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By Movieguide® Staff
FOX Nation is taking a hard look at one of the 20th century’s most elusive killers in a new investigative docuseries hosted by former Navy SEAL sniper and #1 New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr.
“I grew up reading about Carlos the Jackal in any publication I could find that reported on him and his attacks,” Carr said. “As a kid, I could not understand how intelligence services across the globe were unable to track him down and bring him to justice.”
JACK CARR INVESTIGATES: CARLOS THE JACKAL premiered June 29 on FOX Nation as a three-part series exploring the life and crimes of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez — better known as Carlos the Jackal — the Venezuelan-born Marxist terrorist who spent decades outrunning the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agencies. The series features what producers describe as the only known recorded interview with Carlos himself, offering a rare window into the mind of the man who took credit for more than 80 murders.
Lauren Petterson, President of FOX Nation, made the announcement on June 24.
“We are proud to partner with Jack on this compelling new series to bring his unique perspective of special operations and knowledge of national security to the FOX Nation audience,” Petterson said. “His extraordinary insights in this series provide an unprecedented look at one of the most notorious terrorists of the modern era and the global effort to bring him to justice.”
Carr spent 20 years in Naval Special Warfare, rising from enlisted SEAL sniper to commanding Special Operations Task Units in Iraq and Afghanistan. His thriller series featuring fictional Navy SEAL James Reece launched with THE TERMINAL LIST, which became the #1 show on Amazon Prime Video starring Chris Pratt. But here, the target is real.
Related: Chris Pratt Confirms Role in Season 2 of THE TERMINAL LIST
Carlos led the 1975 OPEC headquarters raid in Vienna — three dead, 11 oil ministers held hostage — then spent the following decade running a network of bombings, kidnappings, and hijackings, sheltered all the while by the East German Stasi and Soviet KGB. He called himself a “professional revolutionary.” Intelligence agencies called him something worse.
He evaded capture for more than two decades before French agents, working with Sudanese officials, nabbed him in Khartoum in 1994. He is now serving multiple life sentences in France.
Carr noted in the press release that some of the terrorists Carlos inspired later appeared on American target decks after Sept. 11, 2001. That connection — from a Cold War-era ideologue to the post-9/11 world — is part of what makes this story more than historical curiosity.
The name “Carlos the Jackal” itself has an ironic origin: a journalist discovered a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Day of the Jackal in one of Carlos’s safe houses, and the nickname stuck. Movieguide® has previously reviewed THE JACKAL, the 1997 movie loosely based on Forsyth’s novel, though the fiction barely kept pace with the real thing.
Through firsthand accounts from former CIA and FBI officials and those directly involved in the global manhunt, JACK CARR INVESTIGATES reconstructs pivotal moments from Carlos’s decades-long reign of terror — assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings and the intelligence failures that let him slip the net again and again. Bright North Studios produced the series for FOX Nation in collaboration with Kuma Studios, NGI Productions, and Kan 11, with director Yaron Niski helming all three episodes and Solly Granatstein serving as showrunner and executive producer.
There is something bracing about a series that refuses to romanticize its subject. Carlos styled himself as a revolutionary, but the body count tells a different story. Carr, who spent his career standing between civilians and the men who wanted to harm them, is well positioned to make that case.
JACK CARR INVESTIGATES: CARLOS THE JACKAL streams June 29 exclusively on FOX Nation.
Read Next: THE TERMINAL LIST Team Call Real-Life Bond ‘A Blessing’
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