Colin Smith, who covered the original trial of Carlos the Jackal for the Observer 14 years ago, returns to the Palais de Justice as the Venezuelan faces new charges of bombing and murder
For the past month Carlos the Jackal, a natural showman – who having created the role of world's most wanted man for himself, played it for all it was worth – has been appearing at the Palais de Justice in Paris where, 14 years ago, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and disappeared from public view.
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the middle son of a wealthy Marxist who gave all three of his sons a Lenin forename and sent them to Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University, was 26 years old when he pulled off one of the greatest pieces of terrorist theatre of the late 20th century.
Shortly before Christmas 1975, having joined the Beirut-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, he fought his way into a meeting of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Vienna at the head of a gang that was of mostly Palestinian and German origin. After three people, including an Austrian policeman, had been killed, they took 11 oil ministers hostage and were allowed to fly with them to Algeria, from where they bargained a lucrative ransom.
During the first hours of this drama, when a negotiators asked the Venezuelan who he was, he replied: "Tell them I'm the famous Carlos. They'll know me." And they did, for it was by his Carlos Martínez alias that both the British and French police had marked him as the chief suspect for various outrages, among them an attempt to murder in his own bathroom Edward Sieff, former Marks & Spencer chairman and vice-president of Britain's Zionist Federation.
France has unfinished business with Carlos. This new trial concerns a terrorist bombing campaign in the early 1980s in which 11 of its citizens were killed and about 200 wounded. Some will never fully recover. Surrounded by the wood panelling and tapestries of Haussman's belle époque extravaganza, they have been telling of their suffering.
But Carlos is not getting anything like the audience his first public appearance in captivity commanded after his bribed Sudanese hosts delivered him bound, gagged and sedated to French commandos. From behind the dock's bulletproof glass, well groomed and no balder, greyer or paunchier than most 62-year-olds, he has mostly gazed on empty press benches and a deserted public section.
"The last time we had thousands of people here," sighed Isabelle Coutant- Peyre, drawing gently on one of her frequent cheroots and sipping a glass of white wine as we sat at the heated outdoor table of a little bistro behind the Palais de Justice. "The journalists were queuing up. They had to be searched in case they were pretend journalists hiding a gun behind their backs."
Advocate Coutant-Peyre is more than just the Venezuelan's lawyer: she is also his wife, with her name on a ghosted memoir entitled, Epouser Carlos: Un amour sous haute tension, which might be loosely translated as Wed to Carlos: love can be dangerous for your health.
They met during his first trial when she was 45, the mother of three teenage boys, a wiry gamine separated from her husband, and a junior member of his defence team. Shortly afterwards Carlos sacked her boss and put her in charge. This did not stop him getting a life sentence for the fatal shooting in a Paris flat six months before the Opec raid of two French security service agents, and the Lebanese who had led them there.
In the four years after he left the court with a clenched-fist salute, she visited him in various high-security jails while appeals and other legal actions were prepared. Then, in a prison office in 2001, she went through a Muslim marriage ceremony with Carlos who, since he was still officially married to a Palestinian woman, appears to have converted to Islam in order to embrace its provisions for polygamy. Family and friends were astonished. Even those she had convinced that she had fallen deeply in love could not see the point. "It was meant to be symbolic," she explained at the time. '"We wanted to declare that we loved each other for the rest of our lives."
But underlying this symbolism there seems to have always been some hope that somehow, somewhere, they would manage to spend a few of their last years together. As far as Coutant-Peyre is concerned, all this has changed: "They are determined to give him another life sentence so that he will die in prison. We will never be properly married."
French security services estimate that more French citizens have died because of Carlos than any other nationality. According to the prosecution, what killed most of them was not politics but the love he bore for another woman, the German terrorist Magdalena Kopp, with whom he had a daughter, Rosa. In the early 1980s Carlos's faction of the PFLP was based variously in Syria and Aden and the Warsaw Pact capitals of East Berlin, Budapest and Poland. In February 1982, when he was living with Kopp in Damascus, President Assad's Mukhabarat asked him to dispose of a dissident Syrian journalist in Paris. Carlos considered himself too well known to work in France, but Kopp volunteered and was accompanied by Bruno Brégeut, a rather inept Swiss terrorist who had spent a lot of time in an Israeli jail.
As they closed in on their target they were arrested with a car full of explosives. A heartbroken Carlos dashed off a letter to Gaston Defferre, the French interior minister, giving him an ultimatum to "release our comrades" or face the consequences. To make sure it was not mistaken for a hoax, he placed his thumbprints, long available from various crime scenes, beneath his signature. Defferre's response was to release the letter to Agence France-Presse.
The first bomb went off on 29 March on the Capitole Express between Paris and Toulouse. Five passengers were killed and 28 injured. This attack was claimed by the "International Terrorist Friends of Carlos", and on 22 April, the day Kopp and her companion were sentenced to four years in jail, was followed by a car bomb in a busy street off the Champs Elysées that killed a passer-by.
On New Year's Eve 1983 came two more. One, on an express train between Marseille and Paris, killed three people and wounded 13; then, a few moments later, a bomb in Marseille railway station itself killed two and injured some Algerian workmen. In August 1983 a bomb wrecked La Maison France, West Berlin's French cultural centre less than a kilometre from one of Carlos's safe houses on the communist eastern side. In case of doubt, Defferre's office allegedly received a diagram from Carlos showing where the explosive was placed.
The prosecution maintains it has built up a watertight case from files salvaged from Stasi and the other old eastern European secret services, mostly transcripts of bugged conversations in the sanctuaries they had provided the Carlos gang. Coutant-Peyre has argued that these sources are suspect, but the mild-mannered Olivier Leurant, who heads a panel of seven judges – there is no jury – has refused to throw them out.
After a compulsory 17-year, full immersion course, Carlos speaks very fast French and very loudly, though, according to cognoscenti, with a Castilian lisp. He refuses to plead guilty or not guilty, assures the bomb casualties that they are the victims of Zionism and other reactionary forces. He is usually scrupulously polite to the victims of the various atrocities he is alleged have committed, though one French reporter reprimanded him for sitting throughout one witness' testimony apparently engrossed in a paperback biography of himself called Carlos: Portrait of a Terrorist.
And here I must take some responsibility, for I am the author of this work, first published shortly after the Opec raid. His wife and advocate got me to sign a copy for him. "For Carlos," I wrote. "So many questions I'd like to ask you."
"Join the queue," she said.
A verdict is expected towards the end of this week.
Colin Smith's biography, first published in 1976 and inspired by an Observer series, will shortly be available as an eBook.