Anne Matthews at The American Scholar:
Even in the celebrity-mad 1970s and ’80s, the global mononym club was minuscule. Cher. Diana. Madonna. Pelé. Sting. And Carlos, the terrorist who captured an entire 1975 conference of oil ministers. He’d originally wanted to kidnap a bin Laden family member for big cash—preferably the 17-year-old Osama—but backers such as Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi chose Plan B. Carlos led a six-man team into OPEC’s Vienna headquarters, killed three people, made the Austrian government broadcast statements on Palestinian rights, then forced 33 hostages onto a DC-9. Mission complete, he vanished. Escapes were his trademark, like shooting victims at close range and leaving his face uncovered. As journalist Joby Warrick writes, “Maximum exposure was the point.”
For two decades, Carlos the Jackal, the anti–James Bond, was the planet’s most-wanted fugitive. His motivations and character have remained fugitive as well, despite a half-century pile-up of documentaries, biographies, biopics, miniseries, and scholarly studies. To Warrick, he remains “indisputably, the most famous of the international terrorists who took up arms in the 1970s … an avatar for a newly emerging form of state-sponsored terrorism.”
more here.
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