"Carlos was an adventurer . . . he was a success like Billy the Kid, a success as an outlaw, not a rebel. He was not a Michael Collins or a Martin McGuinness," asserted Mr Colin Smith, whose biography of Carlos, Portrait of a Terrorist, was published by Mandarin in 1995.
Carlos "sees himself as a Pancho Villa, or Zapata, or Che Guevara." He was "not a gun for hire, as some people have claimed," stated Mr Smith. "He was a committed trigger man" who, necessarily, took "lucre from the horrid, tyrannical regimes of eastern Europe and the Arab world".
"Carlos was not a coward but he was not eager to die for a cause."
Born in Venezuela 48 years ago of Marxist parents, "Carlos" was called "Ilich" Ramirez Sanchez - while his brother was named "Vladimir" - for Lenin. The nom de guerre, "Carlos", was given him when the joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by Dr George Habash, in the late 1960s.
Carlos was a product of three environments: an early Marxist upbringing, "the swinging London of the "60s" and the "internationalist" context of that idealistic and revolutionary period.
Carlos matured in London after his mother split with his father and moved to England. Partly educated there he was "finished" at Patrice Lamumba University in Moscow where he absorbed a hefty dose of "highly revolutionary" ideology.
Carlos was turned loose just at the time the Arab world, deeply wounded by the "humiliation" of the Arab defeat by Israel in 1967, was looking for a way to retaliate. Carlos was recruited with other powerfully motivated foreigners by the PFLP operations chief, Dr Wadi'a Haddad. His aim was, said Mr Smith, "to make people think about forgotten Palestine".
Dr Haddad masterminded a series of spectacular hijackings which Mr Smith called "terrorist theatre". The most dramatic involved the capture of oil ministers during a meeting of the Organisation of Producing and Exporting Countries in December 1975.
Carlos was such a self-assured showman that he "signed autographs for the OPEC ministers on the plane". After this coup, Carlos "was involved personally in very few operations but took part in planning".
During the PFLP hijacking of a French civilian aircraft to Entebbe in Uganda in 1976 Carlos was "having dinner in Kampala" when Israeli commandos stormed the plane and rescued the hostages. "This was Wadi'a Haddad's greatest failure. . . It showed he could go only so far. . . Entebbe was an enormous propaganda victory for the Israelis."
After Entebbe Carlos's career began to falter. Once the Soviet Union collapsed he had no sanctuary from his pursuers.
After joining the peace process Syria sent him to Sudan where, three and a half years ago, his Sudanese bodyguards turned over Carlos to the French police.
Once his colleagues might have mounted a rescue operation, but, said Mr Smith: "There will be no rescue now. Times have changed."
