He first spoke with The Jackal by chance, when Carlos rang from prison while Salas was with the family. "We started out talking in Arabic and then in Spanish. I called him Ilich or 'Comandante Salim', which is his Arabic name. He speaks six or seven languages and is very intelligent. We would talk for up to an hour. He would not let me ask questions – they made him angry. So I just let him talk. He even confessed some of his killings, and I have that taped."
Salas began to work on a website that, among other things, campaigned to have The Jackal repatriated to Venezuela. "To prove the website was close to Ilich, I was given access to a trunk that had been closed for 30 or 40 years – with his school reports and family photos. I spent a lot of time in Vladimir's house, classifying the material." Salas would post texts to La Santé; The Jackal sent them back with neat, handwritten corrections. He also sent prison photographs to put on the site.
By tracking the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera, Venezuelan TV and the internet for mentions of The Jackal, Salas discovered that Chávez himself was one of his biggest fans. "For him, Carlos is not a terrorist but a revolutionary – a model internationalist, like Che Guevara. Just as Che went to fight for other peoples, so Ilich went to fight for the Palestinians. Whenever Chávez mentioned The Jackal, I would record it and send it to him, which he loved."
Not that Salas agrees with Chávez's view of The Jackal. "He is considered responsible for 82 killings; I don't call that being a revolutionary. I call him a terrorist." – though he would probably not, he admits, use the term to his face. "It helps that he is in jail."
Salas updated The Jackal's website from cybercafes, using a different one every time. "I imagine Mossad, the CIA and MI6 being driven mad by the fact that The Jackal's page was updated from Portugal one day, Syria another, and from other countries."
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