The Remarkable True Story of The Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970’s, with Jason Burke (Part One)

Summary

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Intelligence Squared: "The Remarkable True Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s" with Jason Burke (Part One)

Date: January 4, 2026 | Host: Gordon Carrera | Guest: Jason Burke

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Episode Overview

This live event episode features renowned Guardian journalist Jason Burke, discussing his new book The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s. Burke, interviewed by Gordon Carrera, explores how a diverse cast of radical figures—such as Leila Khaled, Ulrike Meinhof, and Carlos the Jackal—pioneered spectacular terrorist acts and political violence, leaving an indelible mark on the decade. The conversation covers the context of the era, motivations of these revolutionaries, their methods, the media’s role in mythmaking, and the legacy of their actions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Focus on the 1970s?

• Genesis of the Book:

  • Jason Burke describes how he shifted his attention from recent Islamic extremism (post-9/11) to the underexplored era of the 1970s.
  • He noticed a dramatic transformation: from early, highly publicized and performative hijackings to the bloodier, more nihilistic bombings by the decade’s end.
  • (04:22) “I found a lot of...really interesting people. And I could see that something in the 70s, something very important had happened...it started with people like Leila Khaled...and at the end of the decade...you had big bombs being driven into embassies...and those are two radically different ways of approaching political violence.” — Jason Burke

• The Contextual Shift:

  • The 1960s saw a global explosion of radicalism and idealism; the 1980s became more cynical. The 1970s, therefore, are a transitional period worth examining.

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2. Character-Driven Approach—Humanizing “Terrorists”

• Burke structures his book around the compelling lives of these figures, arguing this is the best way to truly grasp their motivations and the era’s spirit.
• (08:23) “The people who really engage me...the only way to tell a story to a reader is through those characters.” — Jason Burke

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3. Leila Khaled and the “Celebrity” of Terrorism

• Background & Motives:

  • Khaled became the first woman to hijack an airplane—a symbol for the Palestinian cause.
  • She sought a frontline role in militancy, rare for women in the Arab world at the time. Burke interviewed her at length in Amman.

• Media Performance:

  • (15:26) “Some of those hijackings were really partly staged for the TV cameras...there was violence...but it was about...the images and the new world of television.” — Gordon Carrera
  • These “skyjackings” were as much about spectacle as about substantive change, capitalizing on global media attention.

• Memorable Anecdotes:

  • Khaled became such a celebrity that the PFLP leader ordered her to do more interviews to maintain the group’s media profile.
  • Burke highlights the almost “benign” aftermath of Khaled’s imprisonment in England, noting her “sweet messages” to police officers and her mother.
  • (13:48) “She wrote rather sweet messages to her mum from Ealing’s police station...thanking the policeman for the stay in this nice hotel.” — Jason Burke

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4. Ulrike Meinhof & The Baader-Meinhof Gang

• Trajectory from Journalism to Militancy:

  • Meinhof, once a respected left-wing journalist, transitioned from articulate critique to direct violent action, influenced by the radical climate and her associations with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.
  • Her split-second decision to go underground marked the end of her public life and the beginning of a deeply tragic period.

• Complex Motives:

  • Meinhof was motivated by anger at Germany's failure to confront its Nazi past and a desire to address systemic injustice—her suicide in 1976 symbolized the end of “the big left-wing moment in Europe.”
  • (29:45) “She ends that...period, and Meinhof’s suicide basically marks the end of that first period and that big left-wing moment in Europe.” — Jason Burke

• Living on the Run:

  • Highlighted how the pre-digital, pre-surveillance era enabled fugitives to disappear far more easily than today.
  • (30:35) “There’s no way of getting to you...if no policeman recognizes you, you can survive.” — Jason Burke

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5. Carlos the Jackal: Myth vs. Reality

• Construction of a Legend:

  • “Carlos the Jackal,” actually Illich Ramírez Sánchez, derived much of his fearsome reputation from media mythmaking rather than operational competence.
  • The nickname came from a passport and a Frederick Forsyth novel found in his safe house.

