Meet the godfather of global terrorism Carlos the Jackal who seduced women and eluded cops for decades

It was the Sunday before Christmas, 1975, and Vienna was covered by a foot of snow. Just before 11:30a.m., six strangers stepped off a red tram outside the headquarters of OPEC, the world’s most powerful oil cartel, “their long coats and heavy bags casting dark shadows against the snow,” writes Joby Warrick in his new book, “The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist” (Scribner, Aug.18).

A trio of reporters staking out the building guessed the group was a delegation from some junior member state.Minutes later, the strangers pulled submachine guns from their identical sports bags and shot their way through the second floor, killing three people and capturing 62 hostages, including the top oil officials of nearly every petroleum-producing nation on Earth. Their leader, a handsome young man in a leather jacket and a rakishly cocked black beret, had just emptied his pistol into a wounded Libyan economist.Now he set down his weapon, passed out cigarettes, and grinned kindly at his terrified captives. “With remarkable aplomb the ice-cold executioner had transformed himself into a charming host,” Warrick writes, calling the killer “a terrorist emcee presiding over his own coming-out party.”“I am the famous Carlos!” the gunman announced.

“You know who I am.”Almost nobody did, but that would change fast.Drawing on declassified CIA cables, communist secret-police archives, hours of surreptitiously recorded prison phone calls, and a rare 2025 face-to-face meeting with Carlos himself, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist reconstructs how a chubby Venezuelan playboy became “the first of a breed of international super-terrorists, a larger-than-life outlaw whose deeds spanned four continents,” and how scrotal surgery finally brought him down.Carlos volunteered his body count before Warrick even asked.

“I killed 83 people by my own hand,” the 75-year-old inmate told the author across a prison table.“Anoth...