Frederick Forsyth
Why I fought for Marine A
One day in the next few weeks, the doors of HMP Erlestoke will swing open and Alexander Blackman will walk out into the arms of his wife after three and a half long years of confinement. The plan, as it stands, will be quite different to the jubilant scenes outside the Royal Courts of Justice last week, where hundreds of supporters gathered to cheer the news that the soldier formerly known as Marine A will soon be a free man.
Only a tight inner circle of those closest to Blackman are expected outside the prison. Among them will be a person Blackman has never met, nor indeed spoken to. But as much as anybody, the bestselling author Frederick Forsyth has helped secure his release.
“I want to be one of the first to shake his hand when he gets his freedom,” Forsyth says. “Hopefully, as the door opens, I can be there with that knot of people on the pavement to say: ‘well done, you’ve survived.’”
The 78-year-old Buckinghamshire writer Forsyth, who made his millions through spy thrillers such as Day of the Jackal, has been an unexpected figure at the heart of the campaign to release Alexander Blackman.
Last month, when Blackman, 42, had his murder conviction for shooting a gravely injured Taliban insurgent in Afghanistan reduced to manslaughter, his defence barrister hailed Forsyth as the “hero of the hour”. Blackman’s wife, Claire, who has fought for years to free her husband, was described as the “heroine”.
Since deciding to take up the case, Forsyth has cajoled politicians, ministers and high-level contacts racked up over the decades. (In 2015, the author disclosed that he worked as an MI6 agent for 20 years during the Cold War.) He paid for the original court transcripts to find flaws in the murder conviction of Blackman, a hearing he describes as “highly biased”. He also fronted up the initial costs (since repaid through a crowd- funding appeal) of hiring a new defence team – headed by his friend Jonathan Goldberg QC. One presumes such an outlay would stretch well into the thousands. “Pounds” is all Forsyth gives away with an arched eyebrow.
But when we meet in a Marylebone hotel prior to Blackman’s release, Forsyth dismisses any talk of heroism on his part as “nonsense”.
“I very rarely become angry but on this occasion I did,” he says. “What was done to that man was so unnecessary and vengeful by people who had never been near combat.”
If this story has heroes, then it also has villains – and on that Forsyth is resolute. In April 2011, the then Royal Marine Sergeant Blackman and the detachment of young troops underneath him were deployed to Nad-e Ali – at the time the “most dangerous square mile on earth”.
Forsyth calls not just their mission, but the whole of Operation Herrick XIV “badly designed, devised executed and officered”. In Blackman’s sector alone, he says, 45 soldiers lost their legs and seven their lives.
By mid-September, when Blackman turned his rifle on the Taliban fighter left injured in a field after being shot by an Apache helicopter and uttered the now infamous order to “shuffle off this mortal coil”, Forsyth says he was “a destroyed man”.
The Court Martial Appeal Court heard in February how Blackman had been failed by “shockingly bad” leadership, and felt he had been abandoned by senior officers. The court heard that the former commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ewen Murchison, only visited the Marines’ remote camp once or twice. Lt-Col Murchison was replaced by Colonel Oliver Lee (who has since resigned his commission in disgust at the treatment of Blackman) shortly before the shooting, and on the day itself was escorting the pop singer Cheryl Cole around Camp Bastion.
Forsyth points the finger at both Lt-Col Murchison and Lieutenant-General Ed Davis, now the Governor of Gibraltar and the Royal Marine commander of 3 Commando Brigade during the fateful Afghan tour in 2011.
“I think they should lay down their commissions,” he says. “He served loyally and bravely and in the face of great danger for years and when he made one mistake, they cut him loose.”
Forsyth is also damning of Blackman’s treatment by the Ministry of Defence. “These are mandarins who sit in their offices and have never been in danger in their lives,” he says. “Few opportunities escape them to penalise fighting soldiers in some way.”
As for the original defence team headed by Anthony Berry QC, who it has emerged Blackman is planning on launching civil action against for professional negligence, Forsyth calls them “a disgrace”. He says “they practically talked him into jail”.
As a national serviceman, Forsyth spent two years as a pilot officer in the RAF. He then moved into journalism and, during a career working for Reuters and then the BBC, found himself on the frontline of numerous conflicts. It is the reporter in him, he says, that prompted him to begin investigating the story of Marine A.
“Journalists have got gut feelings,” he says. “Sometimes the British people do, too, and you just know something is odd. I purchased the court transcript, a big document 12 inches high, and read it cover to cover. Oddities sprang from every page.” Forsyth then started working behind the scenes on the campaign to have Blackman moved from Category B Lincoln Prison, a place he describes as “full of maniacs, sadists, rapists and thugs of every kind of description”.
In the summer of 2015, Blackman was sent to Category C Erlestoke in Wiltshire. Those who have been to visit say he has embarked on a degree and is helping teach literacy and fitness to other inmates.
Forsyth was also instrumental in hiring Jonathan Goldberg QC to form a new defence team. The author first came across the barrister when Goldberg represented the convicted conman and bankrupt Roger Levitt, whose business empire collapsed in 1990 owing £34 million – £2.2 million of which Forsyth claims belonged to him. Despite the scale of the allegations, Levitt was required to serve only 180 hours of community service. “We met a while later and he was very defensive because he thought I was going to slog him one,” Forsyth recalls. “I said, ‘No, you did a brilliant job.’”
Overall for the great spy writer, he says the tale of Marine A has been one about loyalty. The bond shared between brothers-in-arms which sent Blackman and his comrades across the killing fields of Helmand day after day. And the same strength of feeling which has prompted hundreds of former Royal Marines to parade outside the law courts in support of Blackman for every hearing over the past few years.
“Why do you think a Marine crawls into a minefield to get one of his mates with no legs crying for help?” he says. “They don’t do it for God, Queen, King or country; they do it because it’s their mate out there.” That, Forsyth says, is true loyalty. And as for those who turned their backs when the flak rained down on Alexander Blackman, theirs was an act of gross betrayal.
‘What was done to that man was so vengeful’