• Talent for Manipulation:

  • Burke describes Carlos’s “phenomenal” ability to charm, network, and persuade—whether recruiting bombers or seducing women.
  • Even in prison, Carlos attempted to charm Burke himself through a strange correspondence.
  • (34:18) “He’s still in this sort of slightly—you know, it’s that kind of Terry-Thomas style, ‘Hello! I am the famous Carlos the Jackal...’” — Jason Burke

• The Power of Image:

  • Despite repeated failures and betrayals, Carlos survived by leveraging his media aura.
  • Organizations overlooked his flaws because he brought them notoriety, often showing up to meetings with a thick stack of press clippings.
  • (35:27) “The leader...doesn’t want to shoot him...because he's a hero. He's got this media aura, and…press cuttings are worth much more than a successful terrorist attack.” — Jason Burke

• Debunking the Network:

  • Files from East German intelligence reveal that the feared “network” of operatives amounted in reality to a handful of people, not the hundreds the media suggested.
  • (38:22) “You've got these Stasi reports saying...they have hundreds of operatives around the world...They had like five.” — Jason Burke

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6. The Role of Theater, Image, and Performance in Terrorism

• “Terrorism is Theater”:

  • Many of these figures, like Mohammed Budia, had theatrical or literary backgrounds—suggesting a penchant for “performance” baked into their approach to politics.
  • Burke cautions against “over-glamorizing,” but argues for a nuanced understanding: violent, yes; but also often cultured, strategic, almost artistic.

• Exploding Press Releases:

  • Bombings were sometimes less about causing casualties than acting as “exploding press releases"— creating a spectacle designed to disrupt, draw attention, and communicate a message.
  • (43:08) “There’s a description of some of the bombs the American groups were planting as exploding press releases...trying to use public violence...to communicate a message, but also just to disrupt.” — Jason Burke

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Leila Khaled’s constructed celebrity:

  • (13:27) “[The PFLP] had decided that to have a young striking woman out there hijacking would be great for them...She was very much sort of constructed as the public face of the PFLP.” — Jason Burke

• On the performative nature of 1970s terrorism:

  • (15:43) "They were trying to cut through all the time and get that attention for the group, for their cause, and they're successful in getting that attention. Whether it helps them in the long run or not is another matter." — Jason Burke

• On Carlos the Jackal’s mythmaking:

  • (34:33) “Press cuttings about him. Yeah, obviously. Which was his other insight, which was, you know, it's the message that matters...and he absolutely understood this.” — Jason Burke

• On resisting glamourization but insisting on depth:

  • (39:34) “You don’t want to glamorize them...but you do need to understand who they were.” — Jason Burke

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:28–04:05] – Jason Burke describes his motivation for writing about the 1970s
• [08:00–09:26] – Why telling these stories through characters is essential
• [09:10–15:26] – Leila Khaled’s biography and the cult of celebrity among early hijackers
• [15:26–17:56] – The performative nature of hijackings and media strategy
• [22:29–29:45] – Ulrike Meinhof, her radicalization, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang
• [31:42–38:35] – Carlos the Jackal: myth, manipulation, and the reality behind the legend
• [39:34–43:08] – The fine line between demystifying and glamorizing revolutionaries; role of performance in terrorism

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Conclusion

Burke and Carrera’s conversation lays bare the complexities of 1970s extremism, showing how performance, media, and personal charisma intertwined with violence to shape a new kind of political disruption. The episode combines gripping anecdotes and deep analysis, debunking myths while revealing the real motivations and cultural contexts behind the era’s most infamous revolutionaries.

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For further reading or follow-up debate, visit intelligencesquared.com.
End of part one.

Transcript

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[Jason Burke]

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[Mia Sorrenti]

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[Mia Sorrenti]

Where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with Jason Burke, the international security correspondent for the Guardian. Burke joined the Rest Is Classified co host Gordon Carrera at the Kiln Theatre in London to discuss the remarkable true story stories of the extremists who hijacked the 1970s. In that turbulent decade, a network of radicals from Leila Khaled and Carlos the Jackal to the Barda Meinhof gang, targeted the west with hijackings, hostage takings, and spectacular acts of political violence. Drawing on declassified archives and original interviews, Burke takes us inside the attacks that defined the era, from the Munich Olympics to the Iranian embassy siege in London and the early 1980s Beirut bombings. Let's join our host, Gordon Carrera now with more.

