Tracking the Jackal: The Search for Carlos, the Worlds Most Wanted Man
by By Yallop, David
Category: Social Science , General

David Yallop spent ten years on the trail of the mysterious Carlos the Jackal, a man accused of some of the most heinous acts in the annals of international terrorism: the attack on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers, the massacre at Lod airport in Tel Aviv, and scores of bombings, murders, and hijackings. He found his man. But it was what he discovered along the way that shocks and surprises most.Yallop's intrepid search led him into dangerous territory. He was in Beirut at a time when Westerners were being kidnapped and murdered in alarming numbers, and his guide was killed mysteriously. He continued his investigations in Tripoli, Tunis, Caracas, Tel Aviv, Damascus, Vienna, London, and Paris, moving through the murky worlds of terrorists and counterterrorists, intelligence and counterintelligence, spies and double agents. He drank orange juice with Colonel Qadaffi in his tent, talked until dawn with Yasser Arafat in a basement in Tunisia, and visited Carlos's old school chums in Venezuela and in quiet London neighborhoods. Tracking the Jackal is a real-life story about the world that Frederick Forsyth, John le Carre, and Tom Clancy turn into fiction - a world that runs on intrigue and deception, with governments and security forces operating outside their own laws when they see fit. Carlos himself turns out to be almost a mythical creation of that world, employed by various sinister forces for their own purposes. Tracking the Jackal reads like a thriller, but it is a major work of investigative reporting that reveals a complex web of political corruption and betrayal.