Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was 20 years old when he arrived in Beirut in 1970 and made his way to the offices of al-Hadaf, a weekly Arabic-language newspaper. Deputy editor Bassam Abu Sharif welcomed the young Venezuelan, but they didn’t discuss feature stories or a reporting job.
Abu Sharif was also a senior operative in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and he was looking for recruits to help the Palestinian terrorist organization advance its wars against Israel and several Arab states, which it accomplished through assassinations, bombings, and airplane hijackings.
“I want to fight the enemy,” Ramírez Sánchez assured Abu Sharif with steely confidence during the interview, according to The Jackal, a new biography by veteran Washington Post investigative journalist Joby Warrick about the man who became known to the world as Carlos the Jackal.
“Who is that?” Abu Sharif pressed.
Ramírez Sánchez replied: “The Israeli capitalist imperialists.”