[Gordon Carrera]

Hello everyone. Welcome to this Intelligence Squared event. I'm Gordon Carrera. I host a podcast called the Rest is Classified and write about some of the issues we might be talking about today. And I'm absolutely delighted to speak to Jason Burke, who is the International Security correspondent for the Guardian. A foreign correspondent for almost 30 years reporting the Middle East, Africa all around the world. Definitely one of the foremost writers on terrorism, written a number of books and we're here to speak about his new book. You can see here the Revolutionists, the story of the extremists who hijacked the 1970s. And I'm very pleased, almost envious as well as a fellow author to say it's been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction which I have to say having read it, he sent me a copy. He sent me an early copy a few months ago. Is richly deserved because it is an. It's a fascinating book with a kind of very interesting argument but also just full of rich stories told in a fantastically engaging way. And this evening we're going to have a chance to explore some of the stories, some of the slightly crazy characters I think it's fair to say from the book understand the context and what it all means. But first of all, Jason, full disclosure, we've known each other for a while, haven't we? For about 20 years or 25 years.

[Jason Burke]

We've known each other since we were both working on. On that first wave of terrorism.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, after 9 11.

[Jason Burke]

Yeah, after 911 when we were incredibly.

[Gordon Carrera]

Young because we're not that old now.

[Jason Burke]

When we were born. The fact that we can talk about it, as you know we were actually quite well advanced in our careers then and now we're still talking about more or less the same thing is slightly worrying but get over that.

[Gordon Carrera]

But I guess it's true that that was the kind of post 911 period, the kind of so called war on terror. It was Al Qaeda. You've written about that and some of the things that came after it in the past. But I guess the question is what made you go back to the 1970s for this book?

[Jason Burke]

It was partly what I'd written previously in that I started thinking about this book in about 201415 when we had that big rush of violence in Europe and lesser extent here, the Islamic extremist violence of that period. And I was thinking, I was asked to write a book by Bodley Head and started writing something and it was a kind of potted history of Islamic militancy and how we'd kind of got to that point. It wasn't very good and I junked it. But it got me thinking in a kind of historical way. And I thought how interesting it would be to look at some of these earlier periods. And I thought the oos we've all written about the 90s has. I'd written about the 80s have been pretty well documented. Lots of books about the war in Afghanistan and so forth. And so I, you know, got to the 70s and started looking at it and found first off that there were lots of. Lots of events I kind of half remembered. And quite a lot of people in this room will probably half remember the munich attack of 1972, on the Olympics, the Entebbe raid, Iranian revolution, this sort of thing. And obviously I didn't actually remember it, but it was kind of hard. It was what I remembered, what I'd been told about it, and I thought that'd be interesting to revisit. I found a lot of, when I started reading into it, really interesting people. And I could see that something in the 70s, something very important had happened in the 70s that I wanted to explore. And that was. I mean, one of the things we were talking about earlier was why the seventies? And the sort of try answer, the glib answer is, well, it's because between the 60s and the 80s, which is, you know, true, but the point being that the 60s was this huge explosion globally, particularly in the west, but elsewhere, of radicalism, radical thinking in every sphere, artistic, literary, political, social. And the 80s saw something very different. And I was looking at the histories and the documents so forth, and could see that in my field, that I was looking at the terrorists, if you like. It started with people like Leila Khaled, young Palestinian woman, hijacking planes, and then instead of blowing them up, shepherding all the passengers off them, handing out leaflets and boiled sweets and earnestly trying to convince them of the righteousness and rightfulness of her cause. And at the end of the decade, a little after the end of the decade, you had big bombs being driven into embassies, American embassies in the Middle east, and hundreds of people dying with including the bomber. And those are two radically different ways of approaching political violence. And I just thought, that's really interesting. How did that happen? How did that happen in the. And what happened in the west at the same time? And how did all of this fit together and that. And then I started digging into it, and that's partly why it took me. Best part of a decade.

[Gordon Carrera]

Best part of a decade. And we'll come a bit to the research, but it is a really interesting argument about the kind of evolution of terrorism through that decade, as you said, the kind of shift of it and the different currents which led to that shift. But I wonder if the best way we could kind of explore it is through some of the characters, because I think that's maybe the easiest way of kind of grappling which is why I.

