We Live With the Violent Mayhem Carlos the Jackal Unleashed

Joby Warrick is a former Washington Post national security reporter and author of the forthcoming book “The Jackal.”

He’s an old man now, his face wizened and his world limited to a cell in a former convent that serves as one of France’s maximum-security prisons. He repeats himself and strains to remember details, yet a few names — people who betrayed him or insulted his manhood — still evoke the old rage.

“I should have killed a few more people,” Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the man known popularly as Carlos the Jackal, muttered to me as we sat inches apart in a guarded visitors lounge in the prison, outside Paris. The infamous terrorist whose crimes and extravagant lifestyle inspired dozens of books and Hollywood films now spends his days reminiscing about old........

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