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[SPEAKER_03]: Welcome to another edition of the Spy Talk podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: Our special guest this week is Joe B. Warick, a veteran national security reporter at the Washington Post who has authored and exciting new book on the rise and fall of the world's first super terrorist Carlos DeJackel.
[SPEAKER_03]: But first, our important new developments in our corner of the intelligence world, and I first like to talk a little bit about an extraordinary piece that Julia Curley, our guest on last week's podcast, wrote at the Atlantic Magazine.
[SPEAKER_03]: The loyal listeners will remember that Curley was a top intelligence analyst at the CIA.
[SPEAKER_03]: She was so highly regarded that she was a White House briefer on all manner of subjects from the Middle East to Ukraine to terrorism, vice president Mike Pence and the First Trump administration selected her to be his personal briefer.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's how highly she was regarded.
[SPEAKER_03]: Laura Loomer out of her as trans and that began the downfall of her career and she was quickly ushered out of the farm really forced out of the intelligence community.
[SPEAKER_04]: We know how Laura Loomer got on to her
[SPEAKER_04]: transness.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, we don't, but, you know, she has sources in the maga sections of the Trump administration, and she hears things, and it wasn't really a secret that Julia was trans.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was kind of known but unremark upon and you know, and she was very good so, you know, people didn't make a big deal of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even Mike Pence didn't make a big deal.
[SPEAKER_03]: Once he liked, just Mike Pence, you know, the rock ramped Republican bastion of religious evangelism.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, he's just sort of shrugged and went along, you know, he'd like you,
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, you know, she was thankful for how how tolerant Pence was.
[SPEAKER_03]: But rumor forced it into the open.
[SPEAKER_03]: And of course, all the, and then she gets fired.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then she gets fired.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: What we talked about on the podcast with Julia last week was the disarray in the top ranks of the intelligence community over these repeated purges that we've talked about a lot over the past couple of years.
[SPEAKER_03]: starting with the O-D-N-I, not liking the intelligence boards conclusion on Trin the Agua saying it was not an invasion of the United States.
[SPEAKER_03]: So those people got canned and there are purchases at the CIA and we know about purchases at the FBI and the Justice Department shut down so
[SPEAKER_03]: And in all those places, it's tracking up foreign interference in our, in our electons to solve.
[SPEAKER_04]: But in this case, do we think Radcliffe fired her or was aware of her being fired?
[SPEAKER_04]: And the reason she was being fired?
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think so, I think it was, well, he became aware, of course, because Laura Luma made a big stick about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: He went along.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the hallmark of this administration and the Republican Trump era that people are scared to
[SPEAKER_03]: rebuffed the president and his nag allies it's like they they they value their careers over their integrity I might say and and for and Julie also talk about the pressure on people who are maybe GS 12 13
[SPEAKER_03]: They're getting up into the executive branch.
[SPEAKER_03]: They have 10, 12 years in.
[SPEAKER_03]: They have mortgages.
[SPEAKER_03]: They have kids in college and so on.
[SPEAKER_03]: The pressure on them is really excruciating because they don't want to go along with this bending of intelligence and yet it's not easy for them to quit.
[SPEAKER_03]: So what else is it on our radar, the White House ballroom?
[SPEAKER_03]: Mike, we're waiting for your book on the ballroom.
[SPEAKER_03]: The papers.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, right.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so I was now a national security.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, it's always been a, well, according to the Trump folks, it's always been a national security.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's how they justified this.
[SPEAKER_04]: But Karen has had the advantage of actually reading the court filings for the Supreme Court.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and not just walk us through.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, what I really, I mean, that's, you know, so what's going on right now, and then we can talk about what's been, but you know, the Trump administration filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court, asking it to, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: Let them go on with what they're doing and remember what they're doing is this and like you can correct me if I'm wrong But isn't like a 90,000 square foot above ground ball ground is going to be on top of this five story bunker and what's happened with this litigation which is what the Trump administration wants is while the court While the cases preceding they want to be able to keep going on with the project
[SPEAKER_01]: And the interesting part here is it's always been about the ballroom, the ballroom, the ballroom, and I know you said there've been security issues raised.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's always a big, beautiful ballroom, made in one tense in the backyard.
[SPEAKER_01]: But now what they've decided to do is to argue this case and the reason they need to go on to go forward on security grounds.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they've produced an immense amount of documents that are
[SPEAKER_01]: from written by tough officials that have said, look, this is a national security issue.
[SPEAKER_01]: We need to address it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's fascinating.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Jay Clayton, John Radcliffe, Cache Patel, Markway Mullin, together wrote the letters and it's just sort of interesting that now they've decided that this is the way to our group because it's so transparent that they figure that's what's going to happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what's really got me
[SPEAKER_01]: was that the first letter in this big batch is from Secretary of State, Martin, and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so here he is, he's going to make this great claim on behalf of national security, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Which might you've been writing about in your pieces, you know, the national security consequences of this and what this can mean.
