In September 1976, Sánchez was arrested in Yugoslavia, flown to Baghdad, and released there. He chose to return to Aden. When the leader of the PFLP died suddenly in March 1978, Sánchez recruited the best agents from within the leaderless group, as well as other nationals, to form his own group of terrorist mercenaries, named the Organization of Arab Armed Struggle. The agents included German divorcee Magdalena Kopp, who went on to become Sánchez’ wife in January 1979.
The group established relations with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Cuba’s Fidel Castro and East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. Records that became available after German reunification showed that the Stasi provided him with an office and safe houses in East Berlin, a support staff of 75, a service car, and allowed him to carry a pistol while in public. From here, Sánchez is believed to have planned his attacks on several European targets, including the bombing of the Radio Free Europe offices in Munich in February 1981.
The records also showed that he was connected to the KGB via the Stasi. When Leonid Brezhnev visited West Germany in 1981, Western intelligence expected terrorist activity, but the KGB asked Sánchez to refrain from performing any attacks. Sánchez also had a relationship with the leadership of Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, which the Stasi asked him to use to tone down the Armenian group’s anti-Soviet activity.
The documents also revealed that Sánchez was not the master terrorist who worked in lockstep with ruthlessly efficient regimes to launch attacks in the west as he was depicted in the media such as the epic, multi-part film and TV miniseries Carlos was released in 2010 and traces the terrorist’s life from the 1970s through the 1980s. Instead, he was an arrogant, demanding, and unreliable terrorist entrepreneur who manipulated the anxieties of insecure decisionmakers and the ignorance of security officials from the Baltic to the Black Sea until they finally ran out of patience.
The Organization of Arab Armed Struggle’s first attack may have been a failed rocket attack on the Superphénix French nuclear power station on January 18, 1982. The next month French police arrested Kopp and a Swiss associate carrying weapons and explosives in a car. Prosecutors stated they were planning an attack on the Kuwaiti embassy.
Sánchez demanded her release and, when the French failed to comply, he arranged for France to be struck by a wave of terrorist attacks, including: the bombing of the Paris-Toulouse TGV ‘Le Capitole’ train on March 29, 1982, that was supposed to have been carrying former French President Jacques Chirac (5 dead, 77 injured); the car-bombing of the newspaper Al-Watan al-Arabi in Paris on April 22, 1982 (1 dead, 63 injured); the bombing of the Gare Saint-Charles in Marseille on December 31, 1983 (2 dead, 33 injured), and the bombing of the Marseille-Paris TGV train (3 dead, 12 injured) on the same day. The French continued to refuse to release Kopp, who was given a four-year sentence for her part in the failed reactor attack.
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