I AM THE FAMOUS CARLOS

Hoag chronicles the life and crimes of the infamous Jackal.

The author, a journalist, tells the story of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the Venezuelan-born terrorist who conducted a notorious campaign of bombings and assassinations in the 1970s and ’80s. Born in 1949 and raised in an ardently Marxist household, Ilich, along with his two brothers and mother, moved to the swinging London of the 1960s, where Ilich’s exposure to “diplomats, embassies and upper crust social circles would later strongly influence the activities of Carlos the Jackal.” Ilich and his younger brother, Lenin, made their way to Moscow, where they were the subject of an “ever-expanding dossier” of misdeeds as students at their school. Ilich fell in with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). “At twenty-years-old, he was precisely the right age and had been steeped in leftism since childhood,” Hoag writes. “All he needed was the right cause to devote his energies to. He soon found it.” There followed globe-trotting and increasingly violent years of bombings, kidnappings, and strange revolutionary bedfellows. Hoag nails down the details of these events by employing an impressive amount of research; the text is supported by an extensive bibliography and endnotes. It’s a larger-than-life story, and the Jackal, with his drinking, womanizing, and penchant for violence, is a larger-than-life protagonist. Hoag leans into his lifestyle with her prose, and at times the work reads more like a thriller than a biography. Despite all the necessary exposition, the author manages to keep the pace very brisk, and she depicts her subject with a pitch-perfect combination of horror and grudging fascination. Particularly exciting is Hoag’s account of the “Rue Toullier bloodbath,” in which the Jackal was very nearly caught and only escaped by shooting his way past members of the Direction de Surveillance Territoire, the French domestic security equivalent of the FBI. “I’m not in the habit of killing,” the Jackal astoundingly said at one point, after a lifetime of killing. “I kill all those who betray me.” Hoag deftly explores such contradictions in all their enduring mystery.

A colorful and gripping portrait of a notorious terrorist.