In 1975, a Venezuelan Marxist-Leninist walked into OPEC headquarters in Vienna with a team of German leftists and Palestinian PFLP operatives.
His name: Ilich Ramirez Sanchez.
Codename: Carlos the Jackal.
He worked under Wadie Haddad’s PFLP-Special Operations, a splinter of George Habash’s PFLP secular, Marxist-Leninist, anti-Western.
He shot a Jewish businessman in London (1973). He tried to bomb Bank Hapoalim’s London branch. He fired RPGs at El Al planes at Orly. He threw a grenade into the Drugstore Publicis in Saint-Germain (1974) - two dead, 34 wounded.
Then Vienna. He seized 11 oil ministers, killed three people, and walked away with a ransom estimated at $20–50M reportedly fronted by an Arab head of state (widely believed to be Gaddafi). He kept much of it for himself. The PFLP expelled him in 1976.
He was finally caught in Khartoum in 1994.
That’s when the strangest figure in the story stepped in: *François Genoud*.
A Swiss banker from Lausanne. Met Hitler in 1932. Stayed a Nazi for life “Hitler was a great leader, and if he had won the war the world would be a better place today,” he told a London paper in 1992.
He was the literary executor of Goebbels and Bormann. He laundered Nazi assets through Swiss accounts. He helped found the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva to bankroll the Algerian FLN.
He paid for Eichmann’s defense. Then Klaus Barbie’s. Then Carlos’s. He had known Carlos since the early ’70s through Wadie Haddad who called him “Sheikh François.” When Carlos was extradited to Paris, Genoud wired him money, visited him in prison, and hired Jacques Vergès to defend him.
In prison, Carlos converted to Islam. In 2003 he published L’Islam révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Islam). He praised Osama bin Laden.
He called 9/11 a “lofty feat.” He argued that with communism dead, Islamism was the only transnational force left to defeat the West and that atheist leftists should fall in behind it.
That’s the brown-red-green alliance in a nutshell.
@_j0sh_a_