Latest news with #CarlosTheJackal
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Jackal Speaks: From his jail cell, terrorist Carlos the Jackal tells of his plan to nuke France
The Jackal Speaks (BBC4) As romantic gestures go, none could be more dramatic. When Carlos the Jackal's girlfriend, terrorist Magdalena Kopp, was jailed, he threatened to blow up nuclear power stations until she was released. To convince the French authorities this was no hoax, he sent a letter signed with his own fingerprint. At the time, in 1982, he was the world's most wanted man, with a rocket attack at Orly Airport in Paris among his long tally of crimes. At first, the French refused to negotiate, even after Carlos bombed a train and a newspaper office. But when they realised that his private terror network — funded by huge paydays from Libya's Colonel Gaddafi and other Arab dictators — really could destroy an atomic reactor, they caved in. Kopp, a former member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, was freed. Shortly after that, she married Carlos in Lebanon. 'I could have killed 100,000 people, irradiated half the country,' he boasted, in The Jackal Speaks. It's the sort of fantastical coup that Eddie Redmayne, as an international hitman in Sky Atlantic's thriller The Day Of The Jackal, might pull off. This documentary, produced by an Israeli company, set out to debunk the myths around the Jackal, now 75 and a prisoner in a French jail for the past 30 years. It made much of his vanity, his alcoholism and his slow slide into irrelevance as the fad for Communist revolutions died out. But it forgot that Carlos — whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez — is still a global hero and a revered freedom fighter . . . in his own mind. This 90-minute film was based around phone interviews taped with the assassin from his cell in solitary confinement. Experts including Carlos's biographer Dr Daniela Richterova and his former controller in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Bassam Abu Sharif, gave their analysis of his personality: narcissistic, reckless, pleasure-loving, needy for praise and attention. The problem is, if you allow a man like that to tell his own life story, he will talk about all the wrong bits. Carlos isn't interested in discussing how he planned his kills: the logistics seem to bore him. And he certainly doesn't care about the dozens of people he killed — their lives are meaningless to him. Instead, there was a lot of boasting: 'I was the best shot, I shot better than anybody else.' And he spent a long time reminiscing about his parents and his childhood in Caracas, Venezuela. It was half an hour before we heard about the first assassination attempt, when he walked into a house in St John's Wood, London, and shot the chairman of M&S, Joseph Sieff, in the face. Incredibly, Sieff — who was also vice president of the British Zionist Federation, survived. The bullet was deflected by his teeth. 'Good advert for the Milk Marketing Board,' he joked. Now there's a line that belongs in a thriller.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Jackal Speaks: Inside the Mind of a Mass Murderer review – Carlos turns out to be an icky loser
We in the west love to hate a terrorist bogeyman. When our opponent isn't a state, it's easier to rationalise our failure to stop them causing us pain if there's super-villain lore around them. That a lone Venezuelan called Ilich Ramírez Sánchez could become the scourge of top intelligence agencies would be a humiliation; rebadge him as the impressive 'Carlos the Jackal' and we can cope. As the Israeli-made Storyville documentary The Jackal Speaks: Inside the Mind of a Mass Murderer profiles Sánchez and interviews him, that mystique evaporates. After growing up in Caracas in a family home that has a cook, a cleaner, a gardener and a large photograph of Stalin on the wall, the teenage Sánchez is relocated to London and then Moscow in the late 1960s, dismaying his father – and, in the Soviet Union, annoying the KGB – with his preference for partying over studying. In 1969 he enrols with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), fighting for them in the Black September conflict in Jordan and, most likely, conducting his first solo mission by attempting to assassinate the vice-president of the British Zionist Federation in London in 1973. In the film, Sánchez denies that one, but it's definitely him firing rocket-propelled grenades at Israeli passenger jets at Orly airport in 1975. When an informant turns on him by revealing his location to Paris police, Sánchez kills his former associate and two of the officers who arrive to arrest him. Now internationally notorious, he's nicknamed Carlos the Jackal, the moniker coming half from his South American heritage, and half from a Guardian journalist visiting the flat of an ex-girlfriend of Sánchez and noticing a copy of The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. As if to reward the media's interest, 'Carlos the Jackal' pulls off his biggest job when he and his team take dozens of hostages at an Opec summit in Vienna in December 1975, acting on behalf of the PFLP and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. All this is recalled using the usual documentary mix of biographers, experts and retired spies, boosted by a telephone interview with the imprisoned Sánchez himself, conducted in 2021 by director Yaron Niski. When the supply of evocative archive footage runs out and there's nothing for the star of the show to talk over, the film resorts to slightly comical images of Niski with a phone to his ear, dramatically shot in small rooms half-lit by the dim glow from a single window. Still, it must be worth it for an exclusive chat with the former most wanted man in the world? Barely. Sánchez, rambling unchallenged down an indistinct line, is hard to follow even when you can make out what he's saying, which isn't always. He doesn't offer any insight into why he chose the Palestinian cause, or why he was drawn to political violence. He doesn't sound like a criminal mastermind; instead, the overall impression is that he was narcissistic enough to believe he could get away with outrageous schemes, and psychopathic enough to do the cold-blooded killing. That, rather than any piercing strategic or political vision, was enough. Chiefly, Sánchez's contributions are notable for their Trumpian self-aggrandisement: 'I was the best shot. I shot better than anyone else,' he says of his formative months at a PFLP training camp. 