[Jason Burke]

Put them in as from the writer's perspective. The big theoretical argument is really. I find it interesting. I think it's an important one. But the people who really engage me or what really engaged me, and I know really the only way to tell a story to a reader is through those characters. And as I actually met some of them or just read into them or investigated them and they came to life, there was actually no other way of writing the book. You know, some of them were such strong characters that, you know, you had to structure the book around them. And indeed, we've. When we've been talking earlier today, our conversations have naturally come back to these fascinating characters.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. Let's start with Leyla Khalid, then. You've mentioned her already. So this is the start of the decade. She, I think for a lot of people, was this figure who epitomizes almost the kind of celebrity cult that was around terrorism at that point, at the start of the decade.

[Jason Burke]

Yeah. So. So Leyla Khaled, who I spoke to for hours and hours in Amman in Jordan. She is. She's 83 now. Pretty sparky, not well, but still, all her faculty is very much intact. She was quite tricky to interview because when I was talking to her, she's spoken a lot. I mean, she's gone through two periods of celebrity, if you like, one in the early 70s because of her hijacking, and more recently as a sort of icon of the. Of a broader political movement and the more recent political movement. And she was really interesting because part of why it was tricky was because part of what she was saying was the same stuff she's told lots of interviewers. I mean, I spoke to her in much more detail and much for much longer, but she's told her story hundreds of times and so has this kind of rote version that you have to kind of penetrate. The other thing was that some of what she was telling me I could. I knew wasn't true. And that was sometimes because she was trying to put her organization, for example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in a. In. And this is going to get quite Monty Python this evening. I apologize in advance, but the. I'll try and keep minimal, but they're over there. Yeah, that wasn't rehearsed, but the. The. So. So she would either try to protect her organization or she was still maintaining kind of operational security sort of 60 years later. And so I knew that the weapons had come for one of the hijackings from somewhere from Beirut. They'd been Couriered by a French woman and all this stuff who'd never been caught and never been identified. And she told me something completely different about them being found in a cupboard in a hotel room. Oh, some weapons. Oh, look, you know, I'm in the Premier Inn and there happens to be, you know, two grenades and a Makarov pistol in the closet. But so that one. But otherwise she was very forthcoming. She was brilliant on her youth and all the rest of it. So Leyla Khalid really sort of started Everything in the 60s in many ways as this iconic figure of the Palestinian cause and this new wave of hijacking, skyjacking, as they called it at the time, they didn't have the vocabulary, really. Air piracy they also called it. And she hijacked a plane in 69 from Rome, took it to TWA plane, took it to Damascus, and then she tried to do a second one in 1970. But what I, in the book I used partly her story to do was to explain the background to the Palestinian Israeli conflict. Because she grew up in. She was born in 1944, she fled Haifa in 48. The foundation of Israel during the wars around the foundation of Israel. And educated woman, comes from an educated family, went to the American University at Beirut and then really fought hard to get this kind of frontline role that she wanted to do and be as a fighter, a combat which in late 60s in the Arab world was not something that many people were doing. So as a woman. And initially the PFLP group said no, and then finally they relented, or she said they finally relented. But I know actually that what happened is that the leaders of the group had decided that to have a young striking woman out there hijacking would be great for them. And they put her for her second hijack with a young Nicaraguan American, very good looking, clean cut, very committed Nicaraguan American man who had come out of the Sandinista movement. And so their window, if you like, their kind of public image, was going to be this striking, young, empowered Palestinian, 25, 26 year old and same age, this young American Nicaraguan guy. And she was very much sort of constructed as the public face of the pflp. And she did these two hijackings. The second one ended very badly. Her accomplice, Nicaraguan was shot on the plane by an Israeli sky marshal. It was an El Al plane. And she ended up in Ealing police station in Congress and where she was held for a couple of weeks and eventually released pretty much because the British government just really didn't want to put her on trial and get all the hassle they knew they'd get. And at that time, that's what you did. Basically, you found a way to release them. They went back and you just hoped that nobody else would come and hijack your planes again. And she wrote rather sweet messages to her mum from Ealing Prison, Ealing's police station, sorry, that I found in the archives. And she wrote a message to the policeman saying, dco, whoever he was saying, thank you very much for this stay in this night hotel. And it was all kind of rather benign. And then they freed her, and off she went back to and where she was kind of created as a celebrity to the point where when she refused to do yet another interview, the head of the organization, the pflp, George Bash, phoned her and said, get out there and, you know, do the interviews. So it's very much in that kind of spectacular way, because in that some.

