Detainee No 872686/X

At 48, he has left behind the slim, jeans-clad youth of legend, who affected a rakish beret after the manner of Che Guevara. The man in Fresnes has very little to do with the urban guerrilla who brought the war in Palestine to the streets of Europe. Middle age has outfitted him with a surplus chin, a studied dignity and the mien of a successful businessman. In jail, he wears Lacoste shirts and fashionable loafers and subscribes to Fortune, Forbes and a connoisseur’s magazine called L’Amateur de Cigare.

But deep within, the revolutionary lives on, if only as a caricature. Recalling his days in Havana, where he was forged into a lethal weapon, Carlos recently wrote the French cigar magazine: “Viva Cuba and Viva Havanas! Revolutionary greetings.”

But the Iron Curtain is down, the revolution is over and none of its cashiered generals want to be tainted by Carlos. Today, he is nothing more impressive than a blast from the past. The manner in which he was taken put paid to the legend.

In the ’90s, Carlos has been an increasingly unwanted quantity. After being kicked out of a string of formerly sympathetic countries, Carlos had found his final haven in Sudan, where he lived above ground with his Jordanian wife. In 1993, he was admitted to hospital for an operation that no ’70s bravo should ever require: he needed surgery for a varicose vein on a testicle.

By a sad turn of fate, this embarrassing disorder came up at a time when US agencies were expressing a keen desire to see him behind bars. The Sudanese authorities decided they had closer affinities with the French, who also wanted Carlos. French paramilitary personnel drugged Carlos in the hospital, stuffed him into a bag, immobilised him with masking tape and put him on a flight to Paris, varicose vein and all.

Thereafter, it transpired that the Jackal was not to be tried for his greatest coups, which made international headlines in the ’70s. He was not in the dock for fighting for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) against the Jordanian army in the Black September operation. Nor was it for the Munich Massacres, in which 11 Israeli Olympic athletes were killed. Nor the kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers in Vienna, nor the Entebbe hijack drama.

The trial was for the sickening murder of two unarmed French counter-intelligence officers and a Lebanese informer in Paris in 1975. They had accidentally stumbled upon Carlos in a drunken party in the Latin Quarter. He went into the bathroom, came out with a Soviet 7.62 mm Tokarev pistol which had been taped behind the cistern and took three clean head shots. But, politically, it was a messy affair. It started the process by which Carlos became an untouchable, a man on his own.

Of course, perhaps the Jackal had always been a lone hand, a psychopath innocent of politics. There is reason to doubt whether he had ever wanted the revolution as much as the revolution wanted him. Some time ago, in an interview with Stern magazine, his first wife Magdalena Kopp, who is bringing up his daughter in Germany, belittled him as “a megalomaniacal kook who could kill without batting an eyelid. If Carlos was ever on anyone’s side, it had to be his own.”

Further confirmation comes from the files of Stasi, the disbanded East German secret police: “He speaks much of communism and world revolution, but has no deep knowledge of those fields.” Saudi Arabian oil minister Sheikh Yamani, who conversed with Carlos for several hours as a hostage in Vienna, also found that he “does not believe in the Palestinian cause or Arab nationalism”.

The Carlos myth, obviously, is only a half-truth. He started out all right, born to a millionaire Marxist Venezuelan who named his three sons Vladimir, Illich and Lenin (and who now foots the bill for his creature comforts in jail). He was given a radical upbringing and joined the left students’ movement in 1964. He moved on to Cuba for guerrilla training and attended Fidel Castro’s Tri-Continental Conference in 1966. In 1968, he was in Moscow, studying at the Patrice Lumumba University, where the KGB did its top-level recruiting. There, he met Mohammed Boudia, top man in Europe for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a PLO front organisation. In 1970, he joined the group and started his career as a terrorist.

Right away, he went all wrong. He drew up a list of 500 people, mostly Jews, who needed to be eliminated for the good of mankind. The list began with Joseph Edward Seif, owner of Marks and Spencers, and included violinist Yehudi Menuhin, playwright John Osborne and former British Prime Minister Edward Heath. A lesser revolutionary would have shared out the good work. Carlos decided to hog it all. He never got beyond the first name on his list. Seif survived the attempt and Carlos dropped the project. Obviously, he was not quite the dispassionate, surgically precise killing machine the media made him out to be.

Another embarrassing detail which is often overlooked: he was dubbed the Jackal after Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel, not the other way round. He gained infamy long after the book was published. In fact, he was named the Jackal only because a copy was once found in a safe house where he was stashing small arms.

Last week, Carlos was in the dock in a strange trial. He had been convicted in absentia for the 1975 killings in 1992. French law, which permits a retrial when a fugitive is captured, allows him to plead his case again now. Carlos is arguing that the hearing itself is bad in law. He says the judge suffers from a conflict of interest, for he had been involved in the 1975 investigations. Besides, the Frenchmen who extracted him from Sudan were acting illegally because they had no authorisation.

Strange arguments, coming from a man who once rejected the Western legal system, who needed no authorisation other than the promptings of faith to launch a slaughter of the innocents across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The Jackal’s former wife had once said: “I would love to see the Carlos myth collapse.” In the course of this trial, she may well see that happen as the Jackal turns out to be nothing more glamorous than Detainee No. 872686/X, common resident of Fresnes gaol.