[SPEAKER_01]: And
[SPEAKER_01]: But instead what he does is start and talk about how humiliating it is when because he goes to foreign countries and he visits with dignitaries and his peers abroad and it's beautiful and it's it's just gorgeously done and it shows the dignity.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he says we just have to be able to treat people who come to our country that way and that just to me sort of just not trying to hide that yes we're going to say this on national security, but let's just lead with talking about the need for wealth and beauty that's the phrase wealth and beauty.
[SPEAKER_04]: not exactly a national security argument.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: The particular issue that I focused on from the start was, if there were this presidential emergency operation center, which was the bunker underneath the east wing, where white-outs officials are supposed to assemble in case of an attack on the White House, a nuclear accident, something that would require them to be protected.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's still not clear to me where, I mean, since he's torn up the East Wing does the presidential emergency operation center still exist at the moment, or, I mean, somewhere.
[SPEAKER_04]: Who are like, where should they go?
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe it's half a day Adams, you know, across the street.
[SPEAKER_01]: And and have they created a plan to account for the fact that they may have lost this secure space should any any threat occur.
[SPEAKER_04]: I know it's really very, um, personally, they're basing this all on national security, you know, yet they've eliminated the one national security safe space for White House officials while all this is going on.
[SPEAKER_03]: Karen, do you think it's actually possible that the Supreme Court would stop the construction of this edifice, you know, there were so many hours a day, they're working over night.
[SPEAKER_03]: Meanwhile,
[SPEAKER_03]: an important part of the city because of construction projects where they work eight hours a day they, you know, pack it up at 5 p.m. there's a terrific scenario of the key bridge in Georgetown.
[SPEAKER_03]: I encountered yesterday.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, this was the Supreme Court really the stopage was in there.
[SPEAKER_04]: Then what would happen when they tear down the existing structure?
[SPEAKER_04]: But I mean, the judge we own stopped it, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, he heard the case and it stopped.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's no, so it's halted, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's halted on the grounds that this is a congressional prerogative, this is not something that executive authority can do without congressional authority.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the, you know, legal reasoning behind what's the
[SPEAKER_01]: what they're claiming.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, yeah, but the question is, will the Supreme Court go along with this emergency application and approve it and say, yes, they can still do this while the litigation is pending?
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, that's why they're bringing in the national and don't ask me to guess what the Supreme Court is going to do because I want to always think that it's going to go towards what's actually makes sense legally in terms of balance of
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, that's a cliff area.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ball.
[SPEAKER_03]: Jesus.
[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, anyway, uh, before we get on, just go to work.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to bring up one more thing, which is very aggressive Russian moves uh, on its perimeter and malgola and the Baltics.
[SPEAKER_03]: NATO launched a surprise, very aggressive war planes exercise along Russia's borders last week.
[SPEAKER_03]: These things are usually announced well in advance, so nobody mistakes it as a real attack.
[SPEAKER_03]: The Russians announced it in advance, we NATO announces it in advance, but this one, they've put lots of war planes in the air along Russia's frontier.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it makes me think that NATO intelligence, if not CIA, suspects that the Russian moves toward the Baltics and in the southeast, are real that Putin may actually try to invade might launch a ground invasion of the Baltics, but for now we're seeing this hybrid war
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, the New York Times had a fascinating piece of the day about a training camp.
[SPEAKER_04]: The Russians had set up in Serbia, basically, to disrupt the upcoming elections in Moldova.
[SPEAKER_04]: And aside from, like, actually kinetic training with assault rifles, there was also, you know, a whole campaign of bribery, of cyber attacks, everything to displeasure.
[SPEAKER_04]: election rigging to ensure that a pro-Russian candidate prevails in the and the mulled elections.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, it's just one more sign of Putin's aggressiveness.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and yeah, maybe, but I mean, yeah, but the larger picture here is
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm things in the Russia Ukraine were seemed to be getting worse and escalating and the Russians are firing missiles, ballistic missiles every night on Kiev killing innocent civilians, the Ukrainians are stepping up their game for us.
[SPEAKER_04]: Russia, I mean, no sign of any peace talks at all and it does raise the question how desperate we'll put in get and how escalatory, you know, might he feel if he doesn't think things are working out and you do have the nuclear, you know,
[SPEAKER_04]: tactical nuclear threat that has not exactly gone away, and, you know, up against the wall, I think I sense, and I've talked to a few people about this, that there is some increasing concern that this may be where this is heading.
[SPEAKER_01]: It also makes you wonder, can you, is it possible to have a war now that does not become an endless war of forever war?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's a war.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yes, and well, but the question is, you know, we don't seem to know as a global entity how to end wars.
[SPEAKER_04]: We keep, you know, whether it's, we got an endless war, we're the only one right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, that's what that's what I'm saying, I mean, that's a stalemate.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, at best, and a lot of people, including myself think Iran has the upper hand here and can be more patient than Trump can, not that we have so many greater resources to weigh out the Iranians, but Trump's volatile personality may come into play here where he gets embarrassed.
