On an August night in 1994, French counterespionage agents seized the world`s most feared terrorist from a villa in the Sudan. After more than twenty years Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, alias Carlos the Jackal , had finally been caught. For two decades, he shot and bombed his way to notoriety, always evading arrest partly by his own cleverness, partly through the help of his powerful Palestinian backers, partly through the blunders of western secret services agencies. In a career long shrouded in mystery and myth, Carlos`s most audacious coup was the kidnapping of eleven OPEC oil ministers in Vienna in 1975. Tracing Carlos`s life from his childhood in Venezuela to London, Moscow, Paris, East Berlin, and the Middle East, and using previously untapped files, John Follain tells his full story for the first time.