Born in Venezuela, and named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, also known as, Carlos, the Jackal had a textbook guerrilla career starting with studies at Moscow's Patrice Lumumba university for Third World students. Carlos joined the violent Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), cutting his teeth with the attempted murder of prominent British Zionist and Marks and Spencer department store chief Edward Sieff in his bath in London.
Carlos is most infamous for his participation in the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian commandos at the Munich Olympics. He plotted the 1975 seizure of all 11 oil ministers at a Vienna OPEC meeting, and the 1976 Palestinian hijacking of a French jetliner to Uganda.
Support for the well known terrorist dried up as Communism collapsed and Middle East governments began looking for peace. Carlos was said to have been invited to leave his Damascus refuge in 1991 and to have been turned away from Libya and Baghdad.
He found a last retreat in Sudan in 1993, whiling away time with his Jordanian wife Lana Abdel Salam Jarrar. He may have run out of sponsors for terrorism by the time of his capture, but former French intelligence director Pierre Marion said that had no apparent affect on his love for excess.
Carlos was arrested in the Sudan, when the Sudanese arranged for his arrest after he was anesthetized for minor surgery in 1994. He was handed him over to French agents, who bundled him into a sack and onto a plane bound for Villacoublay airbase outside Paris.
It is ironic since many in Carlos' old Paris neighborhood knew the story that even Ramirez himself bragged about -- the cold-blooded murder of two unarmed French police officers and an informant. In June of 1975, Ramirez was posing as a student in a small Paris apartment when two unarmed investigators and a fellow militant arrived at his door to question him. Ramirez subsequently opened fire, killing all three, and fled the country, to live a life of a terrorist, always on the run, and a fugitive.
To this day, it is said that from his isolation cell, the flamboyant terrorist has sometimes been heard screaming at night: "It's me, Carlos!"