True Spies Debriefs: Dr. Daniela Richterova on the Jackals in Prague
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Hello, True Spies listeners. Welcome back to our new assignment, True Spies Debrief. In the 1970s and 80s, much of the West believed that the Soviet Union and its satellite states were supporting the world's deadliest terrorist organizations and radical groups. But the truth was rather more complicated.

Dr. Daniela Richterova spent years poring through the archives of the Czechoslovak secret police, and her new book, Watching the Jackals, sheds fresh light on a dark corner of European history. Daniela sat down with True Spies producer Morgan Childs to correct the record, and to share what she unearthed about the most famous jackal of them all.

Daniela, as interested as I am in the new book, I'm particularly interested in how you went about writing it, how you went about researching it. And especially because we've talked to so many researchers and journalists who have had a really difficult time gaining access to intelligence archives in the UK where you're living now.

I know that you did much of your research in Prague and you had a lot of, a wealth of material at your fingertips. Can you kind of talk to me about that and maybe the difference between these two countries? For sure, yes. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, so I mostly worked in archives in Prague, in three different archives. One is the National Archive, which is where most of the Communist Party files are kept. So this is where you'd have...

between President Hussack and Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, and various other documents documenting especially these official visits. And then the second archive I worked in is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs archive in the beautiful Chednetsky Palace.

And there you would, as you'd expect, you have documents documenting official foreign relations and foreign policy meetings with various Arab partners, but also with various Palestinian groups.

But I think the heart and soul of the book is the security services archive, the ABS archive, which is, I guess, is HQ in Prague, but has branches all over the country. And this is where the files of the former state security service. So basically the Czechoslovakia's domestic and foreign intelligence services archives are kept.

kept. And this is an astonishing volume of documents. I don't think anyone's really counted how many documents there are, but they're being more and more released.

you know, every year. So I had the privilege to work with these documents. When I started working on this project about 11 years ago, many of the documents that really make the book were not available yet. So I was kind of knocking on various doors and requesting declassifications of some of the core files that discuss Czechoslovakia's relationship with groups such as the PLO, so the

Palestinian Liberation Organization with various of its factions, such as the Fatah or the PFLP, but also with other groups, such as the group around Carlos the Jackal, basically the Osama bin Laden of the Cold War, as well as Abu Nidal. So this is where all the files that really allowed me to go into the heart of Czechoslovakia's relationship with these groups were. And I guess...

I guess Western researchers who mostly work in the UK and the US, they typically, I guess, but correct me if I'm wrong, complain that they don't have enough materials to work with. So I kind of had the opposite problem here. It was an incredible volume of materials. To give you an idea of what we're talking about, some of the object files, so say a file on international terrorism in the 1970s and 80s, had tens of thousands of pages.

This is all tactical information. There's surveillance reports. There's reports about various meetings, about liaison meetings in the Middle East, in Beirut, or meetings in Prague. So an incredible amount of detail. And also, as opposed to Western archives, none of this is redacted.

So people have a hard time comprehending this when I tell them this, but basically the Czech Republic opted for a very liberal legislation when it comes to dealing with these security services files from the Cold War era as well as from the protectorate era. And they decided that they don't want to...

redact them because these files are basically a way of coming to terms with these two totalitarian eras in the Czech Republic's or Czechoslovakia's history. So basically all the names are there, all the relations are there, you know, information about people's private lives and all that. We also have, apart from these big object files, we have personal files. So

We have files of all STV officers, which is also kind of crazy, or people look at me a little bit as if I were crazy when I say this in the West. We see how their career progressed. We see what they were rewarded for. We see which operations they were a part of, which departments they moved from. And then we also have personal documents or files of various targets.