[SPEAKER_04]: to a degree that he might take really extreme actions toward the Iranians and that really well I think worse after the midterms obviously we'll see how they turn out but you know either way a Trump may feel we'll have a free hand after the midterms to do what he had
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, threatened to do months ago, which is to bomb them back into the Stone Age.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, very worrisome.
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, on that high note, we're going to move on to Adobe work.
[SPEAKER_03]: Joby Warq has been a national security correspondent for the Washington Post for about 30 years now.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's written extensively on topics ranging from the Middle East conflict and terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's the author of three previous works of narrative nonfiction, including triple agent.
[SPEAKER_03]: The story of the 2009 al-Qaeda suicide bombing in coast Afghanistan, which left seven CIA officers dead.
[SPEAKER_03]: and he was a winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Black Flags, the rise of ISIS.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we want to bring him on and we will do so right after this metge.
[SPEAKER_03]: You'll be work, welcome to Spy Talk, old friend.
[SPEAKER_03]: Your book has gotten numerous and praiseful reviews right out of the gate, including here at Spy Talk.
[SPEAKER_03]: Why do you think we're so fascinated by Carlos, who you called a world's first super terrorist, all these decades later, what's that about?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, if you're ever going to be a super terrorist, Jeff, and I don't recommend it, but one thing you need is a sexy nickname.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Carlos didn't set out to get his, but he ended up being called Carlos the Jackal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with the name like that, you know, you're, you're, you're made for the big screen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in, he ended up kind of weirdly becoming the template for all these spy shows, you know, Robert Ludlum's novels, born identity, you know, the bad guy is essentially the Carlos character.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's, you know, not because any great skill or, you know, just, you know, levelant, you know, aspects about the man, but he just had a cool nickname and he lived like a rock star.
[SPEAKER_00]: We think about him.
[SPEAKER_00]: We certainly did back then.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he still is kind of an enigma and people love to talk about him.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, people don't glorify in any way Osama bin Laden doesn't have the same charisma.
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, it's telling a little bit of the story about how we earn that nickname or got that nickname.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's from a British tabloid, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Carlos, if we could start a little further back, he wasn't Palestinian, wasn't Middle Eastern.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a Marxist kid from Venezuela, who ends up almost accidentally being kind of part of the, sort of the Palestinian resistance movement in the early 70s, gets, you know, caught up literally in civil war.
[SPEAKER_00]: gets, you know, kind of stands out a little bit to the Palestinian leadership because he was not of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had, he was very western looking, kind of a charismatic handsome kid, spoke multiple languages, could travel anywhere because you had, you know, international passport.
[SPEAKER_00]: could go to Britain or go, you know, wherever they want to send them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he has a becoming a kind of a sleeper agent for the, for the, for the, for the group called the popular front for the liberation of Palestine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, jumping ahead a couple of years in his, in his criminal career,
[SPEAKER_00]: He ends up being chased by French police, there's a shootout, he kills a couple of French police officers, there's this international man hunt for the guy, he has safe houses in London, so the British press are all over this and their calming is safe houses and talking to his friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in one of his safe houses, basically one of his girlfriend's houses where he kept his stuff,
[SPEAKER_00]: A journalist from the Guardian happened to notice the book, The Jackal, the Day of the Jackal, by Fred Forsyth, sitting on the bookshelf.
[SPEAKER_00]: And figured, well, I'm sure Carlos Redd this book.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounds like him.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, that little tidbit gets introduced in a news article.
[SPEAKER_00]: founded Carlos' house, day of the jackal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the jackal just magically becomes attached to his name.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it goes from being a kid named Ilych to someone named Carlos.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then Carlos, the jackal, he's got a great nickname.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's set for life, and that's kind of how he became who he was.
[SPEAKER_04]: One of the first, well, congrats on the book, it is a fabulous read, and I learned a lot.
[SPEAKER_04]: One thing that struck me, one of the many things that struck me is that Carlos, the spent time at LaMumba University in Moscow, where a lot of Palestinian radicals were her educated and recruited.
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, I think you say that,
[SPEAKER_04]: This guy, Wally Haddad, if I was incorrectly was actually an agent of Russian intelligence.
[SPEAKER_04]: Tell us a little bit about the role that the KGB and Moscow then played in promoting and helping to finance and, you know, Palestinian terrorism during this period in the 70s and 80s.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's this interesting moment in young Carlos' life that he ends up going to college in Moscow, at this university, which, as you mentioned, is kind of like a, it's the place where the Soviets would bring people from the developing world, so it was, we're Palestinian's there and a lot of Africans, and Carlos gets thrown into this mix too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most, it wasn't his idea as his dad's, his dad being this kind of super Marxist thought his son should have an education in the Soviet Union.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it goes there, ends up being kicked out as it turns out.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a bad student.
[SPEAKER_00]: He spent all his time partying and womanizing.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a great scene in the book where the dorm minders come into his room to check out a report of a party.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they find all these empty liquor bottles and a prostitute stumbles out of the closet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is kind of the life that John Carlos was leading.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the faculty ended up going to college there,
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of creates his attachment with Soviet Union that follows him for the rest of his life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And whether or not he was working for the Soviets, everybody assumed that he was.
