‘Betrayed and on the run in Russia, I was pursued by a KGB agent called Vladimir Putin’ | Books | Entertainment

Wonder aloud why it’s not Sir Freddie and the journalist and author chuckles. “I’ve put too many official noses out of joint,” he shrugs. “They’ve long memories and I’ve had that from a reliable source. ‘It’s not there for you Freddie, because everything would have to go before an honours committee studded with mandarins you’ve upset.'” So for the moment, at least, it’s plain old Mr Frederick Forsyth nursing a glass of red wine in a London restaurant even more venerable than he is, sitting beneath a mural showing the late Lady Thatcher, who he hugely admired, as a knight in armour.

We’re talking a couple of days before his 85th birthday, which he celebrated yesterday, marking it with his final Daily Express column before retiring from weekly commentary after more than two decades entertaining and enlightening readers.

There is a somewhat jaw-dropping element to the conversation, prompted in part by storytelling skills that need no introduction -he is, after all, author of The Day Of The Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs Of War among countless other bestsellers. But a twinkling in the eye indicates when Freddie is about to reveal something scrupulously well-sourced, possibly highly confidential and perhaps just a little bit mischievous.

It’s best illustrated by a tale he’s thinking of putting to paper, despite having officially retired from thriller-writing in 2018 at the age of 80 with his last book The Fox, when he also stood down as president of the ultradiscreet Special Forces Club.

“There’s a story that’s been nudging its way around up there for some time,” he admits. “I haven’t got round to it, partly because I’ve gone bone idle and partly because I just haven’t had the peace and quiet I need. Suffice to say, it purports to be a British agent on a mission for MI6 in East Germany during the Cold War.

“What he doesn’t know is that a spy in London has denounced him. Fortunately, the KGB head of branch in Dresden is too arrogant to confide in his colleagues in the East German secret police, the Stasi, who have far greater manpower. Because he doesn’t act in time, the British agent manages to slip across the border with the package he’s collected before the phone rings at the border office to say: ‘Stop that car’.”

There are two crucial addenda to the story which, as Freddie reveals with another twinkle, are largely true. “I know this is true because I was driving the car, a Triumph,” he says with a flourish. “And, secondly, the KGB man in Dresden that year was Vladimir Putin.”

Pressed on the details, he continues rather matter-of-factly: “I was picking up a package from a Russian colonel who could get to Dresden but no further. Someone was going to have to rendezvous with him in the men’s room of the city’s Albertinum Museum.

“My cover was that I was researching inside the museum, which was accepted because they’re particularly proud of their medieval collections. Everything went according to the script, and then it was a question of ‘how the f*** do I get out of the country?’ I had a sixth sense; I didn’t want to drive back through East Berlin, so I headed [south-west] towards Bavaria and West Germany. It wasn’t my prescribed route but I decided to take it anyway. They were 30 seconds behind me. But thanks largely to Putin’s arrogance, I made it.”

Thus another chapter in his extraordinarily storied life – his escape with vital intelligence material from under the nose of the future Russian despot – unfolded and the rest, as they say, is history. If he can find the time, it would undoubtedly make a terrific book. The fact is, Freddie’s most famous novels have almost all had a curious symmetry with real-life events – inspired by, and subsequently, inspiring them.

The idea behind his debut novel The Day Of The Jackal, published in 1971 and later a hit film starring Edward Fox, came from his time as a Reuters correspondent in Paris where, between 1961 and 1963, French Right-wing terrorists fighting Algerian independence launched a series of assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle.

Later, in 1974, disgraced Tory MP John Stonehouse acquired a false passport in the name of a dead child after reading the book before using it to help fake his own death.

Freddie’s follow-up, The Odessa File, published in 1972 and also adapted into a successful movie, helped expose Nazi war criminal Eduard Roschmann – commandant of the Riga Ghetto during 1943 and dubbed the “Butcher of Riga”.

During his research, he met Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who spotted an opportunity to set the cat among the pigeons.

“He thought it was an interesting idea, a concentration camp commander in hiding post-war, but told me, ‘You’re inventing one – I have a shelf full of them’.

“So the man in my book is actually real. Wiesenthal gave me the whole file. I used his real name, I said ‘Sue me! Come out from wherever you are and sue me’.”

Subsequently, when the film came out, he recalls: “There was an Argentinian sitting in a little fleapit cinema watching The Odessa File and he thought, ‘It’s funny, I know him, he lives down the street’. He went to the police and denounced him.

“Roschmann was warned and ran to the northern border with Paraguay. He got on to the ferry across the Parana River, had a heart attack and died. When they got to the northern bank, the Argentinians said to the Paraguayans, ‘He paid for a single passage, he’s all yours’.

“And the Paraguayans said, ‘No way’. No one wanted him, so his body lay on the deck for 14 crossings until, finally, he was buried in a gravel bank.”

The Dogs Of War, his third bestseller, was based on his time in Africa, and inspired several real armed coups, most recently the so-called “Wonga” plot in 2004 when mercenaries led by ex-SAS officer Simon Mann failed to take Equatorial Guinea. “He’s now free and back in Britain,” notes Freddie dryly of Mann. “I met him at a cocktail party, I think, but we didn’t talk very much about that side of things, funnily enough.”