So, you know, people who would have been subjected to surveillance or various active measures. So kind of the victims of the regime, but also of the agents. So of the people who either voluntarily or involuntarily ended up working for the STB. So there's an incredible amount. But I think that with this incredible amount, there's a couple of challenges that come with this. One of the challenges is how do you handle all of this?

very private information. And I think that that puts extra pressure on us as researchers to really only reveal the stuff that's important for the story and maybe not to reveal bits of people's lives that could embarrass them but don't really have any significance for the overall argument or the story.

I think another challenge is how do you actually process all of these documents? And I've spent years and years, you know, creating crazy timelines and databases and these kind of things. So that's a challenge that maybe not all researchers who work in archives where information is scarce have to deal with.

And maybe the last thing is, I don't want it to seem like there was no destruction of documents or that no documents are withheld. There is some of that as well. There was kind of routine destruction during the Cold War when the service just decided that it doesn't need massive files from the 1950s from its residentura.

in Tripoli, Libya. So we destroyed them, or some of the documents were destroyed at the end of the regime. I'm told that there were quite a lot of barbecues that were being had or barbecue-like fires that were being lit around the time of the Velvet Revolution when officers of the SCB were burning documents. So I've experienced this as well, especially with

personal files of people who would have collaborated with the regime so there's that as well and some documents again especially personal documents personal files several of them which would have been relevant for the book are still withheld are still classified but all the big files actually all of that was declassified over the past 10 years and

And it's really given me a very wealthy ground or broad spectrum of documents to work with for the book. Yeah, and it really has lined up perfectly with the timing of this project, as I understand it.

Yeah, yeah. It was, well, you know, if I didn't have all the core documents, I'd have to, you know, knock on more doors and would have to wait a bit more. So let's just say I was at the right place at the right time. And also I think the archive and related authorities were quite happy to declassify some of these files and to really show this document

thus far dark or obscured corner of Czechoslovakian Middle Eastern history. Well, let's talk about the book. I think maybe first we should begin by sort of defining our terms. The book is called Watching the Jackals, and I'd like to hear you say a bit about how you chose that term, the jackal, and what it refers to. Yeah, so I called the book Watching the Jackals because this

This was always going to be a book about Czechoslovakia's relationship with various Middle Eastern terrorists and revolutionaries, but I didn't want the title to sound too academic or too difficult. So it could have been "Conducting Surveillance on Violent Non-State Actors." But I decided to go for a slightly more catchy title for a number of reasons.

One of them is that actually when I was studying these violent non-state actors, I realized that they reminded me of the main character in Frederick Forsythe's The Day of the Jackal, a famous book that came out in the early 70s and that's now going through a revival because I think that there's a television show with Eddie Redmayne that Frederick Forsythe is also co-writing.

producing, which brings back this story. And that main protagonist, who is called the Jackal, he reminded me of a lot of these actors. He attacked high-profile targets with much precision, and he was feared by various powerful governments. And that's exactly what the Jackals in my book did and how governments responded to them. But I also think that in many ways, they...

were a little bit like wild jackals who typically attacked impacts, also chose their targets with much precision and were quite territorial about their aims and causes, much like these revolutionaries and terrorists I write about who either wanted to secure statehood or, you know,

had a certain ideology that they were looking to fight for or highlight. So that's how I came up

about this title. And I guess watching, and I think we will discuss this a little bit later, the STB adopted a number of approaches towards these jackals. But whether they were their allies or whether they were their foes, they always watched them. So all of their approaches were surveillance-based and they activated them.

all of their surveillance mechanisms in the 1970s and 1980s to understand these new actors who reached out to Czechoslovakia and who started coming to Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s. So you write in the introduction of the book that the book is a response to a kind of call for a more global and less superpower-centric Cold War history. Could you talk a little bit about what you mean by that?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, maybe I'll just ask you quickly in the beginning. In most of your interviews or most of the episodes you guys have, how many are about non-superpowers or how many are about these small middle actors? Oh, no.

