associated with Carlos the jackal even now. But the other crazy thing was one of Carlos's other girlfriends at a different apartment. They had an apartment where he had stored a lot of stuff.

“Right, weapons, I think, hundred, what else? Passports, you know, all kinds of information. And explain how that comes to light and leads to his fame and reputation.”

Carlos was a guy who had the couple girlfriends in Paris. He also had women that he stayed within London when he was there. And with the story broke about this credible shooting in Paris with police officers being killed. Once the identity of this man was established, they discovered they had these other hideouts in other places in the world, including in London. So police raid this apartment in London where he had stored all these weapons, he had grenades, he had explosives, handguns, and it becomes a big sensational story for the British press.

The reporters are crawling all over the apartment and doing their own investigations. During one of those kind of casual tours of the apartment by a reporter from the Guardian, the reporter notices a book on the bookshelf. And it's a fairly famous novel at the time called "The Day of the Jackal" by an author named Frederick Forsythe. And the reporter just mentions in the article that "On a shelf near the guns that Carlos had was his novel "Day of the Jackal." The next day that book title gets attached to Carlos's name as a new nickname.

So the next day tabloids are running stories about Carlos the Jackal. You know, as an entirely new identity as this really colorful nickname that was totally by accident, had nothing to do with a real person, but it sounded good in a tabloid headline.

Let's take another break here. We are speaking with Joby Warwick. His new book is the Jackal, the rise and fall of Carlos, the world's first super terrorist.

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“Our guest is veteran national security correspondent, Joby Warwick, whose new book profiles a terrorist of the 1970s and 80s, who became so famous for his brazen attacks and playboy lifestyle,”

that once when he was releasing hostages from a hijacked airplane, several asked him for his autograph. Warwick, whose last book about the origins of ISIS earned a Pulitzer Prize, believes there are lessons to learn from the life and crimes of his new subject, a notorious figure from the early days of modern terrorism. His new book is The Jackal, the rise and fall of Carlos, the world's first super terrorist. We can't talk about all of the crimes that Carlos had a hand in. There's just too many, but there's one that we should get mentioned.

And that is the 1975 assault in Vienna at a meeting of officials of OPEC, the organization of petroleum exporting countries. Carlos had a band of six people. This was financed by Moamark Adafi, right? He had a grudge against OPEC, one of them to keep their prices higher. And so Carlos organizes this group. He has a band of six people from three different countries, two Palestinians, and one German, who those three only spoke a few words of English. And so, on a snowy day, they traveled to the headquarters of OPEC on a city street car carrying these big, duffled bags full of munitions. Again, you can just see how large security was.

Walk right into the building and start it shooting. Your book is this is a fascinating episode. I think it's 40 pages to describe the whole thing.

It's amazing the detail you've got here. You want to just kind of give us a general sense of what happened and where it left Carlos?

As you mentioned in the beginning, I've been covering terrorism for a long time, and obviously there's very big, very ambitious attacks happened in our country in 2001. The this incident, this OPEC attack in 1975, it's as audacious as anything I've come across in my career. And if you think about it, you've got a 26 year old with a band of sort of international band of commandos from different countries who don't know each other. Converge in Vienna, Austria and late December 1975, and proceed to walk into the headquarters of the world's largest oil cartel, and then take the entire thing hostage. This was the international conference of OPEC. It was not just their staff, but it's all the ministers from all the big oil producing countries around the world.

Gathered in Vienna for the annual meeting, so there are dozens of people there, some of the wealthiest oil barons on earth are there, and Carlos is a sign that is, "I'm going to take the entire thing hostage."

“And he does that, and that's the start of this really, you must say, sensational incident in 1975, and tell us how he announces himself to his hostages.”

So a few moments past while the commandos are consolidating control, they're putting explosives around the room, you know, the hostages are obviously scared of death. And in the middle of all this, this young man wearing a black beret looking very stylish with a leather coat decides to announce himself to the group. And he does it by saying, "I am the famous Carlos. Maybe you've heard of me." So not, you know, "I am this, the Palestinian group. I'm this, this other fighting unit. I am Carlos."

