In December 1975, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – better known as Carlos the Jackal – attacked the headquarters of a global oil organisation in Vienna. Jason Burke recounts the story of the incident, and reveals how his efforts to interview the terrorist helped solve a 50-year-old mystery
About half an hour after opening the letter sent to me by one of the most notorious terrorists of all time, I realised that not only did it contain a note offering “revolutionary greetings”, but that it would lead to the solution of a decades-old mystery.
It was the summer of 2023, and for months I had been trying to contact Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. While researching my book, a narrative history of 1970s terrorism entitled The Revolutionists, I had already spoken to several of those who had bombed, hijacked and shot their way through the decade, but Ramírez Sánchez was the most iconic figure of these years.
Arguably the world’s first real ‘celebrity terrorist’, Ramírez Sánchez was responsible for around a dozen major attacks in western Europe between 1973 and 1983. But despite the many articles, books and films about him, there was still much about his career of deadly violence that was unknown. As such, the letter on my doormat marked a significant breakthrough.
From Caracas to Paris
It had been easy to locate Ramírez Sánchez, who by that point had been incarcerated for nearly 30 years. Captured by the French intelligence service while undergoing minor surgery in Sudan in 1994, he had been convicted of multiple terrorist offences and held in several different prisons across France. Now locked away in a high-security facility in Fresnes, about 20 miles south of Paris, he was allowed a small number of visitors.
To be among them, however, I needed an invitation. As a first step, I got a message to him via an intermediary to establish my bona fides. I then wrote directly, explaining my interest in hearing his own version of events.
Thanks to a large body of existing literature – declassified diplomatic cables, leaked documents and interviews with spies, officials and others – I had already learned a lot about the man from my research. For example, I found that he had not been a precociously young leftwing activist in Venezuela in the 1950s, as often claimed, but a timid and chubby teenager who steered clear of the street politics of his hometown, Caracas. In London in the 1960s, living with his mother and younger brother after his parents’ divorce, his tastes tended more towards Napoleon brandy, tailored suits and sleazy West End clubs than protests and sit-ins.
In fact, his journey into violence appeared to have been motivated more by megalomania than Marxism. When sent to Moscow to study for an undergraduate degree by his leftwing lawyer father, Ramírez Sánchez was noticed not for his commitment to ideology, but to what the Soviet capital offered by way of nightlife. If, in 1970, he had made a trip to Jordan to find Palestinian factions dedicated to what they called the “armed struggle” against Israel, his claims to have fought against government forces in the virtual civil war there were exaggerated to say the least. It became apparent, too, that the idea he had been recruited by the KGB was probably just Cold War propaganda.
His tastes tended more towards Napoleon brandy, tailored suits and sleazy West End clubs than protests and sit-ins
One fact I dug out was the origin of his famous soubriquet: Carlos the Jackal. This was invented by British journalists in the summer of 1975, shortly after he had killed two French policemen, seriously injured a third, and then executed his superior in the breakaway Palestinian faction he had joined, known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-XO).
All three murders had taken place within the space of a minute inside a small apartment on Paris’s Left Bank. First, French investigators had found a false passport in the name of ‘Carlos Martinez’ at the apartment of a girlfriend. Then, reporters spotted a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal in the London home of another lover, a Basque waitress. The false ID and the book were swiftly combined, and a thousand headlines followed.
Terror in Vienna
In the letter that dropped through my door that summer morning, Ramírez Sánchez expressed his delight at my intended visit. Sadly, this delight was not shared by French authorities, who blocked my request for an in-person meeting but did allow me to send a series of letters. Though he avoided answering my pointed enquiries about his misdeeds, he posted me dozens of printed and photocopied documents. These described his youth and the treble murder in Paris, before going into considerable detail about the attack that earned him global infamy.
The plan had been put together in the early autumn of 1975. Ramírez Sánchez was to lead a team from the PFLP-XO and a West German extremist group called the Revolutionary Cells in an attack on a meeting of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) at its headquarters in Vienna. They would seize the high-ranking ministers due to attend, demand a plane from the Austrian authorities, and then fly around the Middle East, releasing the hostages one by one at the airports of their respective capital cities. Two would not be freed: instead, the ministers from Saudi Arabia and Iran would be shot dead.
The date of the attack, 21 December 1975, was a Sunday. The streets of Vienna were quiet, the air was chilly under a clear blue sky, and carols piped over the speakers of the Christmas Market opposite OPEC’s modern, seven-storey headquarters on Ringstrasse. The attackers arrived at their target at around 11am, rushed through the unguarded entrance of the building, and made their way up to the main meeting room on the first floor. Ramírez Sánchez then fired five shots, shouting: “Don’t move… I am the famous Carlos. You may have heard of me.”
There was little resistance. Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, the only female member of the team, shot dead a bodyguard of the Iraqi oil minister, before killing a plain-clothes policeman as he tried to surrender. Ramírez Sánchez then killed a Libyan economist, and explosives were wired around the building.
