Book description
This is the latest edition of Colin Smith's best selling - it was
translated into Spanish, French, German and Finnish -1976 biography of
the Venezuelan born terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. Carlos -
Portrait of a Terrorist is the result of painstaking research.
Here is the full story of his transformation from spoilt playboy to
'The Jackal', once the favorite assassin of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine.
Previously updated in 1995, after Carlos was sedated and sacked then
handed over to French commandos in Khartoum, it has been revised
following his latest 2011 conviction by a Paris court for a brutal
series of terrorist bombings committed in 1982 and 1983. Smith's
account blends perceptive eyewitness reportage of Carlos in action
with the memories of friends, acquaintances and at least one lover.
Colin Smith is a historian, novelist and former war correspondent.
In 1972, at the age of twenty-three, he became the Observer's
chief roving reporter and spent the next thirty years covering the
world's trouble spots for the Observer and the Sunday
Times - from Phnom Penh to the Golan Heights, from Saigon to
Sarajevo, from Nikosia to Port-au-Prince. He was named International
Reporter of the Year in the 1974 and 1984 British Press Awards.
Today he is best known for his military histories of Britain's
campaigns against the Vichy French, the 1942 surrender of Singapore
and The Battle of Alamein, which was recently reissued in
condensed form as part of Penguin's e-Book Shorts series.
Smith lives in Nicosia with his wife Sylvia and several cats.
Readers wishing to contact him or find out more about his work should
visit www. colin-smith. info
