Bin Laden, is not the first major terrorist that this country and others has ever confronted. There was once another just as famous. He didn't have the resources behind him that apparently Bin Laden has and people didn't know what he looked like, because unlike Bin Laden he didn't sent out videos of himself or photographs or even audio recordings, he just did his dirty deeds, at least in the beginning. He might have even been more feared than Bin Laden, because he led an invisible life. If you don't know what someone looks like, or who he is, how do you protect against him? So who was this man that struck terror into the hearts of the citizens of every Western nation? He was Carlos the Jackal and he was responsible for some of the most heinous terror attacks of his time. He was a South American, having been born in Caracas, Venezuela as Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, he had been named partially after Lenin. I think that you would have to say that anyone who names their child after Lenin, must have been of the Communist persuasion and in this case you would be correct because his father was a Marxist lawyer. Unfortunately, it is the way of the world that people like this always have others who admire them and Carlos was no exception. At the time, the name of Carlos the Jackal was recognized by almost everyone in every country. He had managed to become almost a household name. If Carlos wasn't in jail today, I am sure that he would have been capable of doing any of the acts that Bin Laden is responsible for.

Carlos had been trained as an assassin when he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1970 (PFLP). This was after he had been thrown out of Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. He attended several terrorists schools and excelled in his training. His first mission was to fight alongside the other terrorists when the Jordanians were expelling them from their country. He was good at killing, very good. He was young when he went to the terrorist training schools, only 21 years old having been born in 1949. When he completed the courses in killing and mayhem he was given the name Carlos. The name of Carlos the Jackal was given to him by the press. Somewhere early in his terrorist career he decided that he wanted to do things in a big way to make some sort of a statement. These things included shooting down passenger jets. It seemed that Carlos was graduating to bigger and bigger terrorist attacks as he went along. I think that he wanted to become the most feared person on earth and he was certainly headed that way, but this is not how he started in his terrorist career. As a matter of fact, he couldn't even complete a simple assassination. Three years after he finished his training, he was assigned to kill a Jewish businessman. The man was Joseph Edward Sieff and he was living in a large home in London. Somehow Carlos penetrated the home's defenses and shot Sieff in the face. Carlos fired again, but this time nothing happened, the gun had jammed. Instead of finishing off Mr. Sieff, Carlos must have panicked, because he left the house and Sieff survived. This was not a very auspicious start for the Jackal. The assassination attempt had been prompted by the Mossad assassination of Mohamed Boudia, who was suspected of being a PFLP leader and who was in Paris at the time.

Could it have been that this event persuaded Carlos that he really didn't like going after someone on a one to one basis with a gun? It might have, or his assignments might have changed, but he now took up the favorite weapon of the terrorist, the bomb. Using bombs to kill, shows that terrorists can not make a claim that they are ridding the world of evil doers or some such thing, because a bomb is a weapon that kills indiscriminately. It takes out both those that are your enemy and those that are in agreement with you, who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is a very good illustration of the disdain for human life. Carlos decided he liked to use bombs and planted them all over London and France, killing and maiming all those that happened to be at locations when the bombs went off. What was he trying to accomplish by this? I guess he wanted to show that no one was safe from the wrath of the terrorists, no matter what country they were in. He moved on in his terrorist acts to Orly Airport and in January 1975 tried to shoot down two passenger jets with rocket propelled grenades. It was a lucky thing for the passengers of those planes that he didn't have shoulder fired missiles. Carlos had other failures. He threw a home made explosive device through the doors of an Israeli bank in London. The device was composed of a hand grenade and plastic explosives. Something went wrong and the entire bomb didn't detonate. The only damage caused was a dent in the floor and a minor cut to an employee.

As I said, Carlos liked bombs and to prove this, he left four car bombs outside of French offices. Three exploded and caused massive damage, but miraculously no causalities. Carlos had called just before they were set to go off to warn of the bombs, he said he wanted to limit civilian causalities. This is hardly believable since he had shown in many other instances that he really didn't care about that at all. What was his motive for calling? Perhaps he was trying to brighten his image by trying to make himself look like some sort of Robin Hood figure. The fourth bomb was left outside the Maison de la Radio building, This was a building that was inaugurated by General de Gaulle himself in 1963. The large building is the seat of French communications. Today it contains over 60 recording studios. If that bomb had gone off, it might have been deadly.

Carlos always looking for a cause, aligned himself with the Japanese Red Army or JRA. One of their members had been arrested at Orly airport in Paris. He was caught with three fake passports and $10,000 in counterfeit money. He also admitted that he supported the Palestinian cause. It was found that he had been involved in an attack on an oil refinery owned by Shell in Singapore and was working for the Popular Front at the time. The JAL wanted to attack the French, by capturing the French ambassador in the Hague. Their attack was supported and equipped by the Palestinian Front and Carlos was one of the people that helped do this. The terrorists succeeded and captured Jacques Senard along with ten people and held them. The French Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac had ordered that if any hostages were hurt,Furuya was to be executed immediately, he was the member of the JRA that was in custody. Carlos decided to help by entering a restaurant and going up to the balcony, where he tossed a grenade into the crowd. Two were killed and thirty four were injured. These were just innocent people that were shopping. So much for the milk of human kindness. Carlos was promoted in his organization for the act, because the French government gave in and released the terrorists.

