The preface of the novel consists of two real-life newspaper articles from 1975 about terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as "Carlos the Jackal."

They also find he has amnesia, apparently as a result of a traumatic head injury, with occasional erratic intrusions or flashbacks to the past, but is unable to make sense of them.

The only definite evidence of his former life is a small film negative found embedded in his hip containing the information required to access a bank account in Zurich.

Once in Paris, Bourne learns that his attackers' leader may be "Carlos," who is described as the most dangerous terrorist of his time, responsible for numerous killings in many countries and well connected in the highest government circles.

The plot is called Treadstone Seventy-One, and the truth is known only to eight men selected by covert agencies of the U.S. government; everyone else assumes Cain to be a real person.

They are entirely convinced of his guilt when Carlos has two of his operatives storm the building in which Treadstone is based and kill those inside, and then frame Bourne for the murders.

When the General hears about it, he kills his wife, but Bourne takes the blame in order to bait Carlos into following him to the United States.

The epilogue sees St. Jacques being told about Bourne's past, most of which had been revealed in fragments already: He had been an American Foreign Service officer stationed in Asia during the Vietnam War as part of an operation codenamed Medusa.

[2] ABC News speculated that the name was actually "most likely" inspired by Ansel Bourne, a famous 19th-century psychology case due to his experience of a probable dissociative fugue.

The rare and controversial dissociative fugue has been described "a state in which an individual has lost their identity" by Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter.

The story was also partially adapted in the 1989 Tamil language film Vetri Vizha starring Kamal Haasan.

[4][5] The 2002 film The Bourne Identity starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente and Chris Cooper has largely modernized the material and is only very loosely based on the central premise of the novel.