Carlos the Jackal (Aidan Quinn) makes a chilling entrance in 1974, blending charisma with danger. The sequence opens with a heated moment of intimacy, then a cruel detail: he kills a spider with a cigarette before evicting the woman from his room. He slips into a disguise and walks into a cafe where a CIA operative sits at a table. The agent, Donald Sutherland as Henry Fields, doesn’t recognize the man in front of him due to the ruse. Carlos casually asks for a light, and when the moment of recognition never comes, the Jackal detonates a grenade, tearing through the room and leaving dozens dead in the wake of his calculated violence.
A year later, Carlosmontage-level audacity continues as he launches an attack on an OPEC meeting in Austria, aiming to secure a ransom. To identify and neutralize him, the CIA sends Fields, who harbors a darker goal—to assassinate Carlos with a concealed pistol. The mission nearly succeeds, but a higher-ranking CIA chief thwarts the plan at a pivotal moment: preventing a handshake that could have photographed Fields and marked him as the killer.
The plot thickens years later in 1986, when Carlos seems to be captured in an open-air market in Jerusalem. He’s brutally interrogated by Mossad commander Amos, portrayed by Ben Kingsley. The man claims to be Annibal Ramirez, a US naval officer whose identification went missing during the arrest. Amos, stunned to see a man who resembles Carlos, confirms the claim and releases him. Back in the United States, Fields—now going by the alias Jack Shaw—approaches Ramirez with a bold proposition: impersonate Carlos to mislead his enemies. Ramirez, unsettled by the idea, refuses at first.
Shaw refuses to quit, returning to Ramirez with a persuasive argument about the human cost of Carlos’ terrorism. He escorts Ramirez to Bethesda Naval Hospital to show him a boy crippled by a Carlos bomb, a stark reminder of what’s at stake. The CIA, eager to seize control of the operation, arranges training for Ramirez at a former Canadian prison. The program emphasizes situational awareness and the seduction of Carlos’ own habits—down to the way he breathes, moves, and even conducts intimate rituals. The process culminates with Carla, one of Carlos’ ex-mistresses, Céline Bonnier teaching Ramirez how to mimic Carlos’ sexual persona.
The plan is designed to convince the KGB, Carlos’ financiers, that Ramirez has begun feeding information to the CIA. Shaw nudges Agnieska, another former lover, to Libya, where Ramirez presents himself as legitimate. But Agnieska has shifted sides and is now an informant for French intelligence. French agents arrive at their apartment, forcing Ramirez to kill them and scrambles the carefully laid ruse.
Carlos responds by dispatching an assassin to eliminate Agnieska in France, instructing him to slip out of Europe via London. The Heathrow encounter—happening almost by chance at the same moment Ramirez arrives—tests the ruse, as the assassin realizes Ramirez is an impostor after failing to recognize a code phrase. A tense struggle follows, and Amos and the assassin end up killing one another. With Amos dead, the CIA suspends the operation and Ramirez returns home.
The undercover mission begins to take a toll on Ramirez’s personal life. He and his wife engage in the same intimate behavior Carlos would, leaving her unsettled by the change in him. At his son’s little league game, a confrontation with another father escalates toward violence, and Shaw bails him out of jail. Ramirez accuses Shaw of manipulating events to lure him into the mission, while Shaw hints at using Ramirez’s family as bait should he back out. That night, Ramirez finally reveals the scope of the mission to his wife.
In East Berlin, Ramirez and Shaw reassemble, and the KGB photographs them, assuming Carlos has been turned. A raid on Carlos’ safe house fails to recapture him, and he manages to escape, prompting a tense chase to the banks of the Spree River. The river showdown ends in tragedy and confusion: one man is held underwater, Shaw aims to save the other by firing at the captor, and he discovers too late that he has shot Ramirez while Carlos slips away. Ramirez urges Shaw to finish the job, but Shaw insists that the plan has already achieved its objective—Carlos is now the KGB’s target.
Back home, a car bomb seemingly takes Ramirez and his family from the scene, and Shaw attends the funeral. In St. Martin, Ramirez receives a news clipping about the bombing with a note from Shaw, implying that the supposed killing was staged to free the Ramirez family. The weary agent nervously eyes a spider in its web, nearly repeating Carlos’ fate but choosing restraint instead. The story closes with Carlos finally being arrested in 1994, a final chapter closing on the scale and consequences of decades of covert warfare.
