One summer day in August 1979, Carlos the Jackal, international terrorist and assassin, managed to lock himself out of his luxury hotel room in Prague, and got so angry that he started running along the corridors yelling and waving a large revolver.

The Venezuelan, born Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, is serving a life sentence in France. But in the 1970s and early 1980s, he lived freely – and sometimes outrageously – under the watchful eye of the communist Czechoslovakian regime, making Prague’s Intercontinental Hotel his second home.

Another infamous guest at the hotel was Abu Daoud, the mastermind behind the Munich Olympic massacre, which took place 45 years ago this week. Daoud visited Prague eight times in the decade after the attack, seemingly with few concerns about his safety. Daoud hired prostitutes and drank heavily. In 1982 he got so drunk with the Iraqi intelligence envoy to Prague that he could hardly stand.

Abu Daoud pictured with a woman 24 hours before being forced to leave Czechoslovakia. Photograph: Security Services Archive, Prague

The revelations have emerged in declassified Czechoslovakian surveillance reports, which referred to Ramirez as Bak (possibly a contraction of one of his aliases). A report dated 24 August 1979 recalls: “Between 18:00 and 19:00 BAK had, most probably by accident, locked himself out of his room. As he was unable to get back into his room he went to see the director of the hotel.”

He was running around with a gun in his hand – first up and down the hallways and later on in his room,” the report says. “This was a larger revolver. BAK was furious. His room was unlocked with a special key.”

Daoud was referred to in the reports as “Rak”, which can mean either crab or cancer.

“At 2:50am RAK stepped out of the Intercontinental. He was bareheaded, dressed in a light brown suit, and brown shoes, not carrying any items,” one report noted. “RAK, with an unsteady walk and hands in his pockets, went to a vehicle parked in front of the main entrance and leaned against it breathing heavily.”

The report concludes: “The manner in which he moved suggested that he was in a very drunken state.”

The two global fugitives and their antics were watched, noted and photographed by Czechoslovakia’s secret police, the StB. The reports, declassified by the Czech government, reveal growing alarm at the behaviour of the men. Ultimately, the authorities managed to get rid of their embarrassing guests.

Carlos the Jackal pictured with his German girlfriend Magdalena Kopp, who went on to become his wife. Photograph: Security Services Archive, Prague

In 1982, possibly alerted to an impending new attack in western Europe, state security services detained Abu Daoud, the commander of Black September, and ordered him to leave, circulating reports of his sex life to other Eastern bloc spy agencies. He would die of kidney failure in 2010 in Syria.

“I will never come back to Czechoslovakia,” he fumed to a hotel employee in the lift after a four-hour StB interrogation. “And I will also tell all my friends and acquaintances to look for another state to operate in. I am a decent person and I have never experienced such treatment anywhere in the world.”

In 1986, the Czech security service informed Ramirez that French intelligence had dispatched a hit squad to kill him. It was a complete lie but it did the job – he left Prague and never came back. He was finally captured eight years later in Sudan. In March this year he proudly told a French court: “No one has executed more people than me in the Palestinian resistance.”

Daniela Richterova, a Slovak researcher at Warwick University who discovered the documents in the Prague archives, said they demonstrated the communist regime’s ambivalent relationship with the two terrorists.

“What we expected to see in the documents was that the Czechoslovak regime supported these guys outright,” Richterova said. “But it’s more complicated. These seemingly omnipotent security services like the StB really didn’t like these non-state actors and didn’t know how to deal with them. These ill-tempered guys came to these orderly states in the Eastern bloc. It wasn’t a good match.”