Right, 62 people taken hostage altogether. He would release some, particularly like, clerical people who were Austrians, but he took a lot of these wealthy oil barons with him.

“And was given an airplane and he went to several different countries over the next two or three days. And in the end, well, how did it end?”

Well, not the way that he had been instructed. Carlos had gotten very specific orders from Moamark Adafi, who was bankrolling the whole operation, whose idea was to try to strike out it at OPEC and take off his vengeance on the organization. But it got off the really wanted him above all to kill two of his arch enemies. There was a Saudi oil minister and an Iranian minister who were president and Vienna. And in good coffee, just frankly, one of those two executed.

Well, Carlos never got around doing that.

So there's this period of kind of back and forth where this plain full of hostages is bouncing from North Africa and country to another.

“And eventually, the Saudis and the Iranians are able to convince him to give up his hostages and not to execute his two prisoners in exchange for a lot of money.”

And Carlos thinks about it. He looks at his options and he thinks, "Yeah, a few million dollars sounds great to me." So in the end, it becomes a ransom operation. Carlos freezes hostages, including the two people you're supposed to kill. He got a bunch of money for letting the hostages ultimately go free. As they were releasing the hostages, some of them actually asked for his autograph. It's an extraordinary scene because he's such a showman. And he's doing more than just bragging about himself and kind of wallowing in his kind of a showmanship.

But he's a charmer and he's even charming as a hostage taker. He befriends people he kind of gets into discussions, tells jokes, he sets his gun down, hands out cigarettes. So he's playing at all like he's a game show host instead of a terrorist. And it's just so most remarkable thing that any of these individuals in these hostages has ever ever seen. And so one guy kind of picks up bullet casings as souvenirs, others as they're leaving the plane, if they're being allowed to go home, literally ask Carlos for his autograph and you happily complies.

And as you mentioned earlier, even the pilot of the plane that later flies Carlos away from Algeria, which is where this incident ended, once his autograph and kind of shows it off for years afterwards, here's my personally inscribed book from Carlos the Jackal. But in the end, I mean, this guy coming in with six people, writing a street car with, you know, bags full of weapons, successfully kidnapped, 62 people flies around all over and gets away with it and gets rich.

The problem is that he had orders and when he gets back to what he had died, you know, the mastermind who plans these terrorists attacked, he was furious.

“In fact, as a result of this, Carlos was expelled from the organization, right?”

Yeah, that's right. It is Carlos had committed two offenses. One was he had failed an order, so he had been told to execute two of his hostages and he didn't. And the other is he had become the story. This is supposed to be, you know, a terrorist operation with a point. They were trying to pressure, opaque internationally or doing it in the name of the Palestinian people. Carlos made it all about him. He had to announce to everyone that he was the famous Carlos. I'm the guy in charge here.

And, you know, his leaders, his bosses just didn't take well to that. This is not about you. You're not a movie star. We don't need people like you in our business. So they kicked him out. They almost killed him. They talked about maybe, maybe we should just knock this guy off. Instead, they just told him, you know, we don't want anything else to do with you. You're on your own. And Palestinians go their way. Carlos goes his. Right. So he became a hunted man, but a very rich hunted man. And it was interesting. This is an interesting transition in his life because he's no longer with this Palestinian group.

It had kind of defined his career. He, but he decides he's going to collect his own band of revolutionaries and do what exactly. Yeah. So there's this moment where, okay, the Palestinians don't want anything to do with them. He has no real constituency anymore. He doesn't have. He can't, you know, logically claim to be representing Palestinians in any way. So what do you do if you're Carlos? You want to stay famous. You want to stay in the game. You want people to talk about you. So you remain a terrorist, but you need new sponsors.

So Carlos goes out looking for people who will pay him to do what he does. And not surprisingly, he finds lots of takers. People who can appreciate the mystique, the aura that this young kid has, this Carlos, the jack old, the international terrorists.