Well, you've called us out. I don't have those numbers in front of me, but I'm blushing. No, I mean, it's not about numbers. It's just we all struggle. You know, I teach intelligence at MA level at King's College London, and we do mostly focus on the big intelligence players, on the traditional big intelligence players, on the UK, the US, Soviet Union, Russia, Russia.

friends or others, because that's where most of the sources are. That's where much of the interest is. So I think the book was kind of a call to shift our attention from these, you know, and to look elsewhere and to look at intelligence more globally. And basically, I wanted to kind of present a

a story or write a book that wasn't going to focus on these key players, but was really going to go into the heart of decision making in one of these small, medium powers. And by that, to show that they made their own foreign policy and national security decisions and that they exercised their own agency and kind of had their own interests.

I also wanted to show that I think we need a slightly more nuanced portrayal of some of these actors, because we often tend to look at the Soviet bloc and think these guys all agreed with the same ideology, so they probably behaved the same way, they made the same foreign policy choices, they had the same concerns.

But in the book, I try to highlight how Czechoslovakia was not always on the same page with its ideological brothers and sisters in, say, East Germany or in Hungary, or how it sometimes got a bit upset with Moscow or Moscow got upset with them. So it's also a call to look at the Soviet bloc as not...

not like a homogeneous alliance but but one that has uh quite a lot of diversity and there's you know different different interests and motivations among the players um and then what i also wanted to do in the book and uh obviously not the only one who's doing this there's a

quite a lot of fantastic authors who have written about the Soviet bloc's relationship with various African states or Czechoslovakia's relationship with various African states who have tried to

kind of deliver a more colorful and realistic portrayal of some of the key actors of the Cold War who didn't sit in Washington or Moscow, but say these various non-state actors. And so my goal here was to, again, not kind of throw everyone into the same basket and suggest that, you know, all the Palestinian actors

or violent non-state actors were the same, had the same motivations. The goal was to really show their diversity and how controversial they were often for the Czechoslovaks. How those feelings changed, how sometimes Czechoslovakia was...

very happy to host Arafat and the Czechoslovak president, Gustav Husak, was hugging him and kissing him, you know, and showing a lot of affection. But at other times, they got really upset with Yasir Arafat because of some of the political decisions he made. So the book is kind of a call to look at

the Cold War from a broader perspective to maybe take us out of Washington, take us out of Moscow and look at what these smaller size actors, states, but also non-state actors did. And it's a part of a broader call that I think international historians have been answering over the past decade or so. And there's been some great work in this respect. So I'm kind of joining, I think, a

club of cool kids, of cool historians who are looking at the broader implications and context of the Cold War. So you yourself are Slovak. When you're speaking to somebody who doesn't have a vested interest in that particular part of the world, that particular country, how do you make the case that Czechoslovakia in particular is worthy of

Well, I always say that if you are for some odd reason not interested in Czechoslovak 20th century history, then I think that there's another couple of reasons, important reasons why you should maybe pick up this book and have a read. One is that it's essentially an exceptionally detailed case study in how states use their spies to communicate with various terrorists and revolutionaries.

We don't have similar books about many of the Western states' experience because the archives, as you know from many of the interviews you've done, have not been declassified or the documents have not been declassified. So we are unable to reconstruct many of the Western states' relationship with these important political actors of the 20th century or even now because we just don't have the access. So if people

people are interested in knowing how difficult it is for states to strike alliances with non-state actors or maybe how they struggle to counter them and how they're, how they work on their policies to, to counter these jackals. And I think that this is a, this is a good book to pick up. I think another reason it's, it's, it's a good book to pick up is when people, if people are interested in just,

intelligence services in general, but especially totalitarian intelligence services. I think when we watch various television shows or maybe read various novels, we tend to get the idea that these totalitarian security and intelligence services were quite well-oiled machines, where everyone was kind of on the same page. They knew what their ultimate goals were, had the same ideology.