'The only person who could maybe direct such an operation in such a short time is … Carlos!' he claims, talking about how silly Col Gaddafi hadn't left enough time to plan his attack on the Opec meeting, so Sánchez graciously bailed him out. The tapes also reveal Sánchez to be quite the creepy misogynist. He looks to reinforce the legend that he is a philanderer by commenting on the quality of the women in the many countries he's lived in, an observation that usually comes with an approving reference to how 'clean' these conquests were. The love of his life, Frankfurt Revolutionary Cells member Magdalena Kopp, receives the special accolade 'very clean, everywhere'. It might seem trivial to worry about the icky gender politics of a mass-murdering mercenary, but this guy has been romanticised as international terrorism's answer to James Bond – a man of mystery as suave as he is elusive. Close up, he gives off loner vibes, and the photos we see of his various guises don't burnish his cool-villain credentials, either: he almost always looks like a beady uncle whom female guests have to avoid at a wedding disco. The picture that has become an icon, where he's wearing wraparound shades, is the only one where he looks badass. The story was that the people employed to keep us safe were given the runaround by a unique force of evil, a ghost; it now seems they actually spent years chasing a loser. The Jackal Speaks: Inside the Mind of a Mass Murderer aired on BBC Four and is on iPlayer now.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
TV tonight: Paris Lees' captivating millennial coming-of-age drama
9pm, BBC Three Millennials, prepare for a nostalgia rush as this rollicking adaptation of Paris Lees' memoir takes us back to the time of Nokias, Zombie Nation and total hedonism. Life is 'one big fucking party' for everyone except Byron (a brilliant breakthrough for Ellis Howard), a working-class teenager desperate to escape constant homophobia and hopelessness. Sex work leads Byron to Nottingham's underground scene and a fun-loving group called the Fallen Divas. But the party can't last for ever … It's a bold and captivating opening episode that doesn't flinch from exploring the big issues (Byron is only 15 when being paid for sex) and tells the story with authenticity and humour. Hollie Richardson 10pm, BBC Four'I killed at least 83 people myself; under my orders there were between 1,500 and 2,000 people killed. I was the most wanted man in the world.' That's Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – AKA Carlos the Jackal – speaking from prison in Paris, where he is serving three life sentences for his involvement in terror attacks. He narrates this film about his life, from growing up in Venezuela to his relationships with Gaddafi and Bin Laden. HR 7pm, BBC TwoRecent cyber-attacks on M&S, the Co-op and Harrods have exposed critical flaws in digital defences, causing empty shelves, halted deliveries and furious customers. The hackers? Organised, anonymous and ruthlessly efficient – but often simply disaffected youngsters showing off their skills, as one ex-hacker here admits. Ali Catterall 9pm, BBC One This certainly isn't one of those episodes where the researchers had to scrabble around for a half-decent story. Straight away, singer Will Young provides a moving tale of overlooked second world war heroism thanks to the exploits of his grandfather, Digby. Then there is some spicy villainy further up the family tree. Young receives both happy and sad news. Jack Seale 9pm, BBC TwoThere have been two dramatisations of the Lockerbie terror attack this year. Neither really felt as if they did justice to the tale, so now it's time to hear the families of six victims tell their own stories in this documentary. These victims include 25-year-old Olive Gordon and 24-year-old Tim Burman. HR 9pm, Sky ArtsFor her next trip in this lovely series, art expert Kate Bryan is in Preston at the home of the first Black woman to win the Turner prize, and 'ultimate disruptor', Lubaina Himid. They have intimate chats about Himid's work on race, identity and what it means to be Black in the UK today. HR Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story (Sinéad O'Shea, 2024), 10pm, Sky ArtsA woman who lived her life battling the repression that is an enduring theme in her novels, the Irish author Edna O'Brien is a terrific subject for a documentary. O'Shea does her proud here and is blessed with access to the then 93-year-old – who is as sharp as ever when talking through her experiences. But O'Brien is also tinged with melancholy – a result of a traumatic childhood, an oppressive marriage and the misogynist resentment she faced – not least back in Ireland – due to her frank opinions. Simon Wardell In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, 2009), 11.45pm, BBC Two Iannucci's comedy bridges the gap between The Thick of It and Veep by throwing together governmental fools and chancers from the UK and US. It also ups the ante by making the result of the bungling of its apparatchiks, spin merchants and elected officials an actual war. Most of the Thick of It cast return, though confusingly as different characters. Luckily, Peter Capaldi's vituperative director of comms Malcolm Tucker is present and incorrect, bullying the out-of-his-depth minister for international development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) on an ill-fated visit to Washington DC. SW