[SPEAKER_00]: It turns out that his Palestinian bosses were agents for the Soviet Union.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of the Palestinian groups had connections with Moscow.
[SPEAKER_00]: They might get received some funding or some arms.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this one organization, popular front for the liberation of Palestine, was a Marxist Palestinian group.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the Soviets adopted them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their leader, one of their leaders at Guide Amwadi Haddad, he was a founder of this group, was a committed Marxist and became a named agent for the Soviet Union.
[SPEAKER_00]: So by extension, Carlos and his early career was working
[SPEAKER_00]: indirectly for the Soviets, and it's interesting that's period the CIA was completely convinced or became convinced by the 80s that the Soviets are running terrorist groups all over the world and it turned out often not to be the case.
[SPEAKER_00]: In this case, they were, they're actually were sponsoring this one organization in a big way.
[SPEAKER_04]: And what was the interest of the KGB and the Soviet leadership at the time in promoting what was, you know,
[SPEAKER_04]: pretty shocking terrorism, high airplane, hijackings, shootings, killings.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, what, explain a little what they found.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I'm trying to say that for them, they're going to be doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you know, I forget what one of the KGB leaders would say this later on, but they really came to believe when was with some supporting evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: The terrorism was a great way to fight up a clandestine war that it's much cheaper relative to going to battle and sending out troops and armies to sort of fight this proxy war in which you carry out attacks to sort of undermine your opponents to weaken their system to create havoc and chaos.
[SPEAKER_00]: and also to sort of promote the interest of your allies around the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the time, many of the Arab governments were closely allied to the Soviet Union, many of the Palestinian groups saw some, saw an opportunity there working with the Soviets.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just in this grand chess game that existed in those years, the Cold War.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was one more card for the Soviets to play.
[SPEAKER_00]: One more arena for them to compete against the United States in particular in the West.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they liked it until the terrorists went too far.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you could see like with the first few chapters of the books,
[SPEAKER_00]: the Soviet set limits, you know, we're okay with you doing these hijackings, you know, other things, but just don't be too crazy about it and don't let us be blamed.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were always concerned that somehow they would be identified as sponsors and they didn't want that they wanted to do it quietly as they are.
[SPEAKER_04]: But just last, last beat on this, you quote,
[SPEAKER_04]: from Scarce Bondinson, which and drop off, who had been head of the KDB, and then was for a time actually Soviet leader, was directly involved in communicating with the Hadov, the PFOP.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, one remarkable artifact, and I can't claim to discover it myself, but there were some folks who digging deeply into these Soviet archives that came out right after the end of the Cold War.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there is actually correspondence, as you say, between and drop off and other members of the Soviet leadership, including Brezhnev himself, bragging about these wonderful Palestinian assets that the Soviet Union had managed to recruit
[SPEAKER_00]: And how they had this personal relationship and they were able to sign tasks to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it wasn't just kind of giving them arms and money, but you could actually tell what he had thought to kidnap a CIA officer in Lebanon, and he would accept the assign.
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you, of course, Michael focused on Russia, and of course, I'm going to focus on Jihadi terrorism, of course, right, goes without saying.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I want to talk a little bit about, you know, you call him a criminal narcissist, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the tagline.
[SPEAKER_01]: But actually, your portraying him is much more than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because what you're really laying out is the template for what becomes the terrorism that we know from, you know, 2000 on and before 2000 on, actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wanted you to talk a little bit about what happened with Carlos, who, by the way, in his name, Iliq was named for, as you point out in the book, Lenin, as were his two brothers, which I think tells you a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, but for his name.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just sort of, what is the template that was created because it is different and it does give a kind of momentum to a novel kind of global interaction in terms of proxiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't want to say too much.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want you to sort of talk about what that template was in terms of what we then came to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and there were two, I think, that I identify.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is this idea of terrorism being an international movement in modern sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that didn't exist until the late 60s and early 70s.
[SPEAKER_00]: You think of terrorist groups existed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Terrorists attacks happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were typically an insurgent group, some kind of resistance organization, going after their enemy if it's Israel or whoever else
[SPEAKER_00]: The groups of this time, this is of the organizations that Carlos was connected to, where the first to break out and say, we're going to declare war on the world at large.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to cross international borders to hijack planes and countries that have no dog and the fight that we're involved in.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to do it because it's going to command the attention of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to make people care about our issues, whether they even know who we are or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: The leaders of the day and the Palestinian leaders I'm speaking of would say, we can't get the world to care about us.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we could kill Israelis, nobody cares.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you hijack a plane, it's more effective than killing 100 soldiers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they did that again and again and again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And have these grand,
[SPEAKER_00]: dramatic made for TV pieces where they would hijack multiple planes at once and bring them all together to a single airfield in the past year's hostage.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, where do we hear about that later in our history, these multiple hijackings?