But that's not really the case. And I think if you dive deeper into Central Eastern European history and Cold War history, you'll understand how there's a whole spectrum of actors here, how often the spies disagree with the Communist Party representatives, how the diplomats sometimes get involved and have complains.

completely different objectives here how these change over time and I think that's important to understand uh especially when we're studying today's totalitarian uh security and intelligence services or um you know services in non-democratic States such as say China or or Russia I think this gives you a good roadmap in what challenges what features what conflicts um

what shifts you're looking for when you're studying today's security and intelligence services. So let's talk a little bit about the Czechoslovak STB. You write about the STB's Swiss army knife approach, you call it, to the Czechos in Prague.

Well, tell me what you mean by that. I guess I developed this argument or this notion that the SCB, the State Security Service, which was basically Czechoslovakia's umbrella institution for domestic and foreign intelligence, functioned a little bit like the regime's Swiss army knife. So it was an organization that developed a number of tools or ways of engaging with these

jackals. With some, it struck an alliance. With others, it didn't. And it tried to prevent them from coming back. With some groups, it tried to infiltrate them and manipulate them. And with

some only handful, but still some of these jackals, it turned to oustings and it decided to oust them. So over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the SCB developed this multi-tool approach towards the jackals. And I thought I'd highlight this because when I started working on this project, many of the people who I talked to in the beginning said, you know, Czechoslovakia supported all these terrorists. They were terrorist supporters.

And frankly, this is what many people in the Reagan administration thought in the early 80s. His head of CIA, Bill Casey, his Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, they all thought that the Soviet Union was kind of

coordinating with its allies in the soviet bloc and international support network for all of these violent non-state actors during the cold war these various terrorists and revolutionaries including many of these palestinian groups i

write about. And when I dived into these extensive Czech archives, I found that that was not really the case. Yes, there were some groups that Czechoslovakia aligned with and created basically a strategic alliance with and trained in various intelligence methods and gave them arms.

But there were many groups that it didn't do this with. So I think one of the big findings of the book is that despite the fact that we thought that this totalitarian service functioned very monolithically and basically was happy to support any violent non-state actors who were unfriendly to the West,

and who they shared this enemy with. Ultimately, this wasn't confirmed by those archives. And we see that much like many other services in the West, that in many other countries, Czechoslovakia had allied with some but countered others. Could I ask you to speak a bit about Alexander Haig? And I don't know, I'm the wrong age to have internalized that piece of history, but the way that the narrative was set decades ago. Yeah.

Yeah, so there is a bit in the book, in the introduction, where I talk about how in the late 1970s, there was a group of mostly conservative US journalists, but also some other British journalists who wrote about what happened.

went down in history as kind of the Soviet terror plot. So an alleged plot by the Soviet Union, which was allegedly supporting these various groups, whether they were German, Italian, Palestinian terrorists or revolutionaries, with the desire to kind of help them to bring down the Western way of life.

And when the first Reagan administration came to power and Alexander Haig became the Secretary of State, so at his first press conference, he talked about how the Soviet Union was running this network and was supporting basically these various jackals and terrorists and revolutionaries in their efforts to attack the West.

And in the early 1980s, there were a couple of so-called NIEs, National Intelligence Estimates, where Bill Casey, who was the director of CIA and others, were trying to kind of find the silver bullet and were trying to find evidence that would support this.

hypothesis and their analysts kept on coming back saying listen yes the Soviet Union and many of the Soviet bloc states are aligned with Fata with the main uh PLO faction which is represented by arafat but this is a strategic partner they're not

hiding much of this. They're supporting them in the UN. This is a part of their approach to national liberation movements. But we can't find kind of evidence you'd like us to find that would show that they also support these other terrorist groups. So there were many allegations, especially in the late 70s and early 80s, that various Central Eastern European countries were supporting these jackals, but there wasn't always enough evidence.

