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(I just think Carlos the Jackal is fun to say.)

Carlos the Jackal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal.Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (born October 12, 1949) is a Venezuelan-born self-proclaimed leftist revolutionary and mercenary. He was given a nom de guerre Carlos when he became a member of the leftist PFLP (Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine). After several bungled bombings, Sánchez obtained notoriety for a 1975 raid on the OPEC headquarters, resulting in the deaths of three people. For many years he was among the most wanted international fugitives. He is now serving life imprisonment in France.

Sánchez was born in Caracas. His father, a Marxist lawyer, gave him the forename Ilich, after Lenin's patronym. He was educated at a local school in Caracas and joined the youth movement of the national communist party in 1959. Apart from his native Spanish, he reportedly speaks Arabic and Russian, as well as English and French. After attending the Third Tricontinental in January, 1966, with his father, he spent the following summer at Camp Matanzas, a guerrilla warfare school run by the Cuban DGI located near Havana. Later that year, after the divorce of his parents, his mother took him and his brother to London to continue their studies in Stafford House Tutorial College in Kensington. In 1968 his father tried to take him and his brother Lenin to Sorbonne University but eventually opted for Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. He was expelled from the university in 1970.

Apparently he traveled from there to a guerrilla training camp run by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Amman, Jordan. It was there that he gained the pseudonym Carlos. He claimed to have fought alongside the PFLP members as they resisted the Jordanian government's efforts to expel them in 1970. When he did leave Jordan it was for London where he attended courses at the London School of Economics and apparently worked for the PFLP.

Carlos was given the "Jackal" moniker by the press when the Frederick Forsyth novel The Day of the Jackal was reportedly found among his belongings. Although the book actually belonged to someone else, the nickname stuck.

The Jackal in fiction

• Frederick Forsyth wrote a novel, The Day of the Jackal, first published in 1971, in which an international assassin known only as "The Jackal" (French "le chacal") is hired to assassinate Charles De Gaulle. A copy of this novel, mistakenly thought to have belonged to Ramírez Sánchez, may be the origin of the "Jackal" nickname. Many erroneously believe that the character portrayed in that novel was based on him, which is impossible as the novel was published before Carlos came to public attention.
• In 1973, Fred Zinnemann directed a movie also named The Day of the Jackal and based on Frederick Forsyth's novel. Actor Edward Fox played the role of the assassin on a film that can be considered as a faithful adaptation of the novel.
• The 1997 film The Jackal, starring Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, and Sidney Poitier, was a remake of Zinnemann's 1973 film.
• The 1997 film The Assignment, starring Aidan Quinn, Donald Sutherland and Ben Kingsley is a fictional account of the U.S. government's efforts to hunt down Carlos very loosely based on his true story.
• In the movie True Lies, the character of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a secret agent, intimidates Bill Paxton's character by (deliberately falsely) accusing him of being a dangerous international terrorist named "Carlos the Jackal".
• In Tom Clancy's book Rainbow Six, terrorists attempt to have Carlos freed from prison by staging a terrorist attack on a Spanish amusement park. In this book Carlos is referred to by his real name (Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez) and his nickname (Carlos the Jackal) and is spoken of as a highly successful terrorist/assassin who was imprisoned after an incident similar to his actual capture. The contrast is that in the book Carlos was put under anesthetic in preparation for an operation to alter his appearance, not to perform surgery on his testicles.
• The character Lacrobat in the British sitcom Whoops Apocalypse"is a parody of him (his nick-name is The Devil.)
• Sidney Sheldon's Catoplus Terror is a novel about a former spy attempting to apprehend Carlos.
• A new biopic has been rumored to be in the works, with Spanish actor Javier Bardem as the elusive terrorist. The film is said to be helmed by maverick Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, who directed the crime saga City of God.
• The character Carla the Jackal in the James Bond video game Agent Under Fire is a tribute to Carlos. Her character is hired to assassinate James Bond but ends up falling into a fan.
• The thrash metal band Coroner have a song called "Masked Jackal" about Carlos.
• Carlos the Jackal figures prominently in Robert Ludlum's Bourne Trilogy. In the Trilogy Carlos is depicted as the world's most dangerous assassin, a man with international contacts that allow him to strike efficiently and anonymously at locations anywhere on the globe. His actual name (Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez) is used and details - a mixture of fact and fiction - are given about his upbringing and training, including the fictional account that he trained with Russian intelligence at Novrogod. In the Trilogy he keeps residence in France disguised as a priest, protected by a close network of contacts. In the Bourne Identity a relatively small amount is revealed about him but he factors prominently in the plot of the book because the title character, Jason Bourne, was an American black-ops officer whose mission was to usurp Carlos as the world's preeminent assassin in order to draw him out of hiding so that he could be killed or captured (the Matt Damon film adaptation of the book completely eliminates the Carlos character). In the second book, The Bourne Supremacy, Carlos is not a significant character and is understood to be in hiding (in the Bourne Supremacy the Matt Damon film adaptation strays so far from the plot of the book that the two share little more than a common name). However, in The Bourne Ultimatum, the final book of the trilogy, Carlos and Bourne are pitted against each other again.
• In Munich, the 2005 film by Steven Spielberg, a character named Hans mentions Carlos the Jackal.