So, for example, if you're more macadophian and you want to strike out against, you know, the Egyptian president Sadat, or whoever your enemy of the day is, you can use someone like Carlos to do the dirty deed.

“And that way you don't get blamed for it. Your, your mission or your objective gets accomplished. Carlos takes the responsibility for it.”

So it kind of works out well for everybody. So that becomes really the template for the rest of Carlos's life. He will be what you could essentially call a mercenary terrorist. I'm a terrorist for hire. Give me some money and I'll make things happen. We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Joe B. Warick. He has spent decades covering national security issues for the Washington Post.

His new book is the jackal, the rise and fall of Carlos, the world's first super terrorist. He'll talk more in just a moment. This is fresh air.

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An executive order from the Trump administration made English the official language of the United States. Then the administration moved to cut funding for classes that teach it. Do we matter? Do we matter? Listen to NPR's code switch podcasts and the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air and we're speaking with national security correspondent, Joby Warwick. His new book profiles a man who was the world's most famous terrorist in the 1970s and 80s known for his daring assaults on many governments in Europe and an extravagant playboy lifestyle.

Warwick's new book is The Jackal, The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the world's first super terrorist. We can't tell the whole story and I do want to leave some for people who want to look at the book. There are so many fascinating descriptions of what happens with Carlos.

“But I do want to talk about your own personal conversation with him. You got an interview with him. I guess this was last year, right?”

Yeah, March of 2025. And the president in France where he'd been held for just about 30 years, I guess. I sense that as a journalist, this was somewhat of a disappointing encounter. Well, you have all these anticipation when you're studying someone so carefully and exhaustively and you're wondering what would it be like to meet him? He's still alive and that actually, I think it's a fact that surprise is a lot of people.

So I wanted to meet him. I felt it was important to kind of get a sense of the guy and I tried for a long time to get permission to do that.

And as it turned out, Carlos was very happy to do an interview. He's never who never shys away from publicity.

But it was the French government that was a little less eager to let him speak. As it were killed, trains were bombed. It was quite a bit of carnage that was attributed to Carlos. And so he almost never is allowed to give interviews. And on the few occasions, such as the one that I had, when he's a prison meeting is allowed to take place, there are all kinds of restrictions in terms of, you know, no recording equipment of any kind of cameras. But what can it be done in the interview? But for me, it was a chance to sit next to the man that I had been studying for so long.

And he walks in, he's 75 at the time, now he's 76. And he's become an old man in prison. He's a bit frail, his gravelly voice, a bit of a stube. And a mind that is clearly not what it once was. He's forgetfully repeats himself. He loses his train of thought. But there was this moment to be able to sit with almost with our knees touching and ask him anything I wanted to. And see what he would say.

“Did he express any remorse or regret about killing people?”

Not about killing people. And in fact, and I was really tried to press him on this. I like what, how do you feel about the innocence that were killed? How do you feel about the children who were in that shopping center who got killed or maimed that day you threw your grenade out? And there is no remorse and if you can take him at his word, just studying his body language, he seems to feel completely justified and everything he did.

So there were no mistakes made. The one thing that I was surprised to hear that he does regret is he told me straight out that I should have killed more people. There are a few specific people, and particularly those who were tracking him, the French and the Americans who captured him in 1994. I should have been fast j off my gun and I should have taken them out. That's the only regret that he would do not do.

“You know, was it Hannah Arent that coined the phrase "the banality of evil"?”

And when I read books and articles and talked to journalists who've, you know, had a moment with cruel dictators and despots, they're often just not very impressive. Kind of shallow, did you get that feeling about him? Absolutely, because of my direction of my career, I've spent time with people who've done some very bad things and I've spent years studying the Islamic state and its leadership and its early rise. And sometimes you see in these terrorist figures a rage, you know, extreme views, maybe a religious zealotry that sort of drives them or helps motivate their violence.