Now we know, I mean, thanks to this book, but other great books that exist about jackals in Poland and jackals in East Germany and Bulgaria, we know that every country kind of had its own approach. They were all allied with the Fatah, that's where, with the Asir Arafat's faction, that's where they were all kind of one, that was a strategic partner. But when it came to Carlos the Jackal,

or Abu Nidal, who was one of the basically most lethal terrorists of the late Cold War era, each country had a different approach. So, for instance, Polish generals established a business relationship with Abu Nidal,

But Romania really feared Abunidal because he staged an attack on their territory. Czechoslovakia also wasn't a fan, and they were basically trying to monitor, watch, and then push out anyone who had anything to do with Abunidal. The same thing when you look at Carlos the Jackal. There's a chapter about Carlos the Jackal where I actually spent quite a lot of time detailing the meetings between the Hungarian service, the Czechoslovak service, and

and the Stasi, the East German service. And you can see there how they have a different approach to this guy. He's really dangerous. And the East Germans are telling their allies, listen, you know, yes, he's dangerous, but he's an ideological ally. So we shouldn't kind of, you know, cut him loose, you know,

So we should give him some support, but he can't be in Berlin. It's too exposed here. You guys should probably take care of him. And, you know, the Czechoslovak comrades, they come back to Prague and they're a little bit horrified and they say, we don't want him around. We don't want to support him. He's a loose cannon. So,

This is basically where I push back against that narrative in the late 70s and late 80s. And other colleagues who've written about Central Eastern European states' relationship with these jackals have pushed back a bit to show that there didn't seem to be a conspiracy because each one of these countries adopted ultimately a different approach to each one of these groups.

So let's zero in on Carlos the Jackal, because I think if we're talking about the Swiss army knife, he's a sort of great way to look at the various approaches over time, over a relatively short amount of time. Could we talk about this sort of watching and waiting and then this tricking and blocking and all of the various ways that you see the STB work sometimes against him and sometimes not?

For sure, yeah. So out of the five, I think, various tools in the Swiss Army knife approach that I have, which is liaison, watching, preventing, then infiltrating and ousting. So the only thing that the STB didn't do with relation to Carlos the Jackal was liaison. So they never struck a...

any kind of cooperation with him or members of his group, although they tried to create a liaison with the STB, the State Security Service. So when Carlos de Jackal, who I think

Many of your listeners will probably know, but those who don't, I'll just maybe say a couple of words about him. So he was a Venezuelan man whose original name was Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. So that's his birth name. Now, he came from a family of who I would call, I guess, a champagne Marxist. So someone who's a rich person who is in favor of Marxist ideas. And his father was

a big fan of Vladimir Lenin and so he named his three sons Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and so Carlos the Jackal or Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez was the second child so that's where the first name is from so he when he went to university he was sent to university in the Soviet Union to the

quite famous Patris Lumumba University, where a lot of students from the global south studied various things from philosophy to law. When he was studying there, he befriended quite a few Palestinians. And when he was kicked out of this university because he wasn't a very studious type, he decided to join the Palestinian struggle. And so in the early mid-70s, he worked with someone called Wadi Haddad, a very famous person within the Palestinian community.

let's say, Jackals milieu. And he was the author of a lot of the early hijackings and various international terrorist attacks that were carried out by the Palestinians. So Carlos the Jackal

aligned with him, but later on fell out. This is another feature that you kind of start seeing throughout the book is that these alliances are very fickle and they often break and are shifted. So Carlos the Jackal then goes solo in the mid late seventies. And this is when he starts coming to Prague. This is when he first comes to central Europe when he's building his own say terrorist enterprise.

And when he first comes in, the Czechoslovaks don't really cop on. They don't quite know that it's him. I think the main feature of this is that this group of people, these jackals, is that they never travel on genuine passports. They all have passports on different names, different nationalities, with different professions.