[Gordon Carrera]

Of those hijackings were really partly staged for the TV cameras, weren't they? I mean, they were. It was very performative, the nature of it. I mean, there was violence. We shouldn't, you know, understate that, but. But it was about that kind of the images and the new world of television, wasn't it?

[Jason Burke]

So there's this brilliant moment in the second hijacks, one that she failed with her plane, but they took three others. And they flew the pflp. They flew them all. It's worth just stopping for a moment, imagining that happening now, like, you know, a group from the Middle east tries to seize four planes at once. 747s, you know, 787s, big planes with hundreds of international travelers on them. They get three of them. One, they get to Cairo, where they blow it up. They just destroy it. And there is an moderately amusing moment where they're flying around saying to Cairo control, we want to land the plane. And they say, you can't. And they say, we've just lit the fuses on the explosives. We've got eight minutes to land. And Cairo, go, okay, land. And then the onboard hijackers realize that they've made a mistake. And there are a lot of mistakes made by revolutionists in this book. And they've actually only got. They did. They set it wrong, and they set it to five minutes. So they've got three minutes left and at least. Why everybody on board is panicking, including the hijacker, and they land it, and they all jump off and they run away and they get out, and then it goes up. So that's one big jumbo that just goes up in vain and it goes on the front pages. And everybody in the group thinks this is a fantastic success because they've got the front page and they're competing against a lot in like 1970. I mean the time there are times when they do a hijacking they've got a lot of and then it's like the moon landings or something and obviously nobody pays them any attention but or half of France is on the streets or there's loads of other stuff is going on. So they're trying to cut through all the time and get that attention for the group, for their cause, and they're successful in getting that attention. Whether it helps them in the long run or not is another matter entirely. You didn't start a business just to.

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[Gordon Carrera]

Let's move on to the next person. Ulrike Meinhof, now, another famous name people might have heard of.

[Jason Burke]

I've probably heard of the bar the.

[Gordon Carrera]

Meinhof Gang, which is emblematic, I guess, of a slightly different kind of interface between European radicalism and the Middle east as well. At points, talk a little bit about her and her place in this story.

[Jason Burke]

