‘Bag carrying’ for MI6 to being held by Stasi, how author Frederick Forsyth used experiences to create Day of the Jackal
AUTHOR Frederick Forsyth has a fascination for assassination.
His best-selling novel The Day of The Jackal is a blueprint for how a hitman can get close enough to take out a politician.
Two months ago, Thomas Crooks, 20, was killed by secret service marksmen after shooting Donald Trump in the ear at a Republican rally.
Forsyth says: “That young fellow they shot dead was doing something very similar to what the Jackal did.
“Long-range, high elevation on a roof with a sniper scope and a rifle. Wait for the appearance. It very nearly worked.
“If Trump hadn’t moved his face just a bit, the bullet would have gone through the forehead.”
The bid to assassinate the US Presidential hopeful in Butler, Pennsylvania, mirrors the plot of Freddie’s novel, where the Jackal fails to kill French President Charles de Gaulle at a medal ceremony for military veterans.
Freddie, now 86, says: “Being an Englishman, the Jackal had overlooked a tradition the French have when medal giving, called ‘la bis’, the kiss on the cheeks.
“A short man and a tall president, so de Gaulle bent forward and the bullet went past the back of the head, which, of course, never happened in real life.”
‘Passionate orgy’
Before his breakthrough novel, Forsyth travelled the globe as a journalist for Reuters news agency and the BBC and even worked for MI6 — feigning being “as thick as a plank” to foil the German secret police.
His debut thriller The Day Of The Jackel sparked a Bafta-winning film and has now been turned into a ten-part drama starring Eddie Redmayne as the assassin and Lashana Lynch as MI6 agent Bianca, who is intent on capturing him.
The story follows the professional killer, who works for Organisation Armée Secrète (Secret Army Organisation), a dissident political group.
Freddie says: “There definitely was an OAS trying to assassinate President de Gaulle. I was there covering it as a Reuters reporter in 1962 to ’63.
“I thought to myself that they probably would fail because they were so penetrated by French counter-intelligence.
“But I thought if they were ever to call in an outsider who’s not on the radar at all, he might get away with it.”
Forsyth spent a year in Soviet East Germany, as the official correspondent for Reuters and where, he reveals, he worked as a “bag carrier” for Britain’s MI6.
Frederick says: “I call it running errands. You pop over to someone’s house and pick up something and bring it back.
Having shouted at me all night, they took me down a long corridor to a door. I didn’t know whether it was the execution chamber or what it could be.
Author Frederick Forsyth
“I got a lot of attention from the secret police, the Stasi. I was followed all over the place.
“I thought the only way to survive is to take the mickey. They had no sense of humour, so I would do stupid things.
“I knew my apartment was bugged, so I would go into the bedroom and have a passionate orgy with a non-existent female.
“Knowing every word was being recorded I used two or three voices and then there would be a knock on the door. ‘Mein Herr, your gas is leaking’.
“They would search the flat and discover I had an invisible mistress. I am bilingual in German but whenever I was up against officialdom, I’d become a bumbling idiot who hardly spoke a word of the language.
“Terrible grammar, appalling pronunciation, thick as a plank.
“I was once picked up in Magdeburg by the Stasi and interrogated through the night.
“I was like the PG Wodehouse character Bertie Wooster. Eager to please, helpless, hopeless, hapless and therefore harmless.
“Having shouted at me all night, they took me down a long corridor to a door. I didn’t know whether it was the execution chamber or what it could be.
“Turned out to be the car park. They were chucking me out.
“As I was getting in the car, I heard one of them say ‘He’s too stupid to be an agent’. I drove out of the car park and gave them an elegant two fingers.”
Forsyth left Germany to cover the civil war between Biafra and Nigeria in Africa for the BBC.
Biafra had declared independence from Nigeria in 1967 and in the ensuing conflict, up to two million died of starvation, many of them children.
Frederick returned home at Christmas 1969 with no job and demonised by the Foreign Office for covering the suffering of Biafra’s children.
He says: “I was skint, out of a job and I thought, ‘I’ll write a novel’. Every friend I had told me that I was absolutely insane.
“But I didn’t know any better and I had this story in the back of my head.
“I sat down on January 2, 1970. I wrote every day for 35 days and produced 350 pages. Not one word was ever changed.”
Central to the plot was how crooks used dead babies’ birth certificates to get fake passports.
‘I grabbed it’
A professional mercenary had once told Forsyth of the ruse — so the author tried it himself.
He found the gravestone of a child, requested a birth certificate at Somerset House in London and got a British passport in the dead youngster’s name.
Forsyth says: “I thought I was doing the British Government a favour by revealing the flaw.
“Everybody used it, even the KGB took it up. Thirty years our bureaucrats sat and watched this scam and did nothing about it.”
Once The Day Of The Jackal was printed in 1971, sales exploded and within a year the publishers offered Forsyth £75,000 to buy the rights for ever.
He recalls: “I’d never seen £75,000 in my life. For all I knew, the novel could have petered out within weeks. So, I grabbed it.”
The book went on to sell around 12million copies and has been made into two films and now the 10-part Sky drama.
Forsyth estimates that, had he kept the copyright the publication would have made him £1million in royalties. “It’s easy to be wise after the event,” he adds.
Three or four stars were offered the part but Zinnemann said, ‘No, I want a face that’s not well known because he’s supposed to pass through Paris unspotted’.
Author Frederick Forsyth
But thankfully he still owns the rights to his other 16 novels — including The Odessa File, The Dogs of War and The Fourth Protocol — which have sold some 70million copies in 38 languages.
He has retired but is patron of Chiltern Kills, a literary festival devoted to crime writing.
Forsyth is still pals with actor Edward Fox who played the assassin in director Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 film adaptation.
He says: “We met on the set and became good friends. He was the perfect Jackal.
“Three or four stars were offered the part but Zinnemann said, ‘No, I want a face that’s not well known because he’s supposed to pass through Paris unspotted’.
It was Edward Fox’s big breakthrough.” Forsyth lives in Buckinghamshire, where he is eagerly awaiting the new Day Of The Jackal series which launches on Sky Atlantic on November 7.
He says: “I’m consumed with curiosity at what the new version will be like. It’s a complete mystery to me.
“I’m looking at trailers and there’s Eddie Redmayne, who is a very good actor, abseiling down the side of a skyscraper.
“Well, hello. I don’t think I had that in the book. I can’t wait to watch it.”
- Chiltern Kills Crime Writers Festival, hosted by best-selling author Tony Kent, is on Saturday, October 5 in Gerrards Cross, Bucks. Tickets available at ChilternKills.com.