Saturday Stories
July 14, 2018
On September 5, 1972 in Munich, Germany during the Summer Olympic Games, eleven athletes from Israel were murdered by the Palestinian group Black September. The leader was said to be the terrorist Carlos The Jackal.
It was a chilling eye-opener to read "To The Ends of The Earth: The Hunt For The Jackal" by the award-winning investigative journalist David Yallop. It took him ten years, from 1983 to 1993, to finish the book. One of his contacts from the French intelligence community told him to contact a man in Paris, who told him to contact a man in Milan, who told him to contact a man in Algiers, who told him to contact a man in Beirut – who took him to Carlos.
"To place my story in your hands is not much," said Carlos as they finally came face to face on May 1975 in Lebanon. "You are placing your life in mine."
For a man whose exploits and notoriety are legendary, I find it almost appropriate that I first knew about him from two fiction novels I've read when I was a teenager.
I first heard of Carlos The Jackal in "The Bourne Ultimatum" by Robert Ludlum. Carlos was also in "The Bourne Identity," the first story, but I read the sequel first.
In another classic thriller, Frederick Forsyth's "The Day of The Jackal," there is another assassin named Jackal, whose target was French President Charles de Gaulle. But this Jackal was an Englishman.
The real Carlos The Jackal is from Venezuela, born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez on October 12, 1949 in Caracas. This was Ludlum's Jackal – and of course, he wasn't killed by Jason Bourne.
And the havoc wrought by Carlos were also real. Fighting for Palestine, his attacks against Israel was relentless. Carlos was was the mastermind of the mass shooting at the Lod Airport near Tel Aviv on May 30, 1972.
Yet some of his actions had nothing to do with the Palestine cause, like when he abducted and held hostage five OPEC ministers in Vienna on December 1975.
He has assassinated, to name just a few, the dictator Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua on September 1980, and the vice consul of Yugoslavia on March 1974, and the military attache of Uruguay on December of the same year.
He was behind the foiled assassination attempts against United States President Ronald Reagan and Israeli Ambassador Shlomo Argov. He has been linked with the Libyan Prime Minister Moammar Gadhafi, the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran.
On June 27, 1976, Air France Flight 139 was hijacked by four men from the Palestinian group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the German group Revolutionäre Zellen. The flight from Tel Aviv, Israel to Paris, France carried 248 passengers, almost all of them Jewish – and all held hostage.
The plane refueled at Libya under the protection of Gadhafi who was anti-Israel.
The next day, June 28, at 3:15 p.m., the terrorists landed the plane at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, under the protection of President Idi Amin who was also anti-Israel.
Then on July 4, the spectacular rescue mission by the Israel Defense Forces galvanized the entire globe.
The rescuers were all alive except one, the unit commander Lieutenant Coronel Jonathan Netanyahu.
The terrorists were all dead except one – the mastermind Carlos The Jackal.
Those are the stories, and Yallop shows the truth behind the stories
Here is where I found one of the most powerful passages in the thousands of books I've read, and one to which I fully agree:
"My commitment in this issue is to the ordinary Palestinian and the ordinary Israeli," says Yallop. "Both deserve peace. Israel is the country of Jews; it is also the homeland of the Palestinians. That the talent and genius of both races have not been harnessed for mutual benefit for these past one hundred years will stand for eternity as an example of mankind's stupidity."
Photo of Edgar RamÃrez in a scene from the TV series "Carlos" courtesy of TheVoid99.blogspot.com
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