Some of them are civilian passports. Some of them are diplomatic passports, which I found were issued by embassies of Syria, South Yemen or Iraq. So this is where the first approach, the watching approach or wait and watch approach comes in that when

people like Carlos de Jackal came to Prague, the STB didn't arrest them or call them in for questioning, but they first wanted to find out who they were and how dangerous they were, who they were meeting in Prague and what they were doing there. And so with Carlos de Jackal, they quite quickly found out that he was their

meeting quite a lot of Middle Eastern diplomats. He was there to do some business with them, but he was also there to just kind of, you know, let out steam. He was buying quite a lot of crystal and guns and, you know, all the other fun stuff that tourists in Prague do. We might mention also that at this time, Prague was a relatively liberal place allowing foreigners in, isn't that right? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So maybe not as liberal as in the 60s, but yeah, you would have, I mean, he would also meet with quite a lot of foreign arms dealers. So you'd have Irish nationals there, you'd have Libyan nationals there, you'd have Lebanese, you'd have East Germans. So this wasn't just Czechoslovakian Carlos the Jackal, it was open to people.

people internationally as well. So this was the first approach that they adopted towards the Jackal, which was that they watched and waited and were trying to figure out whether he was a threat or whether he was just coming there to do business with others and let some steam out. And gradually they realized that he was probably not there to attack any Czechoslovak targets, but they still didn't like him. I mean,

They said literally in the documents that he was arrogant and that he was kind of ostentatiously walking around Prague. And that's not what the STB wanted. That's not what the Communist Party wanted. They didn't want basically the Osama bin Laden of the Cold War seen walking through Wenceslaus Square or through, you know, one of the iconic bridges in Prague.

So that's why they gradually shifted to another approach, which I call prevent and block. And so they put Carlos and many of his associates on basically what was Czechoslovakia's PNG list. So as many identities as they knew about were put on this PNG list. And they were hoping that next time Carlos turns up with the same passport, he or one of his associates turns

used that they could kind of stop him on the border. This

It worked a little bit, but it turned out not to be a very effective tool. There is one scene actually where Carlos and his partner Magdalena Kopp, who was from one of the German terrorist groups, so they come to the Czechoslovak embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria to request visas to come to Czechoslovakia. And they are refused this because their names are on this PNG list.

And the poor person who delivered the news was shaking and was really worried that they were going to stage an attack or attack him personally because they weren't provided these visas. Allegedly, Carlos got really upset. Ultimately, they walked away, both Carlos and his partner.

but they did make it to Czechoslovakia again. So they basically just changed their passports and returned back. So Czechoslovakia was ultimately not very successful in preventing or blocking Carlos and his associates from coming back. It didn't quite manage to infiltrate Carlos, although this was one of the tools in the Swiss Army knife approach. It was more successful with infiltrating the Abu Nidal organization as well as the Fatahs.

With Carlos, it obviously ran a number of agents within the so-called Arab agentura, so the kind of agent network. And there were a number of people who they were in frequent contact with who spent time with Carlos in, you know, wining and dining at various locations. But he didn't quite manage to, you know, figure out what his, you know, next steps are, what his plans are, if he's planning any attacks in the West.

So this approach also wasn't very effective and didn't help them, especially to push this guy out. And, you know, in the early 80s, as Alexander Hagan and Ronald Reagan came to power, there was also increased pressure on these states, on these centrists in European states to not align or to, you know, not allow these kind of,

actors to come onto their territory. Now, they didn't know that these states were struggling with keeping these guys out. But there were a couple of meetings in the State Department where some of the U.S. diplomats basically sat the ambassadors of Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, or East Germany down and said, listen, we know these guys come to your

countries and you need to stop this otherwise there's no way we'll be improving our our relations and so i think czechoslovakia is feeling this heat in the early um 80s especially in 82 and that's when it starts adopting the last and quite important um tool from its this approach and that's oustings and it doesn't oust these jackals lightly it really chooses carefully who it

It's very worried about blowback. He knows these are very well trained, mostly men that they have killed before, that they have shot police officers, that they're armed and that they have a support network in Czechoslovakia, mostly the various intelligence and officers and military.

diplomats who are based at the Middle Eastern embassies there. And so they only do this a handful of times, actually. But they do graduate to oustings in 1982. And the first ousting is of someone called Abu Dawood, who was one of the commanders of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.

