Fiction’s Man of Intelligence

Frederick Forsyth perfected the geopolitical thriller by making fact indistinguishable from fiction.

It was 1996. I was visiting my familiar haunt which was the now-defunct Popular Book House in Pune, a city then just beginning to surrender its quaintness and heritage to indiscriminate urbanisation. I was 13. That day, I skipped past the usual Alistair MacLean titles and reached for ‘The Day of the Jackal.’ A classmate of mine had breathlessly described the film version of thriller maestro Frederick Forsyth’s stunning debut novel to me, his eyes gleaming as he recounted how the mysterious assassin, codenamed ‘Jackal,’ almost got away with assassinating French President Charles de Gaulle. The ending, of course, was no secret: de Gaulle lived (and died a natural death). But I would discover (as millions before me had), the novel’s suspense came not from the outcome but from the cold, procedural certainty with which Forsyth revealed how close fiction could cut to fact.

Forsyth, who died this week aged 86, often claimed that he was never meant to be a novelist. He said he simply had a story to tell and a debt to clear. When ‘The Day of the Jackal’ came out in 1971, it upended the thriller genre with such force and finesse that it completely reset the rules. Its taut narrative, procedural detail and icy restraint made previous landmark thrillers like ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1959) and ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ “seem like Hardy Boys” mysteries (so wrote critic Christopher Lehman-Haupt, reviewing it for the New York Times) by comparison.

Forsyth’s books were not the kind one read for flourishes or character arcs. His protagonists were often anonymous operators. Emotions in his novels were muted, the dialogue minimal and the prose clipped to the rhythm of classified cables. Yet his books possessed an uncanny power in that they almost felt like leaks. His descriptions of the entrails of intelligence services and secret networks, anatomies of coups, assassinations and arms deals were no hypotheticals but felt as if he had walked among them. And that was because he had.

Forsyth’s short stint in the Royal Air Force as its youngest fighter pilot, and later as a journalist for Reuters and the BBC, gave him unusual exposure to the darker corners of geopolitics. He was in Paris when the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) made several failed attempts to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. He reported from East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. And most fatefully, he defied BBC orders to stay out of Nigeria’s civil war in the late 1960s, embedding himself in Biafra and siding with the secessionists. He denounced his editors for moral cowardice and returned back to cover the conflict as a freelance (where he is said to have been contacted by the MI6). The result was the non-fiction ‘The Biafra Story’ (1969) – a first-class work that deserves to be widely reprinted alongside his regular thrillers.

The experience radicalised his worldview and deepened his understanding of realpolitik. He saw how modern states used deception and deniability, how intelligence shaped diplomacy and how the line between law and criminality often disappeared in the fog of national interest. All of this would become thematic bedrock in his novels.

Forsyth returned to Britain broke, angry and with a head full of intelligence gossip. He audaciously embarked upon a novel, based on his experiences as a foreign correspondent stationed in Paris. Forsyth wrote ‘The Day of the Jackal’ – a novel about the OAS, a disbanded paramilitary group of extreme right-wingers who hire an anonymous professional assassin to kill de Gaulle - in five weeks flat. After three rejections or so, it was picked up by a fourth publisher for a limited print-run. The rest is history.

When ‘The Day of the Jackal’ appeared, it felt less like fiction than a breach of official secrecy. The novel follows the unnamed killer’s meticulous preparations and the frantic manhunt by French police. More than a few readers assumed the Jackal was real. Forsyth’s long commune with the underworld, his interviews with spooks, armament dealers and ex-mercenaries, meant that he always gave the impression of knowing much more than what went on behind the headlines.

Its film adaptation directed by stalwart filmmaker Fred Zinnemann was just as exacting; Edward Fox was memorably cast (over Michael Caine, who was thought to be too recognizable) as the anonymous assassin while Michel Lonsdale, as the dogged French detective Lebel, embodied weary realism with more than a touch of the maverick. There were no car chases, no explosions, just a sense of encroaching inevitability. The film, like the book, rejected sentimentality, generating nerve-wracking suspense out of logistics.

Forsyth’s follow-up ‘The Odessa File’ (1972) - made into a decent film with Jon Voight and Maximilian Schell - was equally gripping and possibly more consequential (Jack Higgins once said it was his favourite Forsyth). Set in post-war Germany, it traced a young journalist’s dogged odyssey to expose a secret Nazi network called ‘ODESSA’ while melding the jigsaw plot with a parallel story of Gen. Nasser using German scientists connected to this organization to build rockets to wipe out Israel. While historians continue to debate the real-life existence of the ODESSA, Forsyth’s vivid portrayal shaped public consciousness. His depiction of the antagonist Eduard Roschmann, an SS officer dubbed the ‘Butcher of Riga’, was so vivid that it sparked renewed interest in his post-war whereabouts, leading to his (brief) arrest in Argentina.

Forsyth did not merely consult intelligence sources but immersed himself in them. While researching ‘The Dogs of War’ (1974), he invented a fictional rare earth mineral (cerium oxide) so plausibly that real mining executives sought rights to it.

Forsyth might be justly labelled a pioneer of what might be called ‘documentary fiction,’ something on sterling display in the Swiss-clock precision plot of his explosive ‘The Fourth Protocol’ (1984) – one of finest novels with a diabolical plot featuring a futuristic Kim Philby and a sleeper agent tasked with detonating a small nuclear device in Britain to damage US-UK relations that would enable the hard Left to come to power. His successors - from Gerald Seymour to Tom Clancy and Robert Harris – have, in one form or another, borrowed heavily from his blend of procedural realism and geopolitical storytelling.

Vintage Forsyth often outdid the best investigative journalism out there. But more importantly, he made the complexities and ruthlessness of realpolitik vivid and accessible to millions across the globe. He democratised the world of intelligence and power for readers (myself included) continents away from his scenes of action.

For teenagers like me growing up in 1990s India, long before the internet flattened distance, his novels were passageways into the corridors of French bureaucracy, the inner sanctums of the KGB and MI6, the corporate boardrooms where coups were contracted. With Forsyth, we didn’t just learn about power but how it functioned, how it disguised itself and how it was manipulated.

His prescience often startled and gave headaches to establishments. ‘The Deceiver’ included a plot involving the IRA smuggling a body across the border inside a coffin rigged to explode; ‘The Devil’s Alternative’ (1979), anticipated a Soviet grain crisis and its political ramifications with eerie plausibility while ‘The Fist of God’ (1994) probably his best ‘later’ work, gave a frighteningly detailed account of Saddam Hussein’s WMD ambitions and Project Babylon, lending it an authority rare in fiction and often absent in journalism.

Forsyth’s later works, including ‘The Afghan,’ ‘Avenger,’ ‘The Cobra’ and The Kill List extended his reach into post-9/11 terrain Al-Qaeda, rendition flights and narco-terrorism. They were less influential than his vintage Cold War-era novels, but nonetheless retained the old Forsythian rigour. And for many, including this journalist, his books offered more than escape. They offered a vocation. At a subconscious level, I certainly jumped into journalism because of Forsyth - a primal inspiration who made many a day in my adolescence with his knockout works. It was the master’s last stroke!