Well, with Carlos, what was unimpressive, or what kind of as I saw as just extraordinarily weak, is all of that violence, all those atrocities were committed not in the service of an idea which would be bad enough, but really in the service of an ego. And the fact that he had no ability to have introspection about that, to be able to reflect on the harm and the suffering that he caused, is inability to do that, just showed up, you know, point to a very deep flaw in his personality. You know, he's kind of unique in his fame and his lifestyle.

“Is he unique among the terrorists who interviewed or studied over the years or is he another one of the bunch?”

I think there was something unique about him, and part of it is, you know, as bad as he was, he was, you know, an equal measure is lucky. He just kept getting breaks and another break and lived to tell a tale.

Here's someone that, you know, there were a million opportunities for people to either kill him or arrest him,

and he just manages to slip through the net again and again and again. And it was on the run for 20 years, which is just remarkable by himself, for someone who was at the time the most wanted criminal in the world. Somebody every country was looking for, except for the places that he sought refuge. And only after just a lucky break by the CIA in the 1990s was eventually found captured. And if it had not been for that break, it perhaps would be out there in the world still living like a king.

You know, a lot's changed since the days when Carlos was doing his thing. I mean, governments now take terrorism much more seriously and have, you know, great resources devoted to it. And digital investigative techniques and all of that. It's also interesting that a lot of the terrorism that we've come to know in the last 20 years has been motivated by religious fundamentalism. You know, Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban.

“Do you think we'll see a return to the Carlos approach of working for cash funded by whoever needs them?”

I absolutely do believe that. And as someone who's followed the jahadi groups for a long time, I see them certainly being down right now. Their numbers are down, their reach has been diminished.

We'll always see people, you know, committing acts of violence and claiming that it's being done in the name of ISIS or Al Qaeda.

Even though those groups often have absolutely nothing to do with the person or the deed. But what you're seeing, I think what we're witnessing in the last few years is return to a more secular or geopolitical. A terrorism where the target is, you know, so the target is political where it's, you know, you know, Decidant figures that are living in, you know, Iranian dissidents are living in, in America or, you know, Jewish interests in Europe that the Iranians or the Russians for whatever reason to decide to go after.

And what we've seen in the last couple years in particular is a rise in mercenary terrorism again, where the Iranians will hire a local gangster or a drug smuggler or somebody involved in drug trafficking to do things that they don't want to have to take responsibility for. And there's a sense among terrorism officials that I speak to that Carlos style mercenary terrorism is having a comeback right now. And it seems to be the way of the future.

I guess the difference is that you don't have to call yourself a revolutionary anymore.

You don't have to pretend, and in fact, a lot of these sort of contractual arrangements are made using encrypted platforms like telegram. People are wired money to do bad things, and it's just, so some people call it the violent gig economy that you can, you know, get online, apply for a job, carry out an active violence, you know, on behalf of somebody that you don't even know.

Well, Toby Warwick, thank you so much for speaking with us again. Very much enjoyed it. Thank you, Dave.

“Toby Warwick is a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security correspondent who spent three decades at the Washington Post.”

His new book is The Jackal, the rise in fall of Carlos, the world's first super terrorist.

Coming up, Marine Corgan has some suggestions for your beach bag, three new books of great suspense fiction. This is fresh air. Test Stosterone, maybe you've been here and more about it. That low tea can be dangerous, that higher levels could help you work out better, live longer. There's a really compelling and like strong marketing messages, but they aren't actually what the evidence supports.

It's not some drug-depromous peak performance or this longevity. What the science really says about testosterone on shortwave.

Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

How did we get here?

“It's a question we have been trying to answer a lot here at NPR.”

We are exploring global histories on throughline where hearing from national security experts on sources and methods. We're watching the markets with planet money. You can support this work across all our podcasts with NPR Plus. Find out more at plus.npr.org. This is fresh air.

Summer days are dwindling down to a precious few. So our book critic Maureen Corrigan is scooping up some of the season's most interesting suspense fiction. Here's her review. It's the end of summer.

“So let's grab what escape we can, which for me means reading suspense fiction.”

