the jackal's misspent soviet youth

In the good old days, Illich Ramirez Sanchez, a chubby-cheeked student at Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University in the 1970s, could drink away his fat allowance from home and party with pretty Russian girls on each arm.


Such was the picture that Izvestia painted of the brief Soviet college career of Sanchez, alias Carlos the Jackal, in a report published Wednesday. It is a picture that bears little trace of Sanchez' later 20 year blood-strewn record as a terrorist who left 83 corpses in his wake and ended up this week in a French prison cell.


Carlos, then a simple Illich, was such an ostentatious spendthrift and playboy that University officials requested his father, the millionaire communist from Venezuela, to send him less money. Sanchez senior replied curtly that "his son had never wanted for anything," according to Izvestia.


Illich Ramirez Sanchez had arrived in Moscow in 1968, a chunky, cheerful boy by all accounts with pinchable cheeks. After a brief detour en route to a revolutionary boot camp in Cuba -- another rite of passage his father insisted upon -- Sanchez enrolled in the chemistry department of Patrice Lumumba.


He may never have missed a meal, but he did skip the occasional lecture. "He was an average student," Dimitry Bilibin, the associate dean of Patrice Lumumba, told The Moscow Times. "He was only here for fourteen months, then he took academic leave and never returned."


When he was not downing vodkas and chasing skirts, Sanchez was calling for world revolution among his fellow students. His politics proved to be too much for the KGB. By the late 1960s the Soviet Union was out of the business of exporting world revolution, and it certainly did not want any trouble from a spoiled out of town punk. The KGB paid the young Sanchez a visit, warning him that he had better start concentrating more on chemistry and less on toppling world imperialism.


"They warned him twice," says Yuri Reshitnik, a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior. "After that he took off on his own."


Sanchez may have abandoned his plans for a Communist Party-sponsored education, but by the time he left the Soviet Union he had already done enough networking to launch a distinguished career in international terrorism. While still enrolled at PatriceLumumba he befriended Palestinian students, and, Izvestia says, "was charmed by their idea of armed struggle."


According to Izvestia, Sanchez left Moscow for Jordan in 1970, where he received a crash course in terrorism from the National Front for the Freedom of Palestine. His real debut came two years later when he shot Edward Sieff in the jaw at his London home. Sieff, who was Jewish, owned the chain of Marks and Spencer stores and was known to be sympathetic to Israel.


In spite of the KGB, Sanchez wanted to stay in the Soviet Union. It was the only place, Izvestia reported, where he could imagine settling down. He never trusted the Arab countries that sheltered him. But after the KGB's second warning for "anti-Soviet agitation," he left.


According to unconfirmed Palestinian reports, Carlos was spotted again in the Soviet Union with a group of soldiers back in 1974. But the official word is that Carlos took the hint and left the country of his own accord in 1970. "After that he never came back," said Reshitnik. "And thank God."