[SPEAKER_00]: But the other thing that comes through in Carlos' career and his little more particular to him is he became, you know, the model for the state sponsored
[SPEAKER_00]: The state actor didn't want to be associated with the bad things that he really wanted to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Mohmakadafi could assign Carlos to hijack a plane or blow up something or assassinate a leader, and wouldn't have his fingerprints on it, because Carlos was not affiliated.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was kind of a terrorist free agent, and that becomes an important and consistent model for
[SPEAKER_00]: We see jahadi terrorism fading a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know it went into it's up and down, but there's groups themselves are in disarray at most parts of the world, but this idea of Russia or Iran hiring some criminal to blow up a synagogue or to assassinate someone.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's having a comeback.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're seeing many, many incidents of that just in the last years since 22 and 23, it's really on the uprising.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that as a follow up question to that, it also, you know, shed some light on the absence of ideology or the way in which ideology becomes a secondary thing to so can you just talk a little bit about how that does that change over time is it I mean it seems to be in a way true for Carlos for his whole career that that this idea a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, there's some ideological moments when he goes from Marxism to, you know, the Palestinian cause.
[SPEAKER_01]: But how did you see the role of ideology playing out in this narrative that you gave us?
[SPEAKER_00]: Carlos was good at mowing, mowing the rhetoric.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was good at it back in the day, and he could say all the right things about the universal struggle, you know, you know, you know, the brother of the man and rights of the workers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it could say all the right things.
[SPEAKER_00]: To be honest, it was all kind of funtable for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was mortced in kind of his promoting his own brand, projecting himself as his international revolutionary hero in a very romantic way.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he could switch ideologies and sometimes do something had no ideological basis at all, but it's purely geopolitical.
[SPEAKER_00]: And could do it because it suited him, because he needed pay in clients.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was just remarkable how clearly and like he became throughout his career were just the ideology just didn't matter at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one thing that's quite different about that time from what came later is religious fervor, zealotry, religious motivation for terrorism was not present at all, not with him, not with the people that he associated with in the early days, they weren't really religious.
[SPEAKER_00]: and damaging, hurting their enemy, and more importantly, kind of creating attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of you to Hadoid once said that we have to be like a basilis that gets under the skin, the drives people mad.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have to be concerned about us in change policy because of all the devastation and all the problems we're creating for everyone.
[SPEAKER_03]: And yet, he was a naturally impulsive personality.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, Wadi Hadoid didn't virtually kick him out of the movement.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right, and eventually he becomes such a showboat.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in tent on making himself the center of attention, they're going out, you know, this marvelous, I want to glorify it, but just in terms of his ambition, this grand attack on OPEC in 1975, and we can talk about that if you want.
[SPEAKER_00]: But basically, takes over a noPEC conference, walks in, and then announces to everyone, I'm Carlos.
[SPEAKER_00]: You probably know of me and that's, you know, it so becomes his show and the Palestinian didn't take very well to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after a while, they said, you know, you're just too much for us, you know, thanks to your time and, you know, see you later.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he gets kicked out of the organization, but most of just because he was more intent on his own image than helping any particular cause.
[SPEAKER_04]: So how did he go from there to relationships with Kadafi, with Saddam, the other sort of state sponsors that had?
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure, Jessica.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so Jessica becomes wonder.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so early on, he gets to know some of these people sort of indirectly, but gets to know some of their
[SPEAKER_00]: staff and their, you know, their operatives, while he's still with the Palestinians.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when he doesn't have, you know, the Palestinian support system anymore, when he doesn't get money from them, he's not getting weapons in his passport and all the other things that a terrorist needs.
[SPEAKER_00]: When that spikket dries up, he's got to find new allies.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we actually went out actively courting.
[SPEAKER_00]: these are these leaders and their intelligence agencies.
[SPEAKER_00]: He set up shop in Eastern Europe because the Eastern Europeans were happy to have him as a part-time resident living large hotels and villas and eating nice dinners and drinking a lot of alcohol and just having a grand old time.
[SPEAKER_00]: But while he was living in those places, he was cultivating.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's networks.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was traveling every month to
[SPEAKER_00]: to trippling or he was off to Damascus and he was having dinners and basically impressing the security group's security agency is that he was somebody who could help them, that he was this daring and dashing international figure who they should sponsor and they did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Can I ask about the United States?
[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't really attack the United States, or the United States interests for being United States interests, whereas terrorists around the world that are being hired during his period of time, the United States is part of the targets that are discussed in attack.
[SPEAKER_01]: So one thing I wasn't clear about in the book, and I'm just sort of curious here, take on it as you were researching, did he go out of his way, not to,
[SPEAKER_01]: mess with the United States?
[SPEAKER_01]: Did he, what was the reason?
[SPEAKER_01]: What, why does that happen?