So one of the things I'm trying to do in the book is compare the kind of trajectory of Middle Eastern extremism in the period and that in Europe, because at the beginning we start in more or less the same place. So it starts in the late 60s with this great wave of radicalism and you know, 1968, Paris and all this. And in the US and you have all these, this big movement for change. And everywhere you get one or two fringe groups that look to use violence, sometimes lethal violence, sometimes just against property. So you have the Weather Underground in the US you have the Angry Brigade in Britain who famously are really just a bit cross. And then you have the not much in France, you have the Red Brigades in Italy who get to be really big. In Germany you have the Red army faction as they're actually known with, known colloquially as the Bada Meinhof Gang. So Andreas Bada is supposedly the leader and Ulrike Meinhof is meant to be a psychic. Actually, that's a gross misrepresentation. The real leader was a woman called Gudrun Enslin, who was a really extraordinary character, terrifying, very bright, very capable. Andreas Barda was a loudmouth, but kind of good looking and quite glamorous. And quite a lot we could talk about is how these people kind of really glamorized was actually what they did was pretty sordid and, you know, genuinely very nasty. But they became so Bader gets put up in lights partly because he's a man. So nobody at the time can believe that, you know, a woman is actually running the show and he gets put together with Meinhof. Meinhof is there because she's really well known and Minehoff is a radical left wing journalist. She's not kind of crazy radical. She's, you know, on the German equivalent, equivalent of Newsnight, sort of, you know, quite mainstream. I mean, nobody would accuse, you know, just Newsnight of kind of platforming, kind of total fringe elements. I mean, and she's the voice of the radical left and she's there kind of discussing usually with lots of men, often conservative, they're all smoking like chimneys because it's like 1967 or something. And, and she's arguing the kind of new left perspective on social problems in Germany. And she's very angry about the failure to address the crimes of the Nazi era, that lots of old Nazis are still judges and kind of university chancellors and so forth. And she's interested in problem of juvenile delinquency. And, and she's a really committed, she's a highly intelligent woman, very articulate and very committed and, and, and with quite a high profile and quite good living as a journalist. She, she moves in kind of quite wealthy left wing circles and you know, has a good job as a columnist, as two young twin daughters, is separated from her philandering, wealthy publisher husband, but is still part of Amelieu. And she decides between 67, 68, 69, she becomes more and more radical and starts to question whether the words are enough. And she never really articulates it as such that she made her, her rhetoric gets tougher. And Barda, Andreas Barda, the loudmouth and Enslin, who is his girlfriend, are on the run because they done an arson attack on a, on a department store. And they knock on her door, her flat in Berlin, and she puts them up for a few months and then they leave. And a month or so later Enslin gets in touch. Barda has been picked up, put in prison. She wants to bust him out as though she was a capable woman, she really is. So she's got this plan where she wants Meinhof to invite Barda or to collaborate with Bada on a book about crime. And for that he will need to go to a library in Berlin to do research with her. So she has to. Meinoff has to apply to the prison for permission, which she reluctantly gets. And so they meet on a summer's morning in late spring morning actually in Berlin in this library, social institute, kind of academic library. And the plan works. Enslin turns up with some of her mates, sort of very inexperienced underground militants, so inexperienced that half of them are like vomiting in the car on the way there because they're so nervous and they have to, they don't know where to get the guns from. They're having used guns. But anyway, and it kind of works. They Break into this place. They shoot one of the elderly clerks and Barda jumps out of a window, first floor window, where he's sitting there drinking nasty instant 1970s coffee with Minhoff. Now the plan is for Meinhof to stay there and then she's gonna go. I didn't know anything about it. And then she can go back to her flat and her two kids and her career as a prominent left wing journalist. And for whatever reason she jumps out of the window after Bardot. Split second decision. Split second decision. And there's a lot of discussion in the German literature over whether she planned it or didn't plan it. But to me the tell is that one of the first calls she makes is to a friend to ask the friend to pick up her kids from school. She makes this kind of at 4 o', clock, can you be at the school gate and pick up my two daughters? And in that moment she goes underground. And from then on really it's a sort of tragic story in some ways. And she tries to keep up with the others. She never really can. They go on this spree of bank robberies to fund the organization. It's only a couple of dozen people, maybe 30, 40 at most. Initially they have quite a lot of public support that evaporates. As it evaporates, they find it harder to operate. They do a few bomb attacks, people die, they get caught. She ends up in solitary confinement. It's really unpleasant in prison. The others are really nasty to her and she hangs herself in 76. And that in itself, I just reading her story, I thought that's, you know, that is worth a book in itself. I mean there are lots in German, but not. She's an amazing character.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. And she, I mean she survives on the run for.

[Jason Burke]

She survives on the run, which is again, you think about it now, trying to get back to the 70s and understand she goes. When they went on the run, they could go, you, you just need to burn your papers but you know, and not use a check. And you could survive on the run in Germany or in a western, in a developed western country for as long as you wanted, as long pre cctv.

[Gordon Carrera]

Pre digital trails, pre everything.

[Jason Burke]

There's nothing, there's no way of getting to you. So if you're careful, if no policeman recognizes you, you can survive. Which is so dramatically different to how kind of hyper traced we are now that, you know, we kind of forget it anyway. So the other thing about minhap is she ends that, that is over the wave of radicalism of the 60s ends in about that period. And Meinhof's suicide basically marks the end of that first period and that big left wing moment in Europe. And her funeral is a. Is an anticlimax. The authorities prepare for this sort of big outpouring of grief and unrest. There's nothing virtually not. And to me that was really interesting. So it sort of ends there in the West. I mean there's stuff later on I go into the book, but really the big moment is over, but not in the Middle East. And why that is is really crucial to the kind of intellectual argument of the book.

[Gordon Carrera]

Another character, again focusing on some of the more famous characters. Carlos the Jackal, now that's again another name which people may have heard again, you know, comes from that kind of cult, you know, figure from the 70s. And yet what I found fascinating was that when you actually kind of really explore what he got up to, the reality doesn't necessarily match up to the myth, I think it's fair to say. Tell us a little bit about that.

[Jason Burke]

Well, it is kind of massive combat really. Carlos or actual name Illich Ramirez Sanchez and I call him Illich Ramirez Sanchez in the book because I don't see why, you know, the whole.

