Carlos the Jackal, the First “Celebrity Terrorist”

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Joby Warrick on how 1970s terrorists wrote the playbook for today's jihadists

Sep 30, 2026

We don’t yet know who was behind today’s attempted terror attack on a FlyDubai flight from the UAE to Israel. But early reporting offers enough detail to draw some fairly obvious conclusions: one of the plane’s pilots, described by former co-workers as a “religious extremist,” stabbed his co-pilot and seemed intent on turning the plane, full of Israeli passengers, into a suicide bomb. I’m a little less cautious than the New York Times, so I’ll say it with reasonable confidence: this was a terrorist hijacking of the Islamist persuasion.

In the 1970s, hijackings were depressingly common, usually carried out by Palestinian groups and their allies (who, thankfully, lacked the suicidal instinct). In his new book, The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Joby Warrick writes that “after Arab armies were crushed by the Israelis in 1967, leaders of the [Palestinian] movement shifted the battle to a new arena: commercial aviation.”

Everything old is new again.

Warrick draws a direct line from the secular terrorism of the 1970s to the jihadism of today, and the thread running through it is that era’s most famous practitioner, Carlos the Jackal, the first “celebrity terrorist.” Carlos, he argues, was the “human face of a dangerous new form of international terrorism…which became the template for later groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.”

Warrick and I discuss how Carlos laid the groundwork for modern Islamist terrorism, why European states so often caved to his demands, the horseshoe theory of violent extremism, the Soviet Union’s role in facilitating his murderous rampages, and Warrick’s very odd meeting with Carlos in a French prison.

We’re nominated for Signal Awards! Vote for The Moynihan Report for:
Best video podcast
Best guest (William Shatner)
Best episode
Also: The Fifth Column is in the running for Best News & Politics show