[SPEAKER_01]: It looks kind of surprising.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is surprising, because he has this professed hatred, because it's almost like a knee jerk thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to say, I hate the imperialist west, particularly the United States.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was horrible bastards.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, there's this,
[SPEAKER_00]: interesting, you know, object that comes up again and again, and that's a bottle of Coca-Cola, which he saw as a symbol of the capitalist west, and you shouldn't drink Coke, but he did anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was just kind of kind of hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip, hip
[SPEAKER_00]: Romanian sponsor to tack on Radio Free Europe and Munich in 1981, and with that, what's remarkable about it to me is to this day he refuses to acknowledge it, he had anything to do with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, I wasn't anywhere around that, maybe some people that I know did it, it's very, very clear from archival evidence, you know, from basically the Hungarians and others spying on him and listening to his conversations.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he wouldn't claim it, and the reason seems to be he didn't want to piss off the CIA.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't want them coming after him, too, in addition to the French, and everybody else who was looking for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But eventually, as you see in the book, the Americans do become interested, and they become very much part of the operation to seize it in the end.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to talk about what we might call the climactic moment comes regarding the CIA in
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're back.
[SPEAKER_03]: So one of the most fascinating chapters on the book for me is you're a description of Cofer Black, the CIA station chief in Cartoon.
[SPEAKER_03]: I wanted to go there because it was a rough place and you describe it as the Super Bowl of terrorists.
[SPEAKER_03]: It comes off to me, it's sort of the bar scene in Star Wars, with the world's worst bad guys hanging out in the city.
[SPEAKER_03]: And Cover Black has his hands full with them.
[SPEAKER_03]: They are following CIA officers.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's instructed his CIA officers to be ready for an assassination attempt, even in the shower.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was trying to picture how that would be a gun ulcer in the shower.
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, Carlos had sort of dropped off the radar at that point.
[SPEAKER_03]: He wasn't on cover black's mind in Cartoon, but suddenly he pops up.
[SPEAKER_03]: He gets a cable from headquarters saying, Carlos is in Cartoon.
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell us what happens next.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this is wild.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love this part of the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And
[SPEAKER_00]: you guys all appreciate the the hard work that goes into it's kind of debriefing agency people who are involved who know about the story but don't want to be credited as such.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of you know wonderful conversations that I have that I could not put note in the book itself but I have this wonderful wonderful collection of scenes about what happened in cartoon in the early 90s.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Kofor Black, you know, your listeners will know the name.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he was a guy that ran counterterrorism for that CIA at the time of 911. famously said to George W. Bush that he was going to, you know, the flyers are being walking across their eyeballs, you know, he's very tough guy and this was, it had multiple assignments in Africa.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this was the time when you really got
[SPEAKER_00]: The biggest sign meant to go after terrorists in a really profound way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cartoon being, as you rightly described, kind of the mecca of the Super Bowl in terms of terrorist groups, everybody was there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ben Laden was there before anybody really to hurt him at his operation.
[SPEAKER_00]: There he had a training camp at Warehouses.
[SPEAKER_00]: But also Hezbollah had people there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hamas came Abunadal, which is a big name from the 90s, probably the most brutal
[SPEAKER_00]: was in and out, they even had meetings with it, so the various groups could get together and I guess maybe drink shots and share gossip or who knows what they did.
[SPEAKER_00]: But into this environment, Carlos suddenly drops and he shows up there because he's kind of running out of safe houses.
[SPEAKER_00]: The countries that used to harbor him, that used to give him villas, don't want him anymore, so he ends up
[SPEAKER_00]: almost by default in cartoons.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a place where we can try to regroup brings this beautiful new wife with them, he's living large as he always does because it's Carlos.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the CIA gets his cable one day that in addition to all the other things you're doing, in addition to trying to take pictures of a son of a laden and getting chased by his people, we want you to find Carlos the jackal.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that becomes cover blacks assignment as the station chief at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: in 1993.
[SPEAKER_00]: Find them.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know what he looks like because we haven't seen a real picture of them in years, but you and your boys need to track this guy down and capture him at the camp.
[SPEAKER_00]: And tell the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: How did he do it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Alrighty.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we won't give away everything, but it is a great story.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I do book.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the end of getting
[SPEAKER_00]: A intent about a bodyguard, somebody who Carlos has had a conversation with one of his former aids, and wants to become the cartoon to help with security.
[SPEAKER_00]: So once that tip comes in, the agency realizes that they've got a recognizable individual with a known face who's come into cartoon.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's going to be associated with Carlos once he gets there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is their first big break.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you see a period in the book where they're raising around, trying to find this guy, they can't find it for a while, finding they do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's this wonderful moment where some CIA operatives are outside a hospital in Cartoon and they have a tip that Carlos may be there because they've seen a card has license plate that sort of matches with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And out of this hospital comes
[SPEAKER_00]: a folder that probably contains x-ray photographs because we find out later on he's got a medical problem that he's trying to get addressed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they just start taking pictures and just are marveling at the fact that here at last, the most famous terrorist in the world is not only right here in cartoon, but he's right in front of us and we're taking pictures of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the picture taking continued actually much longer than you expect, because you'd think, well, we got our target list go after, but the agency decided to go slowly gather information, see what he's up to, try to figure out if he's got making connections, if he's making plans.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they surveilled him for months as it turned out.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, getting a running an apartment next to his, so they could kind of spy on him from right next door going out dancing on nights when he went to nightclub seats, he's agency guys with the one lone woman in the station would go out and they would literally dancing cheek to cheek with Carlos Jackel and a nightclub.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was the level of surveillance that they had just watching him day to day and waiting for the moment when they would spring a trap.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why in Fish and Atrium?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, this was, and this is, Coferback Black's big surprise was discovering after all that work.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had done all that collection and all those photographs that were so clear that you could see the toothpick in Carlos the Jackals' jaw.