[Gordon Carrera]

Don't over glamorize.

[Jason Burke]

Well, yeah, the whole thing about lots of other books they call him Carlos, which is his, you know, was the name that people gave him and he was called Carlos the Jackal because it's totally journalistic and most of his career is journalistic in the sense that it's sort of mediatized and it's blown out of proportion. So Carlos comes from a passport that was left in a Parisian safe house that was found. And the Jackal comes from another safe house where they found a copy of Frederick Forsyth's the Day of the Jackal, which it turned out belonged to a girlfriend and he'd never read. But that did not matter. It was, he was. Then they put it all together and my newspaper actually the Guardian in 70, whatever it was that was in 75 called him Carlos Jackal and it stuck.

[Gordon Carrera]

They weren't the first, were they? The first the Guardian to do that.

[Jason Burke]

Certainly the first to break the story of the, of the, the book. The book, yeah. And. And then it just start the Carlos the Jackal thing. So Carlos had, I mean I was just. There are loads of examples of how he got screwed stuff up. So he wasn't actually very good at the, the violence, if you like, the actual operative elements. His tradecraft was appalling, as spies call it. So, you know, he get Everybody could find him really easily, and people knew where he was if they'd wanted to. But he had two really brilliant insights or talents and. And one talent on insight. And the talent was for the kind of relational. So he was just great at manipulating people, convincing people, getting them to do what he wanted, whether that be plant a bomb, sleep with him, carry something from A to B, or just boost his ego in some way. And that kind of networking he was phenomenally good at. And even it was weird. I got entered into this slightly weird correspondence with him in prison. I was getting letters in and out. And he still.

[Gordon Carrera]

Was he trying to charm you?

[Jason Burke]

Yeah, he's still in this sort of slightly. You know, it's that kind of Terry Thomas style kind of hello. You know, I mean, it's just weird. I am the famous Carlos the Jackal and are sending me press cuttings, which.

[Gordon Carrera]

Press cuttings about him.

[Jason Burke]

About him. Yeah, obviously. Yeah, yeah. Which was his other insight, which was, you know, it's the message that matters. And this is, you know, Marshall McLuhan, which is the media is a message which is from that period. And he absolutely understood this. And so. And it gets him out of trouble again and again. So when he screws up another big attack and quite possibly steals $4 million, which is in the middle of the book, he gets away with it because the people who run the organization still. The pflp actually. Although to go full Monty Python, it's actually the PFLP xo, which is to be distinguished from the DFLP or the pflp. Thank you. Remember that the. So the head of the pflp.

[Gordon Carrera]

Thank you.

[Jason Burke]

Doesn't want to shoot him, execute him as a traitor or whatever, even though he has just shot one of the PFLP senior functionaries. Because he's a hero. He's been. He's got this media aura, and he's actually turned up. Carlos turns up for this almost trial in the camp in Yemen where the PFLP are based, and he turns up with this thick wadge of press cuttings. And the leader of the organization, Wadi Haddad, obviously makes a calculation that, you know, even if the guy is an idiot and really annoying and can't do his job, the press cuttings are worth much more than a successful terrorist attack. And so he doesn't shoot him and gives him another commission, actually. And so he. And later he. He's in. He. He has all the. He leaves the PFLPXO when it breaks up. Muddy. Her dad is killed by Mossad at that Point it all breaks up and he goes off on his own as a kind of freelancer. And he still claims to be this revolutionary warrior. And he gives an interview saying how he's though he loves. He's a man who likes fine sheets and cigars and Tchaikovsky and luxury hotels, but his soul is dedicated to the revolution. And he's very careful about saying that, which is total rubbish. His soul is dedicated to it entirely himself. But he manages to convince the Libyans, the Romanians under Ceausescu, then Libyans, it's Gaddafi already, the Syrians under Hafez Al Sa', Ad, that he can do their work for them. The Stasi to an extent, the East Europeans, Czech, stb, virtually everybody. He convinces them all. And they're all partly convinced by his, you know, stick and partly by this, the press cuttings that they are actually reading, that they get brought in from the west, which are saying that, you know, he seek him here, seek him there. He can't find him anywhere. It's Carlos Jackal. He's the man who's behind absolutely every attack anywhere in the world. And the other thing that they are worried about, and this is why they give him a safe haven in Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe in the late part of the 70s and early 80s, is they think if they kick him out or they imprison him or they take his guns away or anything, he can turn this vast network against him, against them. Sorry, against those regimes. And there is no vast network. I mean, it's amazing.