And one of the most dramatic oustings was that of Carlos the Jackal. And his last visit to Czechoslovakia was in 1986. He came there with his partner, who I mentioned before, Magdalena Kop, who was quite heavily pregnant at the time. So the hypothesis is that they were looking for a place for her to deliver the baby. But Prague really wasn't.

was quite furious when it, when he found out that he came back with this whole entourage and, you know, with a lot of weapons and passports and all that. And so I won't give you too much detail because this is described, I hope in, in quite, quite a lot of detail and with quite a lot of drama in the book. But Czechoslovakia basically activated its diplomats, its spies, its,

um deputy minister of interior went to talk to the palestinian representative in the country the syrian embassy was told not to provide support the special forces units so the czechoslovak version of sas was put on guard and was was kind of put on alert

And ultimately two STB officers came to Carlos the Jackal's hotel room in the Intercontinental, which at the time was a super luxurious hotel. I think now it's being reconstructed. And they came up to his room and they didn't tell him directly that he's not welcome and he needs to leave. But they went for a ruse and they decided to trick him into leaving the country and basically told him that the French know he's in Prague.

and that this could be obviously a problem for him. Now,

I mean, there were probably very few people or countries that Carlos de Jackal was afraid of. But if there were a couple, then France would be somewhere up on the list. And this is because he conducted quite a lot of attacks on French territory. But also he killed two French policemen and an informer in 1975. And this is something that the French services and law enforcement never forgot.

And so he was really being hunted by the French. And he knew that if someone was going to get him, it would be the French. And so after some pushback, when he didn't quite believe this story, he then decided that basically he ran out of options. He had no more friends in Prague, packed up his pregnant wife, his guns and diplomatic passports, and he was escorted back.

special team to the airport that we all use when we fly into Prague and was put on a flight and as far as I know, never returned to Prague. Yeah, it really is a dramatic story. And you've unspooled it beautifully towards the end of the book. But I should say, you know, Carlos could have been arrested. And of course, he wasn't. And I'd love to hear you talk about why that was.

Yeah, so as I say in the book that all of this Swiss Army knife approach was all good and well, that there were all these methods that Prague tried to put in place in order to keep the jackals out, but basically this approach lacked the ultimate finale, right? Which we would expect, especially in a post-911 world, we'd be very surprised if...

a country saw an international terrorist buying crystal in one of its shops and would just let them go. But counterterrorism worked a little bit differently at the time. Counterterrorism in the 1970s and 80s wasn't

a different animal than that after 9-11. And I think that actually when you look at the global history of international terrorism and maybe some of France's approach or Germany's, West Germany's approach to some of these jackals, you'd see that quite a few of them were not arrested even in the West...

But, and, you know, some of the reasons why they weren't were shared by the East and were the same reasons why Czechoslovakia didn't arrest them. One of the main reasons that they would have shared was that these countries were worried about blowback.

And there were two types of blowback that they were worried about if they had arrested someone like Carlos the Jackal or Abu Dawood or Abu Nidal. First was kind of political blowback. All of these groups were at one stage or another associated with various powerful Middle Eastern governments, either with Libya or Iraq or Syria or South Yemen. And

like Czechoslovakia were running and were leading quite significant and expensive infrastructure engineering projects. They were building hydroelectric plants. They were building massive infrastructure projects across the Global South, including in many of these countries. So the last thing that they wanted was

for these countries to cut off these relations, these economic relations with them. Many countries in the West obviously bought oil from these countries and also had other business interests there. So I think this was a shared reason why some of these countries didn't arrest the jackals. And the more tactical,

The one was that they were just really worried about physical blowback. So there were many cases when in the West, members of the Red Army faction were imprisoned or were arrested, and then their comrades from their respective terrorist groups tried to free them by hijacking that country's planes or by attacking that country's embassy abroad. So there was...

actually fear of blowback. And you can see this in the Czechoslovak documents, that the Czechoslovaks are really worried about whether, you know, Carlos the Jackal's companions, friends, allies were maybe going to attack Czechoslovakia after he was ousted. And these were constant considerations. But

But also for Czechoslovakia, it was one of the reasons why they never arrested them was just the politics of the time. This was happening in a polarized world where, you know, it was polarized based on ideological differences.