[SPEAKER_00]: that they, it turns out the justice department had never gotten around to inditing the guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no paperwork, nothing that, you know, no criminal charges, nothing that would allow them legally to capture him and extradite them to the United States, the kind of thing that wouldn't have been much of a problem later on in the Al Qaeda era, but back then, there was a big legal, you know, red line, you can't, you can't, you know, extradite
[SPEAKER_00]: But there was an allied country that had a lot of paperwork and that was the French because they hit killed French.
[SPEAKER_00]: People many times, he was probably, you know, villain number one, his first, the French was concerned.
[SPEAKER_00]: So France was brought in eagerly so.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the two of them set up jointly in operation to capture him with the understanding that once they got him, he was off to France for trial.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't come to the United States, but the French were able to do with them as they would.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: So let's move forward to your encounter with Carlos in prison.
[SPEAKER_00]: So 1994 is captured.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's been in prison now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so to a 232 years, it's been a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is not allowed to speak very much because the French obviously don't want him weaving his own stories about how, you know, things that happened, you know, they, they still very bitterly remember the, so the police officers that killed intelligence people that, you know, innocent civilians that were killed enough and a bombing at a shopping center, all these atrocities are associated with Carlos and France, so they don't want him being glorified.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he has been able to kind of present his side of things through serapticiously collected interviews, text message exchanges, on lawyer of his brought a cell phone into prison over several weeks and was able to ask questions for an Israeli journalist and get some answers.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he has a been completely muted all this time.
[SPEAKER_00]: But very rarely is anybody been allowed to sit down next to him and ask him questions.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when you do, he's been in prison for 32 years.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yep.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's 75 years old.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's an old crumbling man, a shadow we could say of his former self.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so he is not only that, but he's starting to fade and you can see it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then people that know him well, lawyers that have dealt with him, have seen a pretty rapid decline in the last
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, you know, moments of lucidity and he certainly did with me or remembered events and we talked about things, but he would repeat himself and he would often get off track and the big distraction during our conversation is was a woman because there was.
[SPEAKER_00]: half the time you could care less what I was asking he wanted to know what she thought and he wanted to know about her hair color and just was trying to charmer and sweet talker and so that's part of the challenge of dealing with with the real Carlos because just a little back for a second there's that moment on the opac attack where he was a woman go because she's pretty good
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that scene, and I don't mind falling at the basically, you know, we got all these cowering hostages, many of them, opaque oil ministers, but also an Austrian secretary who's there just scared of death and he's hyperventilating and she's really frightened and she's kind of making a scene.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Carlos walks over to her and whispers in her ear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't worry, sweetie, you're too beautiful to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we let's go, and that's kind of close to this time.
[SPEAKER_04]: Hence, the game's bond analogy that people put on him at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a real story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's kind of becomes part of the legend of Carlos.
[SPEAKER_00]: Any regret or remorse over anything?
[SPEAKER_00]: He had an important question for me to ask because I wanted to know, I mean, he's been in there in jail for this long.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does he look back at any of these deeds?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the caution, though, that was, hey, I regret that I did that or be, you know, just as a human being, you know, have some remorse over it.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the one thing I could get him to say he regretted was I should have killed a few more people and he said that very dramatically like and it was it was very kind of specific.
[SPEAKER_00]: He should have gotten those bastards in Cartoon that were following him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew the CIA were up after him, he knew that it's at the French, those idiots were there and he just should have gotten those guys down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was the one thing that he admitted to regretting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything else about his career of the sort of collateral damage
[SPEAKER_00]: were unintended victims of his attacks, he would not acknowledge any of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, like, everything we did was for a good cause.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody died.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, you know, I didn't intend to kill.
[SPEAKER_00]: I killed a lot of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's very open about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He claims they killed 83 people with his own hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Probably a wild exaggeration.
[SPEAKER_00]: He certainly killed enough, but not that many.
[SPEAKER_00]: None of that is an object of regret for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The one thing he regrets is he just wasn't quicker on the draw when he was captured in 1984.
[SPEAKER_01]: When he was in cartoon with all those other terrorist groups, Hamas, his Bola, and others.
[SPEAKER_01]: to do any notion of whether he ever met Bin Laden?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he claims he did.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, there are two incidents in his life in which he claims to have met Bin Laden.
