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Vienna, he seemed as unmotivated as when he was a colorless student
at the Patricio Lumumba University in Moscow. Literature and
politics so embellish the terrorist that it is hard work for us to recognize
him in a mediocre man. And that human figure is what the testimony
and the facts collected in this vol ume sketch: the portrait of a poor
devil.
Nevertheless, this calamitous young man, this son of a Marxist
millionaire lawyer, this listless fellow with a hearty appetite, this
unlucky suitor of London girls, seems to have been capable one Sunday
afternoon of calmly setting off a grenade at Le Drugstore on Saint
Germain des Pres (killing two people and inj uring thirty-four) simply
because the establishment's owner was a Jew.
The explanation proposed by Colin Smith is simple: the KG.B.
This lazy papa's boy had become the fearsome "Carlos" while he
studied in Moscow, after which he had served as a Soviet agent in the
most extremist Palestinian organization (George Habash's Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine) in whose ranks he was being
converted into a terrorist star, second only to Leila Khaled. The KG. B.,
like almost all secret agencies, undoubtedly uses for its own purposes
fanaticism, madness, ingenuousness, and amorality (as well as generos–
ity and nobility), but it does not manufacture these qualities.
If
indeed
it was in Moscow, where he may have been persuaded by the KG.B.,
that Illich Ramirez Sanchez decided to become a terrorist, we are still in
the dark as to how it was possible for such an insignificant person
suddenly to convert himself into a machine for kidnapping, extortion,
and murder. Rather than trying to sketch the process of Illich Ramirez
Sanchez's transformation into Carlos-an extreme and instructive case
of what happened to others-Colin Smith has written a pleasant,
superficial book, using the the known facts about what Carlos did as
the basic ingredients for designing an
identikit
that is even something
of a palliative since the story seems so unusual.
Portrait of a Terrorist
recounts some violent actions in which Carlos did not star-the
slaughter at the airport in Lod, Israel, the seizing of the French
embassy in The Hague and of the West German embassy in
Stockholm-but these episodes appear in the book stripped of all
sociological, ideological, historical, and cultural references, like a
sequence of anomalies, a bundle of bloody, inexplicable curiosities.
This presentation makes Carlos unreal and falsifies the phenom–
enon of modern terrorism, whose manifestations are no mere product
of chance, individual pathology, or the frustrations and impotence of
certain groups of human beings.
