When I first entered the counterterrorism world in 1997 as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, a sea change was underway in the field. Historically, terrorists were animated by the desire, in expert Brian Jenkins’ words, to have “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” In the latter half of the 20th century, hijackings rarely resulted in mass casualties; there were targeted assassinations and horrific killings—the 1972 Munich Olympics come to mind—but, at least in the terrorists’ minds, they were carried out for a specific goal, such as Palestinian statehood. The most famous of these old-school terrorists was Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born killer who became the improbable face of Palestinian resistance and whose reign of terror captivated the world throughout the 1970s.

But by 2000, when I was serving on the National Commission on Terrorism, a bipartisan congressional panel tracking the looming threat of al Qaeda, we were warning of a different mindset, one that would come to rattle U.S. domestic security: Terrorists now wanted a lot of people dead and a lot of people watching. A new mastermind, Osama bin Laden, had replaced Carlos as the global icon of terrorism. The 9/11 attacks that he orchestrated the following year would go on to transform U.S. homeland security, domestic surveillance, and the nature of global terrorism beyond recognition.

When I first entered the counterterrorism world in 1997 as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, a sea change was underway in the field. Historically, terrorists were animated by the desire, in expert Brian Jenkins’ words, to have “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” In the latter half of the 20th century, hijackings rarely resulted in mass casualties; there were targeted assassinations and horrific killings—the 1972 Munich Olympics come to mind—but, at least in the terrorists’ minds, they were carried out for a specific goal, such as Palestinian statehood. The most famous of these old-school terrorists was Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born killer who became the improbable face of Palestinian resistance and whose reign of terror captivated the world throughout the 1970s.

The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist, Joby Warrick, Scribner, 384 pp., $30, August 2026

But by 2000, when I was serving on the National Commission on Terrorism, a bipartisan congressional panel tracking the looming threat of al Qaeda, we were warning of a different mindset, one that would come to rattle U.S. domestic security: Terrorists now wanted a lot of people dead and a lot of people watching. A new mastermind, Osama bin Laden, had replaced Carlos as the global icon of terrorism. The 9/11 attacks that he orchestrated the following year would go on to transform U.S. homeland security, domestic surveillance, and the nature of global terrorism beyond recognition.

Joby Warrick’s new book, The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist, has been released at the very moment when Americans will be........

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