[Gordon Carrera]

It's a brilliant bit of myth making, isn't it?

[Jason Burke]

Yeah. You've got these starsy reports saying. Secret German intelligence report saying, you know, very worried about this network with, you know, they have hundreds of operatives around the world and all this. They had like five.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[Jason Burke]

I mean, there were like 10 of. A bit more. They're 10 to 12 of them, like, serious core and it works. And. And that is a spiv, basically. I mean, and. And. But he's been, you know, they've been. There's a very good film that people may have seen, Olivier Sayes film, which is great. It's brilliant film. I mean, it's really good fun to get those detail. And a lot of it is really spot on, but it does glamorize. Yeah. I mean, they have this young, handsome actor and I mean, there's a point where he's. He wants liposuction because he's feeling he's getting a bit heavy, rather chest, actually, in the. In the Tockins, which. Not in the film. I mean, he's that kind of guy. I mean, he's really unattractive.

[Gordon Carrera]

And it's one thing I like about that, because you, you. You pick apart the glamour, you know, you're careful about. About understanding it, you know, and the way it's used. And if you like, weaponized by these people, which is a difficult, you know, because it's easy when you're writing it to go. Let's play into the stereotypes of these kind of mythical figures.

[Jason Burke]

So there's another one this is going off beat because we didn't talk about him, which is Mohammed Budia, who's actually on the back. I can't turn it around. You won't see him. But that's. That's the. In, that's the. He was a really interesting character, which I'll just talk very briefly, but he was killed by Mossad in Paris in 73. And he has always been portrayed in almost all the literature as literature, a womanizer and a terrorist. Now, he was both, depending on your definition of terrorists, but we'll save that for another discussion. But he was a master logistician of terrorist attacks, and he was an invisible womanizer. And quite often the two combined. So he'd be sending his girlfriends, several, sometimes several girlfriends on one, like on a bombing trip or whatever, he convinced them to carry the explosives and all the rest of that, you know. So he. And this has been the center. But actually he wasn't just that. And I dug into a lot of the French sources on him, the Algerian sources, and he was director of the first. Well, he grew up in the Casbah in Algiers. He did a young actors course in prison, having been in prison for petty crime by the French authorities. And they were doing kind of a rehabilitation thing, had a lot of talent, found that he was better as a writer, playwright, than a actor. Used it for his revolutionary purposes, but also translated Moliere into Arabic from French while in Marseille prison. Now, that does not get into the standard account of Muhammad Budia, now should it? You can argue that he's a terrorist. He deserves what he gets. Why do we want to know that he is also a talented translator and playwright, a man of great culture. Well, I think that's important, and I think it tells us a lot about who these people were. He was also very deeply engaged in the Algerian War of Independence and so on and so forth. So I put all that in because. Exactly, you know, you're treading this very fine line between wanting to. You don't want to glamorize them because, well, as I say, what I did is inflicted huge suffering and is genuinely appalling. On the other hand, you do need to understand who they were.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[Jason Burke]

In the round.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. And actually it's interesting you said about the. Quite a few of them are theatrical and they've got kind of acting backgrounds. Is that kind of.

[Jason Burke]

Yeah, it comes up again and again. There's this sort of dram thing. I mean, I don't, you know, they weren't doing the Importance of Being Earnest in the church hall, but I mean, they, they were doing.

[Gordon Carrera]

They're people who are kind of projecting, you know, they're projecting images of themselves.

[Jason Burke]

The line terrorism is theater comes from 1972 and a really brilliant analyst called Brian Jenkins, American analyst and also a lot of the earlier stuff which we've been talking about, you said it was kind of performative. I mean, it comes out of the 60s and that business of that strategy of disruptive public theater. Yeah, theater, yeah. So it's, you know, there's a description of some of the bombs the American groups were planting as exploding press releases and it's that sense of, you know, trying to use public violence in the terrorism or just public performance to communicate a message, but also just to disrupt. And that's quite strong.

[Mia Sorrenti]

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a [e-mail] membership and to join us at future live events, just head over to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

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[Jason Burke]

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