The Jackal Speaks (BBC4) 

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As romantic gestures go, none could be more dramatic.

When Carlos the Jackal’s girlfriend, terrorist Magdalena Kopp, was jailed, he threatened to blow up nuclear power stations until she was released.

To convince the French authorities this was no hoax, he sent a letter signed with his own fingerprint. At the time, in 1982, he was the world’s most wanted man, with a rocket attack at Orly Airport in Paris among his long tally of crimes.

At first, the French refused to negotiate, even after Carlos bombed a train and a newspaper office. 

But when they realised that his private terror network — funded by huge paydays from Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi and other Arab dictators — really could destroy an atomic reactor, they caved in.

Kopp, a former member of the Baader-Meinhof gang, was freed. Shortly after that, she married Carlos in Lebanon.

‘I could have killed 100,000 people, irradiated half the country,’ he boasted, in The Jackal Speaks. It’s the sort of fantastical coup that Eddie Redmayne, as an international hitman in Sky Atlantic’s thriller The Day Of The Jackal, might pull off.

When Carlos the Jackal¿s (pictured) girlfriend, terrorist Magdalena Kopp, was jailed, he threatened to blow up nuclear power stations until she was released

When Carlos the Jackal’s (pictured) girlfriend, terrorist Magdalena Kopp, was jailed, he threatened to blow up nuclear power stations until she was released

To convince the French authorities this was no hoax, he sent a letter signed with his own fingerprint

To convince the French authorities this was no hoax, he sent a letter signed with his own fingerprint

This documentary, produced by an Israeli company, set out to debunk the myths around the Jackal, now 75 and a prisoner in a French jail for the past 30 years

This documentary, produced by an Israeli company, set out to debunk the myths around the Jackal, now 75 and a prisoner in a French jail for the past 30 years

This documentary, produced by an Israeli company, set out to debunk the myths around the Jackal, now 75 and a prisoner in a French jail for the past 30 years. 

It made much of his vanity, his alcoholism and his slow slide into irrelevance as the fad for Communist revolutions died out.

But it forgot that Carlos — whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez — is still a global hero and a revered freedom fighter . . . in his own mind. 

This 90-minute film was based around phone interviews taped with the assassin from his cell in solitary confinement.

Experts including Carlos’s biographer Dr Daniela Richterova and his former controller in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Bassam Abu Sharif, gave their analysis of his personality: narcissistic, reckless, pleasure-loving, needy for praise and attention.

The problem is, if you allow a man like that to tell his own life story, he will talk about all the wrong bits. 

Carlos isn’t interested in discussing how he planned his kills: the logistics seem to bore him. 

And he certainly doesn’t care about the dozens of people he killed — their lives are meaningless to him.

Instead, there was a lot of boasting: ‘I was the best shot, I shot better than anybody else.’ And he spent a long time reminiscing about his parents and his childhood in Caracas, Venezuela.

It was half an hour before we heard about the first assassination attempt, when he walked into a house in St John’s Wood, London, and shot the chairman of M&S, Joseph Sieff, in the face.

Incredibly, Sieff — who was also vice president of the British Zionist Federation, survived. The bullet was deflected by his teeth. ‘Good advert for the Milk Marketing Board,’ he joked. Now there’s a line that belongs in a thriller.

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