Forsyth lets MI6 spy secret out in tell-all memoir

Thriller writer Frederick Forsyth has finally revealed a long-kept secret - that he worked for British secret intelligence service MI6 and sent information about the late 1960s Biafran War in Nigeria besides being involved in missions in erstwhile East Germany, Rhodesia and South Africa.
The British writer, author of novels like "The Day of the Jackal", "The Fourth Protocol", "The Dogs of War", "The Odessa File", "The Cobra" and "The Kill List", shares this information and many others in his autobiography "The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue."
In late 1968, on a brief home visit from Biafra to firm up some correspondent contracts with various London papers, Forsyth met a member of the MI6 who needed an "asset deep in the Biafran enclave", what he termed 'someone in on the ground'.

"When I left for the return to the rainforest, he had one," the author writes in his memoir published by Penguin Random House.
Forsyth's job was three-fold.
The first was to report, through the various media houses which accepted him as a stringer, the military war as it crawled on its way. Then he was to use the same outlets to portray the humanitarian situation, the disaster among children dying of protein deficiency and the church-based efforts to keep them alive with an air bridge of illicit mercy flights bringing in relief food donated by literally the whole world.

His third task was to keep Ronnie informed of things that could not, for various reasons, emerge in the media.

"For the last year of the Biafran War I was sending... both journalistic reports to the media and other reports to my new friend," he says.
Thereafter, he also conducted a mission for MI6 in communist East Germany, given the task of gauging the intentions of the then Rhodesian government in the 1970s and asked to find out the government's plans on nuclear weapons in the post-apartheid period.
On his East Germany mission, he writes, "There was an asset, a Russian colonel, working for us deep inside East Germany and he had a package that we needed brought out. No, not in East Berlin but based outside Dresden. He could not get further than a meet in Dresden. It began to be not quite so simple. Dresden was a long way in.

"It would have to be by car because the package, which in deference to Alfred Hitchcock I always called the McGuffin, would have to be concealed far from prying hands and eyes on the way out. Besides, there was another package for the asset which had to go in. So, a swap. One in and one out."
Forsyth drove his Triumph Vitesse convertible to Dresden and received the consignment from the Russian colonel in the toilets of the Albertinum museum.