With the 5-hour miniseries “Carlos” premiering this week on the Sundance channel and opening in art theatres in selected U.S. cities, there’s renewed interest in the Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez’s career of terror. Undoubtedly his best-known operation, and the movie’s dramatic core, is the takeover of OPEC headquarters in Vienna in 1975 where he and his cadre from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took more than 60 hostages, 3 of whom they killed. Carlos’s deputy, portrayed in the movie by Rodney al-Haddad, was Anis Nakash, a Lebanese national whose own brilliant career was just about to take off.
In the 1970s, anyone who wanted to learn the finer points of asymmetric warfare—i.e., terror—went to study with the Palestinians. Students came from around the world — Germany, Italy, Japan and, like Carlos himself, Latin America—for manifold reasons: because of the romantic élan of the Palestinian cause, because some of the Palestinian cadres had been trained and armed by the Soviets, and just because the Palestinians had done an awful lot of shooting. Yasser Arafat led the Palestinians’ war against Jordan in 1970; known as “Black September,” this was a war the Palestinians lost and in which they suffered thousands of casualties before relocating to Lebanon. It was the Palestinians who taught the Iranians that the Lebanese state was the perfect host for a non-state actor determined to wage war against Israel across the border—the Lebanese government was too weak to stop it, while much of the Lebanese, and the Arab masses, cheered it on. The Islamic Revolution put this knowledge to good use when they created Hezbollah.
