Review
The war of kidnappings, hijackings, and commando raids waged by the Palestinian resistance is told here in the story of Carlos ("The Jackal") Martinez - possibly the most dreaded terrorist recruit in the Palestinian cause. Eldest son of a Venezuelan Marxist millionaire, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez became "Carlos," a secret operative in the employ of the KGB, while a dandified student at Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University. This is a circumstantial deduction on Smith's part - like much else about the plump, suave womanizer who, as an adolescent, had come to believe that "bullets are the only thing that counts." Smith, an award-winning journalist for the London Observer, maps the clandestine and faction-ridden networks of Arab terrorists even as he follows Ilich-Carlos' shadowy footsteps from London to Moscow, Lebanon to Paris. Among his more spectacular feats, Carlos is believed to be the man who tossed a grenade into the Left Bank's Le Drugstore in 1974; he was also the leader of the gang which broke into the OPEC meeting in Vienna in 1975, smiling genially through the tense negotiations with the Austrians for the plane that was to carry his Killer squad to safety in Algeria. While tracking Carlos, Smith unravels the skein of international terrorist alliances which includes the Japanese Red Army, the West German Baader-Meinhof group, and the Turkish People's Liberation Army. His contention that Carlos, a central link in the deadly chain, is the KGB's man-on-the-spot is admittedly open to dispute since the Soviets, at least officially, denounce "elitist adventurism." But the portrait of Carlos, like Tinnin and Christensen's The Hit Team (1976), is etched with chilling precision. The poised, nonchalant viciousness of the affable playboy-killer, still very much at large, should disturb everyone's slumbers. (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
A biography of Carlos the Jackal, from fat Venezuelan rich boy to the world's most-wanted man, and a reconstruction of the mayhem he caused. The author, who has twice been named International Reporter of the Year in the British Press Awards, takes the story up to Carlos's capture in Sudan.
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