LONDON, Aug. 15 -- Carlos Ramirez, known internationally as 'Carlos' or 'The Jackal,' whom French officials say they took into custody Monday in Sudan, is a lifelong revolutionary and one of the world's most infamous terrorists.
Carlos led the kidnapping of OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975 and was believed to have planned the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and 1976 hijacking of a French airliner to Uganda that ended with the Israeli commando raid at Entebbe airport.
His career in international terrorism also included numerous air hijackings and the December 1973 raid on Rome's airport in which a Pan Am airliner was firebombed on the ground, killing 32 of the 90 people aboard.
At the height of Washington's campaign against Libyan leader Moammar Khadafi in December 1981, U.S. border guards were warned that Carlos might try to lead a Libyan hit-squad into the United States to assassinate President Reagan and other top U.S. officials.
A U.S. Immigration memo said Carlos was "extremely dangerous and will not hesitate to open fire." He was said to travel on a Lebanese passport with an assumed name and was described as 5-foot-9, heavy-set, with curly brown hair cut short. The memo warned that Carlos spoke fluent Spanish, Arabic and Russian and was "skilled at changing appearance and identity."
Carlos had been sought by police and intelligence agencies of a dozen countries, including the United States. His name was connected with few terrorist acts after 1986 and an Israeli newspaper reported him dead.
Author David Yallop, who wrote a book on Carlos titled To the Ends of the Earth published in 1993, said Carlos in the early 1990s posed as a Mexican businessman and lived with his wife, German radical Magdalena Kopp, and their two children in Damascus.
Yallop called Carlos a bumbling killer who often killed in panic, in contrast to the widely believed image of a cool professional. Yallop said the CIA and British and French intelligence mistakenly believed he was a Russian KGB agent.
During nearly two decades of terrorist activity, using forged passports and an array of faked identities and nationalities, including British, French and American, he operated from London, Paris, East Berlin, Beirut, Baghdad, Havana, Moscow and Libya.
Carlos was portrayed as a pudgy but dapper South American playboy, a guitar-strumming ladies' man and party lover, and a killer so cold- blooded that in 1975 he shot a close friend and cohort between the eyes as he fled near-arrest by Paris police.
'Carlos' was born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez in San Cristobal, Venezuela, in 1950, the son of a wealthy but dedicated communist who named his three sons Vladimir, Ilich and Lenin, according to Claire Sterling's book {i:The Terror Network.' The eldest, Ilich, who became 'Carlos,' joined the pro-Moscow Venezuelan Communist Party at age 14. According to a 1979 interview published in the Paris Arab weekly al- Wattan al-Arabi, he was sent to Havana and then London by his father in 1966. Two years later, he began guerrilla training at Moscow's Lumumba University, where he fell in with radical Palestinians. In 1970, he joined George Habash and Wadi Haddad and the ultra-radical Popular Front For the Liberation of Palestine.
Terrorist attacks he was said to have been involved in included:
--The May 30, 1972, machine-gun attack by three Japanese commandos, claiming to represent Arab guerrilla groups, who killed 25 passengers and wounded 77 in the Lod Airport massacre in Tel Aviv.
-- The Sept. 5, 1972, Arab guerrilla attack at the Munich Olympics that killed 11 Israeli athletes, five guerrillas and a West German policeman.
-- The December 1975 kidnapping of 11 oil ministers from a Vienna meeting of the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries.
-- Organizing the 1976 PFLP hijacking of a French jet in Athens, an incident that ended with the Israeli commando raid on Uganda's Entebbe airport July 3 and the rescue of 103 passengers.
--The 1974 bombing of Le Drugstore in Paris that killed two and injured 20. Reports of his activities, though usually sketchy, linked Carlos with numerous terrorist organizations in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, including Italy's Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang and Black September.
Carlos appeared to drop from sight in 1976 -- "probably because he had become and embarrassment and a liability to his own side," according to Sterling. Reports said his instructions -- apparently from Libyan leader Moammar Khadafi -- in the 1975 OPEC kidnapping were to kill Saudi Arabian oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, as well as the oil minister of Iran, and that he spared their lives for a bribe of $5 million.
One report said Carlos met informally with CIA agent Frank Terpil, who has worked for Khadafi, in London in summer 1976. His name continued to surface from time to time. Press reports claimed he was involved in the 61-day seizure of hostages, including 14 ambassadors, by Colombian M-19 guerrillas at a diplomatic reception in Bogota in early 1980. Unconfirmed reports said Carlos was the man abducted by armed cohorts from a Caracas hospital in May 1981 immediately after surgeons had removed bullets from his stomach and back.
Police found a note Jan. 5, 1984, claiming responsibility for two New Year's Eve bombings in Marseilles, France, that killed five people and injured 50. French officials said the note was in Carlos' handwriting.
