A Terrorist Emeritus.

To most of the West, Carlos had become more historical curiosity than pernicious threat. “He’s a terrorist emeritus,” says Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism official. The CIA monitored his whereabouts for two decades and photographed him during his refuge in Damascus, but the U.S. never had a warrant for his arrest. The agency, Newsweek has learned, tracked him to Khartoum shortly before his capture and tipped off French intelligence. Carlos had by then been rendered all but irrelevant by the fall of communism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which wanted no part of the 44-year-old Venezuelan. He spent the past years laying siege to Guinness PLC, which makes Johnnie Walker Scotch.

Nabbing Carlos proved a coup for French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua. Charged alternately with being too tough and too lax on Muslim fundamentalists, Pasqua eagerly took credit for the cap-ture, despite allegations in the local press that France traded funds or military intelligence to Sudan for Carlos. Pasqua may have boosted his chances in next year’s presidential elections. Carlos would appreciate the irony; he himself was no slouch at mythmaking. Authorities blamed him for masterminding some of the world’s most chilling deeds – the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the hijacking of a French jet to Entebbe, Uganda – even when he had no role in them. Carlos loved the notoriety, but now he’ll pay for being a man the West couldn’t forget.