Remembering Frederick Forsyth: my encounters with the spy who stayed out in the cold

One of the great British purveyors of the spy and cold-war genres, Frederick Forsyth, who has died at the age of 86, was best known for his novels The Day of the Jackal (1971), The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974).

He wrote another 22 books, which together have sold 75 million copies worldwide, and spawned several successful films. In his 2015 memoirs, Forsyth revealed he had been a spy for the British government.

My encounters with “Freddie” came late in his life. Back in 2023 my former colleagues at Brunel University were launching a project called Writers in Intelligence. Having no contacts in the murky world of spookery, they approached me for help.

They needed a high-profile writer who had worked in intelligence for their first event. I suggested Forsyth, as he had admitted to being an MI6 asset between 1968 and 1988. I wrote to him, and he agreed to an interview.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

It was not my finest hour. I had carefully created a narrative arc of questions and outlined my plan to Forsyth in the green room. He nodded. After we sat down in front of a packed audience Forsyth proceeded to ignore my first question and launched into his own well-practised narrative.

“What is the point of espionage in the first place?” he asked rhetorically. “I would sum it up in a single word: forewarning – what the bad guys are doing,” he said, launching into his spiel. He was particularly good on the need for a cover story when working abroad, “where the very nasty secret police ruled the roost”. His cover was being a foreign correspondent.

For the rest of his “talk”, I tried to predict his direction of travel and lob the occasional question to justify my existence. Relief for me came with the Q&A.

Inevitably a question came up about the Nigerian civil war in which he had a controversial role. Independent from 1960, Nigeria is a creation of the British empire and in broad terms combines three different colonial and ethnic areas. The Muslim north, mostly the Haus-Fulani people; the mixed religions of the Yoruba west; and the Christian Igbo people of the east in the area known then as Biafra, rich in oil reserves. In 1966, an attempted military coup sparked civil war and anti-Igbo pogroms in the north, forcing 1.2 million Igbo refugees to return to the Biafra region.

Refugees complained that the Lagos-based Nigerian government under General Yakubu Gowon had failed to protect them. Secessionists under the military commander of the east, Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, declared Biafra a separate republic in May 1967. Gowon ordered the Nigerian army to retake Biafra. Initially the Biafran forces countered attacked but Gowan’s troops, reinforced by secretly delivered British munitions, created a lengthy stalemate.

Forsyth, aged 29 and now a BBC correspondent (after stints as the RAF’s youngest fighter pilot and a Reuters journalist) was posted to Biafra to cover the war. With few of his reports being used despite him being on the frontline (at one point a bullet grazed his head), he grew increasingly disillusioned. He considered the BBC’s reports from its west Africa correspondent in Lagos hundreds of miles away, to be pro-Gowon.

Angering BBC bosses by making the case for Biafra, Forsyth was ordered out, after which he said he resigned, although this contradicts the tweet made by the BBC’s John Simpson, who this week said that Forsyth was sacked after “introducing Biafran propaganda into his reports”.

In 1968 Forsyth reported independently from Biafra on the deliberate starvation of people that shocked the world, and became close to Colonel Ojukwu. Eventually, after three years, Biafra was overwhelmed and reintegrated into Nigeria in 1970.

In the Brunel audience was Nigerian novelist and journalist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani who is of Igbo heritage. I asked her this week what she recalled of the evening having travelled to see Forsyth whose books “had been a staple” during her teenage years. She asked Forsyth whether his assessment of the war back then was valid. Forsyth did not really give an opinion but, describing what he had seen, clearly thought his reporting had stood the test of time.

The Brunel evening was deemed a success as Forsyth had lived up to his reputation as a charismatic raconteur. Even in his eighties he cut an imposing figure – decidedly alpha male and a hard-living world traveller. On the thriller-writer spectrum, he combined the spirit of Hemingway with the cool detached air of le Carré. It was not hard to believe that Forsyth had been a little too close to some of the unsavoury events he wrote about.

We meet again, Mr Forsyth

A few months later I asked him for a one-to-one interview and was invited to his house in a Buckinghamshire village. I explained that for nearly 50 years I had been intermittently researching the foreign office’s cold-war covert propaganda operation, the Information Research Department (IRD).

Set up in 1948 to attack communism, by the late 1960s the IRD was a huge operation and had extended its secret remit from anti-communism to covertly attacking anybody or anything its mandarins perceived as anti-British. I had been reading recently released IRD files on Biafra that had long been withheld.

The first thing that was clear was that Forsyth was still angry over what he saw as the British betrayal of the Biafran people. He cursed the then prime minister Harold Wilson. As a result of his reporting on Biafra – which he saw as objective – Forsyth had come under personal attack.

Who was responsible, I asked. Forsyth identified the high commissioner in Lagos at the time, Sir David Hunt, “a very unpleasant man” whom he held in very low regard. Indeed Hunt had written in one internal memo that Forsyth was “an ardent Igbo partisan and is now employed by them”, and who “spread the most alarming and exaggerated reports”. The memo is now held in the National Archives.

I was able to tell Forsyth that the foreign office had deployed the full arsenal of the IRD’s propaganda skills to support Gowon’s government – and made a huge effort to neuter Forsyth’s reporting from Biafra. Wilson’s government did not want to lose access to cheap oil supplied by Nigeria, or for it to be known that Britain was secretly supplying Gowon with arms.

The IRD’s role was all the more curious in that the Soviet Union was pro-Gowon and Ojukwa was anti-communist. In our meeting Forsyth was surprised at what I had to say; he had never heard of IRD, which in turn surprised me. What was all the more puzzling was that IRD was close to MI6 and, as Forsyth revealed in his memoir, he had been an unpaid MI6 asset for 20 years, beginning in Biafra in 1968.

He thought his targeting might explain the breadth of the personal attacks any against him. In another memo held in the National Archives, this time written in 1969, another British diplomat said he had met Forsyth and bemoaned it was “hard to understand” how the BBC had employed him as correspondent.

The war ended in January 1970. The number of deaths is still disputed but claimed to be between one and two million – mostly civilians many of whom starved to death. On his return to the UK Forsyth wrote his first book, a non-fiction account called The Biafra Story, which did not sell.

By the beginning of 1971 Forsyth was unemployable as a journalist and struggling financially. He sat down and over 35 days wrote The Day of the Jackal, a novel set in 1963 about an assassination plot against the French President, which went on to sell ten million copies. In 1973 it was turned into a film starring Edward Fox and was a huge box office hit. Forsyth never had to worry about money again.

Paul Lashmar is affiliated with the Labour Party