THE JACKAL

From the author of Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS (2015), a swift-moving account of the infamous terrorist who boasted of killing 83 people and ordering the death of a thousand more.

Born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez in Venezuela, Carlos was just one of the countless fake names that “the Jackal” used. It was the one that stuck and the one that he used in Warrick’s opening episode, when Carlos and crew attacked a meeting of OPEC ministers in Vienna in 1975. Just whom he was working for is unclear: It could have been the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Muammar Gaddafi, or any of a number of clients who funded his “new kind of state-sponsored terrorism.” Nominally a communist, Carlos was even financed by former Nazis as well as the KGB and Romania’s Securitate. Already wanted for a string of killings in France and England, he would gain international notoriety for the OPEC attack and subsequent escape, as well as plane hijackings, bombings, assassinations, and cruel operations, such as tossing a grenade among civilians in a Paris shopping mall in 1974. Trained by the PFLP in a “summer camp with guns,” Carlos eventually went out on his own, skillfully amassing a fortune that funded a lavish, drunken lifestyle that occupied his time behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary and even in backwaters like Sudan. Warrick skillfully assembles the details of Carlos’ adventures in terrorism, which earned him almost legendary status: “He was ruthless, killing without remorse or mercy. Most astonishingly, he was capable of carrying out attacks in the heart of Europe’s great capitals and then vanishing without a trace.” He was finally tracked down in Khartoum in 1993 by a CIA agent who was “conducting surveillance on multiple terrorist groups,” and French agents spirited him away to prison outside Paris, near the scene of some of his most devious crimes. He is housed there to this day.

A true-crime saga that reads with the immediacy of a thriller.