Since then, there have been many more novels, yet surprisingly, given the scale of his success, there was never a plan.

He quit his BBC post as an assistant diplomatic correspondent in the late Sixties over its failure to report the Nigerian Civil War – covering the conflict as a freelance foreign correspondent for two years – before returning to Britain as hostilities ended.

“I knew the Foreign Office had well and truly slagged me off, they were passionately pro-Nigeria and I’d been reporting from the Biafran side,” he recalls.

“I knew I’d have no job and no likelihood of a job, so what was I going to do? I thought, crazily, ‘I know, I’ll write a novel.’

“As I later reflected, ‘As if there’s any stupider way of trying to make a bob or two! Rob a bank instead, for God’s sake!'” Having borrowed £1,000 from his parents, he camped out on a friend’s sofa in Chelsea and spent the days hunched over his Empire Aristocrat typewriter – complete with a bullet scuff from being strafed by a jet in Biafra.

“When they went off to work in the mornings, I went to the kitchen table and tapped out 350 sheets of A4 paper in 35 days. Ten pages a day. To this day, not one line of that “manuscript has changed,” he says proudly. “It remains exactly as I wrote it – never touched or tampered with.”

Having hawked his book around London publishers, he was offered a contract by Hutchinson – for three books, if he could come up with two more ideas in a week.

“For an aspiring author, that was a wow moment; it was like ‘open sesame’. But what should I do? They wanted synopses for novels two and three before the first was published.

“What the heck did I know about? Well, I knew about the Germans and I knew about Africa. So I thought, ‘Nazis and mercenaries’. The publisher read the synopses, flicked them back over to me and said, ‘Nazis first, mercenaries second’.

“When I told him I hadn’t a bean for research, he scribbled a note and said, ‘Take this to accounts, they’ll give you a research fee of £6,000.’ It was a fortune.”

Freddie, who at 19 had become one of the youngest ever RAF pilots during his National Service by lying about his age before travelling the world as a reporter, was up and running. The book sold to a US publisher for the then enormous sum of $365,000, roughly £100,000 at the time. Today, he still writes using two fingers, tapping away on a typewriter but, while the thoughts themselves still come easily, admits to being slower at the typing itself.

As Freddie revealed in his final Daily Express column, he has enough in the “kitty” to live anywhere in the world, but prefers to remain in his rural Buckinghamshire village with “its green, its pub, its church and its conviviality. It’s been a restful place to be an old codger. The tropics are all well and good but, after the first week, what do you do with yourself?”

Like many older Britons, Freddie is coping with a partner afflicted by ageing and illness.

His adored second wife, Sandy, fondly known to Daily Express readers as the “CO”, is some ten years his junior yet confined to a care home.

“It’s very painful,” he admits. “I’m afraid it doesn’t look like there will be change. Every doctor I’ve consulted says they cannot sanction her coming home because I couldn’t begin to cope.

“She doesn’t need five times a day attention, not even hourly attention, she needs minute-by-minute attention.”

Having lost several friends of late, including Barry Humphries, Sir David Frost and, only last week, Sir Michael Parkinson, he is profoundly aware of his own mortality, adding: “Before she went to hospital, Sandy used to rib me that the Daily Telegraph’s obituaries page was my contacts book! Every week, it’s ‘Oh, look, he’s gone now’.

“One thing that is abidingly unfair is that normally, if there’s a ten-year gap between husband and wife, it’s the young wife looking after the old dotard, but with me it’s the other way round.

“Hopefully, it’ll be close but it could be that she predeceases me.”

Has Britain changed over the course of his two decades of column-writing for the Express?

“The power of the Civil Service is absolutely out of control and a lot of it came during Covid when the Government literally handed over the running of the country to Sage, which got it all wrong with lockdowns which will take years to recover from: our children’s education, human relations and so on. And it wasn’t even necessary, as Sweden has since proved.

“We’ve become a country that is effectively run by its bureaucrats, not by its elected tribunes.

“There was a time when, worldwide, people would say, ‘If you want something run smoothly and efficiently, trust the British.’ Today it’s the reverse.”

What about the people, the ordinary Britons? “Deep, deep down I think the old defiance is still there but we’ve become very, very despondent, disconsolate, pessimistic,” he adds.

Asked if he would change anything personally, Freddie pauses: “If I was looking back – of course, I’m looking back, I’ve nowhere else to look! – it’s been a very varied life. I’ve done all sorts of things in all sorts of places and met all sorts of people.

“I wouldn’t change much. I’ve got two sons and I love them both but unfortunately they’ve emigrated so I rarely see my grandchildren.

“Fortunately, I see them on FaceTime, but I know they’re forced to stare at this whiskery old fool on screen, wondering who the hell he is!”

As we prepare to leave, he laughs off the suggestion he’s a legend, smiling: “These days if you do two turns as the barman in Emmerdale you’re legendary.”

He adds: “I’m just a hack at heart.”

This article first appeared in the Daily Express on Saturday, August 26, 2023