Once he was done, Ramírez Sánchez relaxed. He distributed cigarettes, chatted with his 60-plus hostages (conversing in English, Spanish and French), and ordered food from the local Hilton. Ham sandwiches – which any Muslim captives would not eat – were angrily sent back. When one of the Palestinian gunmen struggled to adjust the explosives, Ramírez Sánchez quipped, “Oh dear, I’ve told him a thousand times how to do it, and he still can’t get it right”. Similarly, when an OPEC driver tried to persuade him to free the female hostages, claiming they “might get hysterical”, Ramirez demurred, pointing to Kröcher-Tiedemann.
Three unanswered questions
Early the next morning, a bus arrived to take the hostages and their captors to Vienna airport, where a fully fuelled aircraft had been readied as Ramírez Sánchez had requested. He ordered the plane to fly first to Algiers, where a handful of the captives were released. The next destination was Tripoli, where Ramírez Sánchez hoped to obtain a bigger aircraft with enough range to fly around the Middle East.
But he was to be disappointed. In the Libyan capital, there was a frosty reception for the angry, despondent and exhausted terrorists. No one expected them, and not a single person – even in this supposedly ‘revolutionary’ state – wanted to help. It was clear there would be no new plane.
The only option was to return to Algiers, where Ramírez Sánchez was presented with an ultimatum by local authorities: he could carry out the plan to shoot the Saudi and Iranian ministers (and take his chances with Algerian security forces afterwards), or accept the $20m being offered by the Saudi and Iranian governments as ransom for the two men.
Amid stormy scenes, tears and obscenities, Ramírez Sánchez told his team that the time had come to end their escapade. A few hours later he was on his way to a five-star hotel in Algiers, thence to a luxurious government guesthouse for a few weeks’ rest and eventually back to the PFLP-XO’s base in Aden.
Over the next two decades, Ramirez Sanchez would operate from bases in Baghdad, Prague, Budapest and Damascus. While some attacks were simply motivated by personal vendettas, many were commissioned by powerful patrons, including Gaddafi. Eventually, ‘Carlos the Jackal’ would become a fugitive himself, ending up in Khartoum, where the French found him.
Amid stormy scenes, tears and obscenities, Ramírez Sánchez told the team that the time had come to end the escapade
Though I had spent months investigating this whole episode, three mysteries remained unsolved. Firstly, who commissioned the attack on OPEC? Secondly, what happened to the $20m ransom payment? Finally, how had Ramírez Sánchez escaped punishment by the PFLP-XO for his failures?
My correspondence with the then 74-year-old prisoner resolved the first of these questions. Ramírez Sánchez’s account unequivocally named Libya’s president, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, as the man responsible for the OPEC attack. This made sense. The mercurial Libyan leader had the means – and the motive – to embarrass pro-western Arab countries and hike the price of oil, which would boost his income. Furthermore, I had already seen testimony that a Libyan diplomat had provided weapons to the assault team in Vienna, evidence of previous Libyan support for such violence, and multiple reports of Ramírez Sánchez cursing Gaddafi as “impossible to work with” when he realised that, rather than delivering the vital new plane as presumably agreed, the Libyan leader had simply disappeared into the desert.
Fame as a weapon
The whereabouts of the $20m cash remained unresolved, however. It is possible that Ramírez Sánchez kept it, as some veterans of the PFLP-XO suggested to me when I tracked them down. But I found no proof, and the alleged thief himself did not respond to my questions on the matter. There is some reliable documentary evidence, too, that only Saudi Arabia actually paid up and that these funds were kept by the Algerians – the designated intermediary – as ‘compensation’ for their trouble.
And why wasn’t Ramírez Sánchez shot by his comrades? Either after killing a respected member of the PFLP-XO, or after the debacle of the OPEC raid itself?
Here, the correspondence offered an important and unsolicited insight. Much of what this most famous of terrorists sent to me consisted of press cuttings. These said nothing new, but confirmed something I had long suspected: that Ramírez Sánchez’s greatest talent was not as a terrorist, but as a self-publicist.
If most of his attacks failed to attain their objectives, this did not matter. They all helped construct his legend, and this fame made it impossible for his outraged ‘comrades’ to consign this hero of their cause to a shallow grave in a Middle Eastern desert. It also convinced Gaddafi and other sponsors to pay Ramírez Sánchez tens of millions of dollars to carry out violent new operations in western Europe, and eventually persuaded several eastern European regimes to offer him a base in their own countries as well.
The greatest weapon Ramírez Sánchez possessed, I realised, was not his Tokarev pistol or total unconcern for the suffering of others – and nor was it his undoubted ability to manipulate and charm. Rather, it was his celebrity, in which western governments and media were to some extent complicit. It was this, above all, that had allowed him to continue his career of violence at great cost to many hundreds of innocent people. Memories of his violence may have faded, but the morbid fascination with Carlos the Jackal – and sometimes other terrorists too – remains.
Jason Burke is the international security correspondent for The Guardian. His latest book, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists who Hijacked the 1970s (Vintage, 2025), was shortlisted for the 2025 Baillie-Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction