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com. That's stitchfix. com. Hey, welcome back. Joby Warwick is with us now.
He's the two-time Fulbrighter Prize-winning author of New York Times bestseller on Black Flags, The Definitive Account of the Rise of ISIS. His new book, The Jackal, The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World's First Super Terrorist, is now out. Joby, welcome. Thank you. Good to be here.
Before we talk about ISIS of today, talk about really where this started. First off, who is the jackal?
Well, Carlos the Jackal, folks who've lived as long as I have may remember this name from the 70s. He was at one time the most well-known, sort of the most. Charismatic, the most colorful bad guy in the world. He was a terrorist. His most famous crime was hijacking an entire OPEC conference, the oil cartel.
He walked into the headquarters in Vienna in 1975 with some commandos and took the entire thing hostage and was able to get the Viennese to give him an airplane and flew them all off into the desert of North Africa. Kind of crazy, audacious things that might seem more common now, but in those days it was pretty exciting. And his mission is? His mission at the time, he considered himself kind of a Marxist revolutionary. He was originally Venezuelan.
His father was a devout communist. He gets his name. His real name is Ilyich, named after the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Ilyich Julianov. And so that was his upbringing. Tried to fashion himself and project himself as kind of a Marxist revolutionary.
It turns out he was really for whoever would pay him and allow him to do bad things around the world.
So he became a Palestinian later? He became a Palestinian because he landed in the Middle East. He wanted to get military training.
So he got kicked out of college in Moscow. His dad sent him to Moscow to go to school. He gets kicked out of there. He's got a girlfriend who's pregnant. His life is falling apart.
And so he decides on a whim to move himself to Lebanon to try to join up with the Palestinians. He thinks they're great. They're freedom fighters. He wants to be part of that movement.
So he shows up there in 1970 just as civil war is about to break out and ends up becoming a guerrilla. He gets guerrilla training, he learns how to shoot a gun, build bombs, and they love him. He's international. He speaks five languages. He can live anywhere because he looks Western.
So he becomes the perfect sleeper agent for the Palestinians. And his ego began to get out of control. He saw himself as a rock star before anybody else did.
So his whole life. You know, point, the reason he was doing this was to try to create some glory for himself. And for a long time, the Palestinians were that ticket. Eventually, the Palestinians got tired of him and thought he's too much of a showboat. It's too much about Carlos and not about our movement.
So they kicked him out, and then he just went on his own. And how is he, in one way, at all, a precursor to some of the terrorism we see in the Middle East today?
Well, a couple of things. I think what's most significant today is he came to represent state-sponsored terrorism as we understand it. Because after the Palestinians kicked him out, he worked for Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator. He worked for the Syrians. He worked for Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Anybody who would pay him money because they wanted to attack an enemy, wanted to attack Israel, wanted to attack the West, but didn't want their fingerprints on it, they would hire Carlos to do the deed for them. And we see that today. In fact, you see, just the last five, six years, both Russia and the Iranians are really attracted to this idea of hiring proxies and not the Usual ones, not FBE agents or Hezbollah, but criminals in some cases who can be hired on social media platforms and given a few hundred dollars to blow up a synagogue or to assassinate a dissident. And what's he best known for?
So, Carlos himself, basically, he's almost like the Paris Hilton of the terrorist world, someone who's kind of famous for being famous. He did some horrific things. He blew up trains in Paris in the 1980s. He went to war against the French government after they arrested his girlfriend and had her in prison. His caper with OPEC in 1975 made him an international celebrity.
And then he managed to stay at large for 20 years. All governments, the French, the Americans, the Israelis, all looking for him. And he managed to stay out of everybody's grasp. No plastic surgery? No plastic.
Well, I want to say no plastic surgery. There's always kind of this rumor or this belief that he had kind of changed his appearance. But he did have plastic surgery, but it was very personal. He wanted to, it was breast reduced. Reduction surgery because all his life he was a little bit chubby.
He was sensitive about his kind of big fleshy man boobs. And so, in the early 1980s, he went to found a plastic surgeon and had his breast size reduced.
So, now you had a chance to interview him. I did. First off, how did they capture him? The capture was pretty crazy. It was an operation conducted jointly by the French and the American CIA.
But it was the CIA that found him. He had gone into sort of self-imposed exile. He'd been kicked out of this country and that ended up in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. And while he was there, he was kind of living large, as Carlos always did, staying in nice hotels, eating well, drinking well, womanizing, chasing women around the capital. And the CIA station in Khartoum discovered that he was there.
And so they sent their best analysts and their best trackers to kind of watch him day and night to see what he was up to, see who he was meeting with, and eventually hatched a plan to catch him. And they would. And they would. And the crazy, this is a story that I think readers will really enjoy if they see the book. Is how they caught him was they realized, understood that he was going to have surgery.
He had a new wife, this beautiful young Jordanian that he married. They were trying to have a baby. They weren't able to conceive. It turned out he had an issue, kind of a varicose vein, veins of the testicles, and decided to have surgery while he was in Khartoum. The CIA was aware of the plan and set it up so that once he went under the knife, They had their people in place to catch 'em and Picked him up, put him on a plane, flew him off to France for trial, and that was the end of the Carlos' career.
There you go. And you got to him in prison. I got to him in prison.
So, this, you know, rolled the clock forward 30 years.
So he's been in jail for a long time. But it's a rare thing for people to get to sit down with this man. The French don't let him do many interviews. They don't want him to be a celebrity. They don't want him to be a celebrity.
He's kind of milked that, you know, for as long as he possibly could. He killed a lot of French people, including police officers, so they don't want to give him a microphone. I had an opportunity to see him under tight restrictions, but for me, it was a chance to see what he was like, to see what a 75-year-old Carlos was up to. And what's your takeaway? He is a classic criminal narcissist, and people, I think, know the type.
He. Has no empathy, no feeling for other people. All the crimes that he committed, all the people who were innocents that were killed in his terrorist attacks, he doesn't regard as serious. He doesn't see, you know, feel any remorse about that. In fact, he brags about the number of people that he killed, and he talks with remorse about people he should have killed.
I shouldn't have let this guy get away. I should have killed a few more people. Wow.
So the book is the jackal is out now, Joby. Today is the launch day. Wow, congratulations. Just talk about terror in the region. Jared Kushner is sitting down with Hamas, sat down with Hamas yesterday.
You know, he's got that 15-point plan. And they said they've agreed to give up power. They have indications they are. And number two, they have to disarm. And then an international force has to come in.
The Israelis are not optimistic. Here's Kushner, Cut 33. They said all the right things, but obviously it's very, very hard to trust a terrorist organization that committed these terrible atrocities. But we had a very cordial meeting, and they said all the right things. And so we're going to give them a chance to perform, but it's going to have to be based on actions and steps.
And I hope it will be true. The Israelis evidently told Kushner, I'll give you room, but we're not optimistic that they're ever going to do that. They got to get rid of their tunnels and blow up those tunnels and expose them. What do you think? The skepticism is well deserved.
Historically, Hamas has been they fall into a category that you'd call rejectionist. Are extremists, they're a violent extremist group, but they also don't want to compromise if it involves. Recognizing Israeli Speaker, you can see a path where eventually the leadership is so decimated and there's such desperation that they are forced to make a compromise. Would I trust that they're going to hold to their commitments? Probably not.
As long as they're a committed Hamas. Terrorists and just true believers, they're going to look for ways to strike back at us. You wrote a book about ISIS, the Rise of ISIS, which is really a sect of Al-Qaeda, same mindset. How damaged is ISIS right now?
Well, ISIS is truly on its foot, and it's been a long time coming. There was. They were able, after the fall of the caliphate and sort of the destruction of the last strongholds in Syria, they had a way of hanging on because of their ability to inspire through the internet. And this was a new phenomenon with ISIS. You didn't have to join the group.
You just had to commit an act of violence and claim it in the name of ISIS.
So that was their special niche. But their ability to kind of organize anything, it's quite limited. They have cells in Africa that are beginning to gain some strength and are a worry, but in the Middle East, they're just really not what they used to be. What about Al-Qaeda? Al-Qaeda is in the same.
Bucket, I think, but even more diminished, I think. They wiped out two generations of leadership. Exactly. And that was, you must have to say, have to acknowledge, this was the result of an extremely effective and aggressive counterterrorism campaign that a lot of Americans didn't see because it didn't involve bombing cities. It was special ops, it was drone warfare, and it was going after a target and then going after another target the next night and not giving them any space to recover.
Did they underestimate the retaliation for 9/11? I think they did. I think, and Bin Laden's mind. This was going to spark this war between civilizations, that America was probably going to come after the Muslim world, but there was going to be a resilience and a resistance, and eventually America would be defeated. I don't think any of them expected that the campaign against terrorism would be as long and as aggressive as it was, and it worked.
Yeah, 25 years later, what are you thinking? I'm thinking that. I see a shift happening. And again, this gets to some of the themes in the book where it's going to be less about religious extremists. We might still see some of that.
There might still be some inspired, you know, ISIS-inspired individuals who do things. But I think the terrorism arena is moving back towards state-sponsored terror. And this is a repeat of what happened in the 60s and 70s, the Carlos generation, where they weren't interested in a religious cause. They were looking to inflict harm against governments they didn't like. And that's what these early terrorist groups are all about.
Right. I mean, almost the good old days was the Cold War, because you knew who our enemy was was somewhat rational, if not obviously powerful in the Soviet Union. But now I think the president's a little exasperated by the lack of logic with the dealing with that extremist mindset, which you write about. Yeah, and and that is true. that level of extremism.
And I write about people in this latest book, the Carlos book, extremists who were when asked about a two-state solution, Israelis and Palestinians living side by side, would refuse to accept it if there was a square inch of Israeli territory, even one town or one village, that wouldn't be acceptable. It was everything or nothing. You know, we in the West think about a process, a negotiation, some accommodation to other points of view. That doesn't exist in that mindset.
So when you go ahead and do the jackal, it's it's is do you feel like you're You're interviewing more of a criminal, like a almost like a mobster. More than a terrorist, Bin Laden type terrorist, as Awahiri, Azar Kawi. In the case of Carlos himself, he's more of a mobster mentality. But the movement that he represents. Remorseless too, right?
Yeah, remorseless, and really just no empathy, no ability to have a moral view. It was just all about himself. But the people that he was around, the people that funded him and sponsored him. You know, they were very much, you know, true terrorists in the modern sense. And they were the first groups that decided that it was okay not just to attack the Israelis because they're our enemy, but to declare war on the world at large, to attack any airport, any airplane, any target of opportunity, just to kind of make our point and to get people to think about it.
Anti-Semitic, anti-Jew, anti-Israeli. Yeah, all that wrapped together. In fact, one of the interesting things that comes out in the book about Carlos is there were. Serious anti-Semites and even former Nazis who are bankrolling some of those Palestinian efforts. There was one, you know, a Nazi banker from Switzerland who becomes sort of the chief financier and even a legal defender of some of the hijackers.
And that's when you studied ISIS, you saw, was it really based on what they thought the Koran read? You have to kill infidels? Was that the fundamental core of it? It was because they felt empowered to interpret. Islam and the Quran in the ways that suited them.
So, the godfather of ISIS is his guy named Zarqawi. He was a Jordanian who moved to Iraq to meet the Americans after the havoc. Exactly. And he created havoc. He never even finished school.
So he was just basically a gangster from the street who became a religious zealot. But his whole thing is: I don't need to understand the Quran that well. I just need to get some imam to say that this interpretation is okay. And this interpretation says you can kill innocents, you can kill women, you can kill other Muslims. Whatever we decide is okay, we'll do it.
So, Joe B. Work, our guest, just a couple more minutes here. He wrote Black Flags about the rise of ISIS. And today, The Jackals Out: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the world's first super terrorist.
So When you talk about the extremist mindset, Is Saudi Arabia? A success story in that they went in and they revamped, if I'm to believe it, I haven't been there, the Wahhabism and that curriculum that fomented and gave rise to so many terrorist mindset to learn to grow up and hate the West.
Now, when I see prior to the Iran war, I think about Saudi Arabia, they were about economic expansion and opportunity. Is that showing a focus on revamping the curriculum to make sure the next generation isn't obsessed? With this whole religious fanaticism? I think they're making them. Yeah, but I think they were really late to make this realization.
And I think leaders like MBS would acknowledge that. What's been concerning to me as I've investigated terrorist groups around the world was this sort of missionary that the Saudis were engaged in, sending Wahhabi. Apostles around the world to kind of convert, to build madrasas in places like Pakistan and the tribal areas in particular, where a whole generation of people were brought up on this really hateful, intolerant religion that is. You know, inconsistent with what a lot of Muslims believe, but it certainly became a fuel for some of the terrorists that we saw bubble up in that part of the world.
Well, we're going to see. If it does bubble up, I know you'll write about it. Joby War, congratulations. Everybody, go out there and pick up the jackal. Appreciate it, Joby.
Thank you very much, Brian. Back in a moment. From breaking news to big-name guests, Brian brings you insight you won't hear anywhere else. You're listening to the Brian Kill Meat Show. Nearly home.
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The talk show that's getting you talking. You're with Brian Kilmead. I like this thing that Republicans do, where we have to, you know, associate everybody with everyone. Yes, Hassan Piker has said some things I disagree with, but he has cited the Democratic Party in a way I think is important. We always talk about young men and hearing young men's voices.
A lot of people have said things that they regret in the past when they were younger. I think, obviously, Hassan Piker doesn't think America deserves 9-11. Come on. I defend free speech in the United States of America. Yep.
If you watch him say it, and you can see him on his podcast, that's Elijah Manley, Democrat from Florida, on the story yesterday. He's being challenged on he's challenging Washington Schultz for that new district. Of course, he means what he said. If you watch him, he says, I will come out and I will say it. America deserved 9-11.
Rick Scott. should be dead.
Someone should kill Rick Scott. Blood of blood should run on the capitalist cities of America. I mean, really, I mean, all you have to do is listen. Every other word is a curse word. And he was asked to go help out that woman who almost won in Wisconsin.
Uh And then you have Hassan Piker, who he was campaigning with on Sunday before the Tuesday election.
So he doesn't want you to apologize. He said, well, I shouldn't have said it. It's not a dumb thing. Nobody I know would Say that Even as angry as they got, there's nobody I know in America that I know of. They would come out and say, America deserve 9-11.
Oh, sorry, I didn't mean that. You just don't have a slip of the tongue that way.
So it's just crazy. It doesn't make any sense to me. But I'm very curious to see if this guy, Alvar Larkin, is going to win. Why? Because he's out, Mr.
He is really a socialist. He's a socialist like El Saeed almost admits to, and that Graham Plattner was actually running on, even though that's saying not DSA. This guy is DSA.
So if he's able to win the 25th District over Jerry Moskowitz, man, look out. Keep in mind, you can see me in person at Briankilmeat.com on my new book, on my tour, United States. I'll be in Redbank, New Jersey on the 16th of October, Westbury, New York on the 17th, BrianKilmeat.com. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.
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