Six years ago I stopped eating mushrooms. The cause was Sylvia Moreno Garcia's horror novel, Mexican Gothic, in which fungi become frightful. Moreno Garcia, who excels at playing around with genre fiction, recently brought out a noir novel, set in 1940s, Mexico, called the intrigue. It's so stylishly evil, it begs for a movie version in black and white, of course. The plot is a classic one in which a predator risks becoming a patsy.

A con artist named Ulysses makes his money by placing ads in the lonely heart sections of magazines, and waiting to see if any rich widows or spinsters respond. When parallel in clon, the owner of a mansion turned boarding house in the port of Veracruz invites Ulysses to visit. He thinks he's in clover. But trouble awaits in the form of perilous niece.

Ines rightly wonders what a man who bears a resemblance to a movie star like Tyrone Power is doing, according her grim ant. Moreover, ines desperately wants out from under her aunts' thumb. Who could blame her? Here's a snippet of a scene where parallel announces to friends that she's shaperowning ines to a dance.

I will escort her, parallel said firmly, "My father always told us ladies from good families are like delicate flowers,

which must be carefully pressed inside a good book, and I agree with him." Ines' hand wrapped around a fork, her fingers squeezing it tight, she wished she could stab her ant with it. A carefully pressed flower, she thought, "a dead thing." The double and triple crosses, as well as the body count, mount in the intrigue, which subverted all my guesses about who would be left standing at the end. This summer, Richard Russo brought out his first crime thriller, originally written as a TV script.

Under the falls is set in upstate New York, in a place called Stone Mountain. The plot, like that of Marino Garcia's novel, is indebted to noir, where the past is never really past. Tyler's sinclair hasn't been back to Stone Mountain since he ran off from an abusive father and romantic complications at 18. Now, 18 years later, he's returning as a big shot country rock singer. The occasion is a fundraiser for one of Tyler's old friends, nicknamed Doc, who was paralyzed in a diving accident when they were all teenagers.

But as Doc now informs Tyler, not everybody in the mountain is a Tyler's sinclair fan.

It's that you made it writing songs about us, about our lives, where's our cut, is how they look at it.

“The benefit concert ends in multiple deaths, prompting Tyler and others to excavate his hometown secrets.”

Beyond the crime plot, though, Russo excels here at what he's long excelled at. Namely, chronicling the world of working class America and the limited opportunities for those in places like Stone Mountain. George Pelicanos started writing his crime series, starring African American private investigator Derek Strange in 2001.

In the intervening years, Pelicanos has written for series like The Wire and Trame, but he's always kept intermittent faith with Strange.

Fourteen years after his last doubting, an older, but still street-wise Strange returns in the blue flame, investigating two murders that have struck within a once-tight group of friends.

“It's been long enough that I can repeat a cliche about Pelicanos, namely that he does for Washington DC, what Chandler did for LA.”

Strange takes us into the DC, the tourists and politicians don't know. From neat, rowhouse neighborhoods to the DC central detention facility. The title, the blue flame, refers to the fact that Strange and X-Cop still has that burning cop curiosity.

I hope it's never extinguished.

Marine Corrigan is Professor of Literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed the intrigue under the falls and the blue flame. On tomorrow's show, Harrison Ford, he's been nominated for an Emmy for his role as a therapist in the Apple TV series shrinking for the second year in a row,

“where rearing our conversation from March, in which he talked about the series, as well as doing action scenes, his real-life plane crash, and getting his start in movies with Lucas, Spielberg and Copola.”

I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show, then get highlights of our interviews follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's Executive Producer is Sam Brigher, our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stanashowsky. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by fellow Smires and Marie Baldonato, Lauren Crenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth,

The Challenger, Susan Yacundi, and Abalman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nespar, Roberta Shoreock directs the show. For Terry Gross-Antonio Mosley, I'm Dave Davies. You've got a lot of ways to get news and a lot of podcasts in your feed that take a long time to get to the point. Here and now any time gets to the heart of the day's big story all in about 20 minutes every afternoon.

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