Was Freddie Forsyth a real-life 007?
Sex with a Czech spy. Posing as an arms dealer. Now thriller writer’s memoirs are set to tell his most explosive story of all by Guy Walters
For more than 40 years, millions of us have been thrilled by his stories featuring the very shadiest of characters: terrorists, spies, assassins, mercenaries and femmes fatales. Meticulously researched, the plots and settings of books such as The Day of The Jackal and The Dogs of War are firmly rooted in the real world — albeit a dark and clandestine one that is known only to very few.
Some regard Frederick Forsyth as having invented a whole genre of writing called ‘faction’, in which fact and fiction are blurred to produce very realistic novels.
The 76-year- old writer has long claimed that he will go to extraordinarily risky lengths to penetrate the shadowy milieus he writes about.
‘I become the characters,’ he said recently. ‘If they need to obtain a false passport, I get one myself.’
He recounted how he ‘stared down the barrel of a psychopath’s Colt 45’ many years ago when it appeared the man’s girlfriend had taken a shine to him. ‘And I once escaped from an arms deal gone wrong, James Bondstyle, on a speeding train.’
The comparison with Bond is apt because the gentlemanly Forsyth, with his Jermyn Street tailoring, craggy features and cigarette holder, clearly models himself on 007 author Ian Fleming, who was involved in the world of Naval intelligence during World War II.
Intriguingly, it is beginning to emerge that Forsyth, rather than just writing about secret agents, was himself a real-life James Bond.
In September, Forsyth will publish his autobiography, The outsider: My Life In Intrigue, which, it is reported, will reveal that the novelist worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6.
If this is so, then Forsyth really will be sticking his neck out, as former MI6 agents are normally extremely reluctant to admit their involvement in the world of spooks.
Cynics might suggest that Forsyth has started to fictionalise his own life and to turn himself, Walter Mitty- like, into the type of adventurous and glamorous character he so loves to write about. So what is the truth? There are certainly indications that Forsyth might have been a secret agent. He says he’s ‘packed a tremendous amount of action into his life and frequently drawn on his experiences to lend verisimilitude to his fiction’.
AGED just 19, he became the youngest pilot in the royal Air Force, but left to join the press agency reuters. In 1963, aged 25, he was posted to east Berlin to cover east germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
It was the height of the Cold War and Forsyth knew that his work would be monitored by the dreaded Stasi, the east german secret police, or the StB, the sinister Czech state security organisation.
‘I realised that there would be secret police attention,’ he recalled. ‘So when it came, it didn’t surprise me.’
What happened next was just like a James Bond novel or film. In Czechoslovakia, Forsyth picked up a ‘ very pretty girl’ in a bar and enticed her to join him on a night-time drive.
The author takes up the story: ‘ We parked the car, walked down the meadow to the lake, stripped off and had a swim. Then I spread a blanket out and we made love.
‘Afterwards, I was l ying down staring up at the stars and I just murmured that I wondered what had happened to my StB escort tonight? And she said: “You’ve just made love to it!” ’
It is also quite likely that Forsyth was spying behind the Iron Curtain. ‘ British intelligence did use journal- ists during the Cold War,’ says Jeremy Duns, a spy writer who recently made a radio 4 documentary on the links between MI6 and Fleet Street.
‘Forsyth was clearly very wellconnected and incorporated genuine insider espionage information in his novels.’
MI6 is known to have used many journalists as sources of information. referred to as ‘along-siders’, they included the likes of Antony Terry of the Sunday Times and David Astor of the observer.
It was Terry who supplied Forsyth with much information about fugitive Nazi war criminals that Forsyth would turn into his 1972 thriller, The odessa File.
In her barely fictionalised memoir, Antony Terry’s wife, rachel, writes of a journalist called ‘Freddie’, who spent time ‘out of the sight and the company of his overt newspaper colleagues’, while gathering ‘information not likely to be printed in his newspaper’.
‘It is a familiar type in intelligence work,’ rachel Terry observes. ‘The man who enjoys being within a secret, and cannot resist the temptation to hint at his knowledge of what others do not know.’
There is other evidence that the future millionaire thriller writer was a spook.
After leaving east Berlin, Forsyth joined the BBC, for whom he covered the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, in 1967. According to some accounts, Forsyth was sacked by the BBC for producing reports that were too openly supportive of the Biafran rebels.
As the f ormer colonial power, the British government was anxious about the effect on its oil holdings. But Forsyth decided to continue reporting from the conflict.
According to one British journalist, he began operating under the cover name ‘Major Tommy Atkinson’, wearing military fatigues and working as an aide to a german mercenary called Colonel rolf Steiner, who was fighting for the Biafran rebels.
It’s at this point that things get very murky.
In his memoirs, the head of the Biafran Army, Major general Alex Madiebo, recalls how he met ‘ Frederick Foresythe [sic], a former BBC man’, who was acting as Steiner’s interpreter.
At one point, the Biafrans and the mercenaries had a dispute about pay, during which Forsyth helped the mercenaries, much to the annoyance of Madiebo.
‘Later on, I sent for Foresythe and accused him of being a spy,’ Madiebo recalled.
‘I threatened to get soldiers to get ri d of him before long unless he voluntarily left Biafra. The fellow was so frightened that he spent almost two hours trying to convince me of his innocence. To get rid of him, I withdrew my charge and shook hands with him.’ The rebel leader said the englishman remained in Biafra.
Could Forsyth have been acting as a spy in Africa?
Again, it is perfectly conceivable. As the former colonial masters of Nigeria, the British were deeply involved in events in Biafra, although Forsyth’s support of the Biafrans ran counter to the policy of the British government, and therefore, perhaps, against the interests of MI6.
LATER, it emerged that Forsyth was also part of a plot to topple the government of equatorial guinea in 1973. Although the attempt was thwarted, secret documents later showed he helped to bankroll the plot.
‘I took part in the plot in as much as I was chewing the fat and shooting the breeze with the others involved,’ Forsyth admitted. ‘But as far as I was concerned, any money I gave was for information, and I pulled out before the plan was put into practice.’
Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, such coups were often carried out with the tacit but deniable involvement of Western intelligence agencies such as MI6 and the CIA. It is not fanciful to suppose MI6 was involved in the plot, with Forsyth as a trusted linkman.
Whatever his relationship with MI6, there can be no doubt that Forsyth has often acted almost as a one-man intelligence agency, with hairraising close shaves.
on one occasion, he posed as a South African arms dealer in Hamburg as he tried to discover how mercenaries acquired their arsenals.
Unfortunately, it was not long after the publication of The Day of The Jackal (about a plot to assassinate French president Charles de gaulle), and one of the underworld arms sellers saw Forsyth’s photograph in the window of a bookshop.
Luckily, he was tipped off to flee by an ‘ insider friend’ — possibly an MI6 agent. ‘I left all my clothes, grabbed my money and passport and ran across the square to the railway station,’ Forsyth l ater recalled. ‘There was a train pulling out, so I vaulted the ticket barrier and did a parachute roll through the window, landing on a bewildered businessman.
‘The ticket conductor asked me where I was going. I asked him where the train was going and he said Amsterdam. “So am I,” I said.’
If Freddie Forsyth’s autobiography contains more of such tales, then it may well be the best book he has ever written. Sometimes, novelists are their own greatest creations.