Christina Hoag
I Am the Famous Carlos
The Story of the Jackal, the World's First Celebrity Terrorist
"A larger-than-life story, and the Jackal, with his drinking, womanizing, and penchant for violence, is a larger-than-life protagonist. At times the work reads more like a thriller than a biography. A colorful and gripping portrait, impressively researched."
- Kirkus Reviews
He was the most wanted man in the world. Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born terrorist, carried out a wave of attacks across Europe in the 1970s and 1980s.
A ruthless self-proclaimed revolutionary, he claimed to fight for the Palestinian cause and communist ideology, but also worked as a mercenary for rogue regimes and organizations.
After bursting onto the world stage with the 1975 OPEC siege in Vienna, where he took sixty hostages and killed three people, he eluded capture for two decades. Finally arrested in a daring raid in Sudan in 1994, he was brought to justice in France where he is serving three life sentences for his reign of terror.
This is the compelling true story of how a pudgy schoolboy became a global celebrity terrorist.
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From the Author
So, who was Carlos the Jackal exactly?
I first encountered the story of Carlos the Jackal while working as a Latin America foreign correspondent based in Venezuela. Over the course of my coverage, I interviewed his family and others who knew him, and I became fascinated by his extraordinary life and the cast of vivid, often contradictory characters orbiting around him. After years of research, I decided to bring all of it together in this book. Thank you for reading.