Frederick Forsyth 'to reveal he was an MI6 spy'

Frederick Forsyth (photo), Reuters correspondent turned best-selling author of spy thrillers, is expected to reveal that he was an agent of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service MI6, newspapers speculated on Saturday.

Fans of Forsyth, now 76, had suspected he may have had brushes with SIS, and he is expected to confirm they were right when his autobiography The Outsider: My Life In Intrigue is published in September, The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail reported.

Forsyth joined Reuters at age 23 in December 1961 and was assigned to France and East Germany.  He left in 1965 for a job with the BBC.

“He has admitted in the past that he often draws on his real-life experiences for the plots and action in his books; his experience of reporting on an attempt to assassinate the French president Charles de Gaulle gave him the idea for his first novel, The Day of the Jackal,” the Telegraph reported.

“He has also admitted having friends in MI6. In his newspaper column Forsyth has referred to ‘taking lunch with a senior officer from the Secret Intelligence Service’ though he did not explain how they knew each other and he has never gone as far as revealing that he was recruited by them.

In 2012 Forsyth was elected president of the Special Forces Club, founded in London in 1945 by surviving members of the Special Operations Executive, a British military organisation that conducted espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance against the Axis powers in occupied Europe during the Second World War.

The title of his autobiography provides a hint that he will use the book to blow his own cover as a former spy, and it has become an open secret in the publishing world that he is about to do just that, the Telegraph said.

As a former RAF jet fighter pilot who spoke German and French like a local, and whose job took him behind the Iron Curtain and behind enemy lines in Africa, Forsyth would have been a natural choice for an approach by MI6, it said.

He also lived like James Bond even without the help of Britain’s overseas spying agency.

In East Berlin at the height of the Cold War, he was routinely bugged and tailed by the Stasi, the secret police. A romantic liaison led to his swift retreat.

“I had been having a torrid affair with a stunning East German girl,” he later said. “She explained she was the wife of a People’s Army corporal, based in the garrison at faraway Cottbus on the Czech border. She was an amazing lover and rather mysterious.

“She was immaculately dressed and after our almost-all-night love sessions at my place refused to be driven home, insisting on a taxi from the railway station. I wondered about the clothes, and the money for taxis. One day I spotted one of the drivers at the station whom I had seen at my door picking up Siggi. He said he had taken her to Pankow. That was a very upscale address, the Belgravia of East Berlin. On a corporal’s salary?

“It was in a bar in West Berlin that two buzz-cut Americans who screamed CIA slid over to offer me a drink. As we clinked they murmured that I had a certain nerve to be sleeping with the mistress of the East German Defence Minister.”

Realising how much trouble he was in, a week later, having made excuses to Reuters, he walked through Checkpoint Charlie with a single holdall and flew back to London.

“It is a bit drug-like, journalism,” he once said. “Even in your seventies, I don’t think that instinct ever dies. But my wife worries all the time. She rails at me.” ■