We in the west love to hate a terrorist bogeyman. When our opponent isn’t a state, it’s easier to rationalise our failure to stop them causing us pain if there’s super-villain lore around them. That a lone Venezuelan called Ilich Ramírez Sánchez could become the scourge of top intelligence agencies would be a humiliation; rebadge him as the impressive “Carlos the Jackal” and we can cope. As the Israeli-made Storyville documentary The Jackal Speaks: Inside the Mind of a Mass Murderer profiles Sánchez and interviews him, that mystique evaporates.
After growing up in Caracas in a family home that has a cook, a cleaner, a gardener and a large photograph of Stalin on the wall, the teenage Sánchez is relocated to London and then Moscow in the late 1960s, dismaying his father – and, in the Soviet Union, annoying the KGB – with his preference for partying over studying. In 1969 he enrols with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), fighting for them in the Black September conflict in Jordan and, most likely, conducting his first solo mission by attempting to assassinate the vice-president of the British Zionist Federation in London in 1973.