And at the time, the East and West just didn't imprison the other high profile or attackers or adversaries. So it was kind of inconceivable for the East to be arresting people who were sought

in the west and vice versa and also just maybe two more things one is that there was no formal pressure on czechoslovakia to do this because czechoslovakia at the time was not a part of interpol so it didn't you know feel this this you know arrest these actors and also it had um

business interests not just in Arab states, but in many other states. One of the largest arms producers in the 20th century. And it didn't want this business to suffer in any way, especially when it came to Libya, but also other countries, and was worried that maybe arresting some of these jackals could also result in this economical blowback.

Well, so this begs a question about the present day, I think. I mean, you obviously make the point in the book that when we look at the last couple of decades of the Cold War, we're really seeing this kind of trend of this increasing clash between security states and non-state foreign actors.

And I'm curious how the way that Czechoslovakia interacted with these jackals and radicals and terrorist groups compares to the way that you're seeing or we're seeing states interacting with non-state actors today. That's a really great question. So I talked to quite a few people who have, say, been following Iran's alliances with various countries.

violent non-state actors with various terrorist groups in the Middle East. And I think what those stories share with the story I write about in the book is that these are never easy alliances. This is never a walk in the park, although this is how they're often presented, that they have joined enemy or they have a joined ideology or in some cases they've joined religion. So they must be working smoothly together to attack their targets. There's always challenges.

And I think the challenges that we see in the book are present in today's alliances with the jackals of today as well. They are quiet, unpredictable actors. They often change alliances because they are often led by people who are slightly fickle.

The groups themselves are often divided along ideological lines or there's challengers to the leadership. So that also impacts these alliances. And they are often on the lookout for other sponsors for people or countries who are maybe more generous or who put less pressure

pressure on them or who maybe give them a more free reign. So one thing that we see in the book is that Czechoslovakia often drew red lines and didn't want to let their liaison partners go further than it would want them to go. So, for instance, the Palestinians suggested that they could stage some assassinations or kidnappings for Czechoslovakia and Czechoslovakia had to draw those boundaries quite

quite harshly. And I think that with some states, we might also see that today, is that the non-state actors are often willing to go further than the states because they don't have the same reputational risk concerns

as some states do. So in other words, if you're a leader of a slightly rogue state listening to us today and you want to align with violent non-state actors, this is not going to be an easy ride. And the book tells you in what ways this is so. Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to talk to you and it's a really great book. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for tuning in for The Debrief. We're so happy to have you along for the ride.

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The plan was for us to stay at a hotel in Bratislava called the Devin. And then Arnold and I would go to dinner in the hotel restaurant. And at some point, a Slovak agent with the code name Ina would approach our table or make some small talk or find some excuse to come and talk with us. And all the magic would presumably happen from there. All the magic? What exactly was the plan?

Mark's file laid out all the inconceivable details. I would be so taken with this person that we would continue our relationship and the relationship would grow and eventually I would bring her over to Vienna to be with me. And there's even a line in the file, something like, in the best circumstance, Ina will move to Vienna to be with Inter as his partner or his wife. They were arranging a kind of sleeper wife for me.

True Spies. With me, Sophia DiMartino. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.

As a longtime foreign correspondent, I've worked in lots of places, but nowhere as important to the world as China. I'm Jane Perlez, former Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. On Face Off, the US versus China, we'll explore what's critical to this important global relationship. Trump and Xi Jinping, AI, TikTok, and even Hollywood. New episodes of Face Off are available now, wherever you get your podcasts.