[SPEAKER_00]: One was there in cartoon when he was rising international terrorists here.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other just comes up very briefly earlier in the book where
[SPEAKER_00]: What he did at Hadad is boss is trying to raise money and one of the things they like to do is kidnappings.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they briefly considered kidnapping or some of the laden or our members of his family.
[SPEAKER_01]: Who was 17 at the time?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, just a kid.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was actually sent to this resort Lebanon to spy on them and figure out if it was feasible for them to kidnap the good laden's.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you know, you can imagine, you know, Carlos de Plaine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, I don't see any reason to doubt it that he was, he was chums with all these guys.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're all kind of like in the, in the terrorist social circle and in the, in the, in the cartoon, hi, I mean, they just had a kind of a kind of a social environment.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're where they all got to know each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, none of the others have claimed to know him, but I don't see any reason to think that it's not true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to think though, the must have been seen, it's just really, really odd dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because all these other guys, you know, are committed terrorist groups with either religious or, you know, very specific secular agendas.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's this crazy man, Carlos Sajackel, who loves his liquor, you know, tries to sleep with a different woman every night, you know, it's
[SPEAKER_00]: very, very different creature.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you can imagine that would be kind of an awkward friendship at most.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I kind of imagine they were doing all that much, you know, hub nodding around.
[SPEAKER_04]: So bringing the story around to today, um, I, you know, as you mentioned before,
[SPEAKER_04]: Carlos and the PFLP were Marxists.
[SPEAKER_04]: They were Muslim fundamentalists, such as Hamas today or his blot.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I was struck by a lot of parallels.
[SPEAKER_04]: You quote George Habash, who was the leader of the PFLP,
[SPEAKER_04]: you know, innocent civilians being killed because the through and through the airplane attacks because this is the way to get the world talking about the Palestinian cause.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then Hadad is outraged when Arafat goes to the UN and holds up an college branch suggesting that he might be open to peace talks with the Israelis.
[SPEAKER_04]: And their hardcore rejectionists, and one of the reasons they want to step up their attacks is because to prevent any such negotiations with the Israelis.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I got to say that both of those sound very similar to Hamas' explanations for October 7th.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: When they were concerned, no, the Saudis are going to be joined the Abraham Accords.
[SPEAKER_04]: just, you know, unleash a terrorist attack on civilians in Israel.
[SPEAKER_04]: There are, there is a consistency in the thinking of Palestinian rejection from men today.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a similarity to those rejectionists, whether they have religious motivation or if they're purely secular and just, you know, aboard the idea of in Israeli state, there's one
[SPEAKER_00]: line, I think this is again, Hadoid speaking, telling the Russians that they don't like the idea of a two-state, you know, Palestinian and Israelis co-existing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even if the Israelis gave us all of Palestine except for Heifel, except for one city, we wouldn't accept.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a bad deal for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that rejection is that sort of extremist and sort of refusal to negotiate.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's very, very similar to Hamas historically.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hamas has been very much like that, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I do see quite a lot
[SPEAKER_00]: This, you know, excusing violence because it's necessary to kind of get the forms that reform some changes that we need and they don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're willing to overlook the deaths of that, since including Arabs and Palestinians, if it helps their cause, if it gets something on television.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it helps their cause, because I'm not clear it ever did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and at the same of the ISIS, I mean, there's just a virulence that they don't understand it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, it becomes it's too much, even for their supporters.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after a while, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: There are many friends and the organizations begin to crumble because they don't have alliances, they can't get resources, very much happened with the PFLP back in those days.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, we have to wrap it up now.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have to say that anyone familiar with your work, Shelby, knows you are a terrific writer.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can take an arcane, a subject that might be arcane to a lot of people, terrorism, terrorists that's been in jail for 32 years, and make it very compelling read.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I have to just broadly recommend that some are running out, but if you're head, it's in the beach.
[SPEAKER_03]: Get the rise and fall of Carlos de Jaxel because it's just a compelling read from page one, I'm worried.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks so much for spending time with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a big interject here, you know, people may not know this, but Jeff and I used to be, you know, office mates.
[SPEAKER_00]: We work the Washington Post together.
[SPEAKER_00]: So all the tricks, you know, all the kind of special skills that I acquired, have to kind of give credit to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Great, great.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks, Yobi.
[SPEAKER_00]: See you around.
[SPEAKER_00]: Quite a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much for conversation.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's it for this week's ByTalk.
[SPEAKER_03]: Be sure to check out our complete podcast archive on Apple wherever you get your podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you haven't already, do check out the SpyTalk.co new site on Substack, where we offer steady diet of scopes and the original analyses from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just Google SpyTalk.
[SPEAKER_03]: You'll quickly find your way there.
[SPEAKER_03]: This edition of the Spy Talk podcast was smoothly produced, as always, by can I, and expertly edited by Molly Hawkey for MSW Media.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_03]: See you around.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Jeff Stein.
[SPEAKER_03]: Am I close off?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Karen Greenberg.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for listening.
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