He’s an old man now, his face wizened and his world limited to a cell in a former convent that serves as one of France’s maximum-security prisons. He repeats himself and strains to remember details, yet a few names — people who betrayed him or insulted his manhood — still evoke the old rage.
“I should have killed a few more people,” Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the man known popularly as Carlos the Jackal, muttered to me as we sat inches apart in a guarded visitors lounge in the prison, outside Paris. The infamous terrorist whose crimes and extravagant lifestyle inspired dozens of books and Hollywood films now spends his days reminiscing about old conquests. Yet the type of terrorism that was his signature brand is having a remarkable resurgence, and Americans are nowhere near prepared to deal with it.
Unlike the record of Al Qaeda, the emerging threat is little concerned with ideology or religious zealotry. Instead, like Carlos in his prime, it is transactional: covertly arranged acts of mayhem carried out by criminals on behalf of governments seeking to harm their geopolitical enemies. In the 2026 version of terrorism-for-hire, modern-day Carloses use encrypted social media platforms to sign up for what some are calling the violent gig economy.
Evidence gathered by Western law enforcement agencies points to an explosion of such cases, nearly all linked to Russia or Iran. Since 2022 — after Moscow’s full-scale Ukraine invasion, and amid the conflicts spawned by Hamas’s 2023 terrorist attack against Israel — investigators have identified nearly 300 outsourced operations in Europe, Asia and North America by independent operators believed to have been recruited by Russian or Iranian security services.
The crimes range from arson attacks aimed at Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain this past spring, to synagogue bombings and attempted assassinations of journalists, dissidents, Jewish community leaders and even politicians. Among the notorious recent cases was a startling plot against the New York-based Iranian activist Masih Alinejad: The would-be hit man, a Brooklyn pipe fitter and convicted murderer who was among several linked to the assassination attempt, was recruited for the job by an Iranian agent he met in prison.
Such criminals now make up the majority of the perpetrators in Iranian- and Russian-sponsored attacks, according to data collected by the Soufan Center, a New York nonprofit that researches security threats. Many of the recruits are what experts call “disposables”: petty criminals who can be hired for a few hundred dollars. But others are professionals — Russian mobsters, cybercriminals, drug cartel members and human traffickers. Like Carlos in his heyday, they are armed, experienced and adept at operating in the shadows.
“It really is back to the future — a variation on the kind of terrorism that Carlos practiced,” said Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury Department counterterrorism official who has tracked hundreds of Iranian-linked cases as a researcher for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank. “It’s how these countries can reach out and touch adversaries in a way that doesn’t boomerang back on them.”
Carlos’s story is instructive in understanding how mercenary terrorists have been used in the past, and why the global threat is re-emerging now. A native Venezuelan, Carlos was a Marxist whose first terrorist forays were on behalf of Palestinian militants. Later he became an international mercenary, killing and maiming his way across Europe and the Middle East on behalf of a shifting array of powerful clients. By the late 1970s he was the most famous terrorist in the world, a violent and enigmatic figure whose pursuit of luxury and beautiful women made him a tabloid star, and then the template for villains in novels and films including Robert Ludlum’s “Bourne Identity” series, Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow Six” and the director Christian Duguay’s spy thriller “The Assignment.”
Carlos’s later criminal career was a study in state-sponsored terrorism. Today’s “spook-gangster nexus” — a term coined by the International Center for Counterterrorism in The Hague to describe the relation between the criminal underworld and Russian intelligence agencies — hews to the model Carlos pioneered in key ways.
First, for countries that employ them, professional criminal networks function as an off-the-shelf private army. Carlos possessed a huge arsenal of guns and explosives and scores of forged passports that allowed him to slip across borders undetected. The well-armed gangs employed by Moscow and Tehran likewise are built for terrorism and also adept at using encrypted communication and cryptocurrency to elude police. The list of contract killers employed by Iran includes members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang and the international drug kingpin Naji Sharifi Zindashti, who U.S. officials say operates under Iranian protection. With a reputation for both opulence and violence, Mr. Zindashti has invited comparisons to Carlos because of his insistence on a “life of luxury” while carrying out “heinous operations on the government’s behalf,” as one Treasury Department report put it.
Using criminal networks also offers the benefit of plausible deniability. Carlos’s services were prized by Middle East autocracies — Syria, Iraq and Libya were among his employers and supporters — because they could secretly use him to terrorize their enemies with minimal risk of reprisals. Russia and Iran appear to have hit on a similar formula. In recent years, both have shown reluctance to use their own agents or closely allied proxy forces for attacks on Western soil, because of the threat of sanctions and other punitive measures. By using criminal gangs, Moscow and Iran can achieve the same results with far less risk.
From the evidence so far, mercenary terrorists seem to be used mainly to silence or intimidate regime critics — a service Carlos also frequently preformed in his day. Some of the Jackal’s most notorious attacks, such as his 1981 bombing of Radio Free Europe’s studios in Munich, were aimed at journalists and dissidents whose criticism infuriated his powerful clients. Tehran, in particular, appears to be following the same playbook.
In addition to backing the assassination attempt against Ms. Alinejad, Iran has repeatedly hired criminal gangs to go after activists and journalists in Europe. Among the recent high-profile victims was Pouria Zeraati, a presenter for the anti-regime Saudi-funded Persian-language broadcaster Iran International, who was badly wounded in a stabbing outside his London home. British prosecutors charged a pair of Romanians who were believed to have been recruited by Iran.
The evidence so far suggests that both Iran and Russia are exercising caution. Up to now, most attacks have been modest in scope: an assault on a single individual, a bombing using limited amounts of explosives. But both countries appear to be experimenting with the model, testing an array of collaborators and a variety of weapons, including, in recent months, drones, cyberattacks and explosive devices smuggled onto planes.
The scores of incidents have also reconfirmed something Carlos discovered decades ago. If the goal is to covertly attack a powerful enemy without leaving fingerprints, outsourced terrorism offers clear advantages. As a tool, it is, as Soufan Center analysis concluded, “cheap, deniable, decentralized and asymmetric,” and able to be deployed almost anywhere.
Preventing such attacks requires not only a high degree of vigilance, but also alliances: extensive networking with foreign counterterrorism agencies, as occurred in the wake of Al Qaeda’s attacks in 2001. Such cooperation appears to be on the wane in the Trump era. The U.S. intelligence community continues to shed numerous experienced analysts, as the administration shifts its focus to illegal immigration and a mostly fruitless search for left-wing antifa cells and voter fraud.
Western governments were utterly unprepared when Carlos and others of his generation introduced frightening new forms of terrorism decades ago. Carlos’s earliest crimes were also modest — mainly because his employers weren’t yet convinced that he could be trusted. His first attacks included an attempted assassination of a Jewish businessman in London, and the lobbing of a single grenade into a shopping center. The following year, he was shooting rockets at passenger planes.
His ambitions continued to soar. Most chillingly, in the early 1980s, the Jackal facilitated an attack on a French nuclear power plant that damaged a reactor building. No radiation was released because the plant was not yet operational, but Carlos described the attack as a warning. “We have the means to do it,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”
