Frederick Forsyth: My 20 years as an MI6 spy
BESTSELLING author Frederick Forsyth has revealed that he worked as an MI6 agent for more than 20 years.
The writer broke his silence to detail how he ventured behind the Iron Curtain and to Africa on unpaid missions to help Queen and country.
In return for his work, Forsyth was later able to contact MI6 to check information for his books – which include hit thriller The Day of the Jackal – although the relevant passages always had to be approved by spy chiefs. The author, 77, divulged the secrets from his past ahead of the publication of his autobiography.
He said he was first approached by MI6 in 1968 while working as a journalist in Africa.
His most dangerous mission – a trip into communist East Germany in 1973 – took place just after the release of his second novel, The Odessa File.
Forsyth’s mission was to exchange packages with a Russian colonel working as an asset deep inside East Germany.
The author’s Triumph Vitesse car was altered by the secret service so that documents could be hidden inside the engine. He then travelled across Europe to Dresden, using the cover story that he was visiting the city’s Albertinum art museum.
He met the undercover colonel in the museum toilet, where Forsyth ‘nodded’ at two adjacent cubicles.
‘He took one, I took the other. Under the cubicle partition came a fat package of paper. I took mine and slid it the other way,’ he wrote.
‘I defy anyone to resist the small worm of anxiety in the pit of the stomach at that moment. Is the place about to be invaded