Carlos was given the job of capturing an El Al jet at the Paris airport. An El Al strike thwarted his plans, but he decided to wait the strike out. Finally an El Al plane was ready to take off. A group of terrorists including Carlos were in a car at the airport. They had a Russian bazooka and were waiting for the plane to take off, so that they could shoot it down. The bazooka was wielded by Johannes Weinrich a fellow terrorist. The first shot missed the plane and hit a parked car, A second shot missed the El Al plane and hit a plane on the ground, passed through it and hit a building that was empty. A call was made to the airport and they were told that the next time the terrorists wouldn't miss. Carlos and his fellow terrorists went back to the airport four days later, even though security had been greatly increased. They had hid another bazooka in a public toilet and went and got it. They lined up the next El Al plane, but a security guard saw them. He fired at them with his automatic weapon and they ran. The terrorists were running and throwing grenades. Carlos had slipped away in the confusion while the rest of the terrorists ran into the passenger lounge and tossed grenades while they were shooting the place up. Again the terrorists succeeded in taking hostages. The French government gave them a Boeing 707 in exchange for the hostages.

Carlos was soon to find that even his closest associates could not be trusted. They were like a bunch of rats in a maze that were only interested in finding their cheese, at any cost. On of Carlos's closest associates and the one who had gone on many jobs with him, was a man by the name of Moukharbal. He had been captured in Lebanon and the police there managed not only to get him to betray Carlos, on the pretext of releasing him, but when he was released he was followed and he never noticed. He led them to Carlos. but the two had evaded the tail. The French Reneseignments Generaux, their intelligence section, had gotten involved and had gotten Moukharbal and again he cracked and turned in Carlos. He gave them the address of a home where Carlos often went, because he had a girlfriend there. The police went to her home and Carlos was there. They brought in Moukharbal and asked him if he could identify anyone in the room and he pointed to Carlos. Carlos pulled a submachine gun from his pants and shot all the officers and killed Moukharbal. He escaped into the streets. Only one officer survived. Carlos actually had the gaul to return to this apartment days later and he was still able to retrieve weapons and passports. I can't understand that, you would have thought that all that stuff would have been removed by the police.

Carlos was now set to attack OPEC, The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. He wanted to take over the OPEC conference and kidnap the government ministers. The conference was in Vienna, Austria. All the ministers were to be held for ransom, except two who were to be instantly executed, they were Sheik Yamani from Saudi Arabia and Jamshid Amouzegar from Iran. He got his team together and weaponized them, now he was ready to go. They all got into the seven story building where the OPEC conference was still going on and went up to that floor. A telephone operator seeing them with their weapons called the police. A woman named Krocher-Tiedemann, that was part of the team, was busily executing people. She killed a policeman in cold blood and killed an Iraqi security guard. Carlos had joined in the killing. The Venezuelan oil minister had been someone that Carlos had planned to kill before, but this time Carlos addressed him in friendly tones. One man, who was locked in a room, was a high ranking police officer and he also got out a phone call. A squad of police with machine guns and bullet proof vests and helmets were sent up to the floor where the terrorists were located and engaged in a gunfight. One terrorist who got shot, but was still able to function, went to toss a grenade but fumbled it. It blew up between the terrorists and police. A threat was made to kill all the hostages and the police withdrew.

The Austrians had to negotiate because the hostages had been separated and explosives planted. A bus was supplied the next day after several broadcasts were made as Carlos had ordered. He took 42 hostages on the bus with him. The bus went to the airport and the hostages were put on a plane. A famous photo was taken of the Austrian Interior Minister and Carlos shaking hands. This almost caused the collapse of the Austrian government. Carlos then put some explosives under some of the seats on the plane. The plane landed in Algiers. Carlos then released the thirty non arab delegates after meeting with Abdel Aziz Boutefika, Algeria's Foreign Minister. The plane was refueled and took off for Tripoli. When the plane landed in Libya, the Libyans demanded the release of all Libyan hostages. Carlos said he would shoot them first, but gave in and released all the Libyans. Carlos contacted Saudi Arabia, but they said that they wouldn't help because Carlos held their oil minister as a hostage. Carlos got the plane refueled and ordered a return flight to Algiers, but when they got into the air space over Tunis they were denied landing privileges. Carlos ordered the pilot to land anyway and in response the airfield turned off all their lights making landing impossible. He then headed the plane toward Algiers directly. They finally landed at Dar El Beida airport and he was greeted by Minister Boutefilka who was not a happy camper. The hostages were released. Carlos had escaped again, but there was more to this, someone had paid him between twenty and thirty million dollars for the release of the hostages and it was believed to have been paid by Saudi Arabia.

There is a lot more to the story of Carlos the Jackal, but it is too much to relate here. Carlos was finally arrested in the Sudan many years later, where the government had initially refused to admit he was hiding. The French had got him. When he arrived in France, a warrant was immediately issued, by a judge, for the murder of two police agents. He was convicted by a jury and given a life sentence and is still in jail today.

Is Bin Laden the greatest terrorist that ever lived, I bet Carlos doesn't think so?