Frederick Forsyth, British journalist, in his just published autobiography ‘The Outsider: My Life’ has narrated how he was converted into a spy during Nigerian civil war (1967-1970).
Forsyth said he was first approached by the spy agency to give information when he was working as a journalist in Nigeria the war.
He said that an intelligence officer asked him to “tell us what’s going on” during the war.
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“For the last year of the Biafran War, I was sending… both journalistic reports to the media and other reports to my new friend,” the journalist said.
According to him the MI6 wanted to check the report that children were dying inside Biafra.
“The Foreign Office was denying that there were any dying children and they were passionate in supporting the dictatorship in Lagos, and it was oddly enough MI6 that had a different viewpoint,” Forsyth added.
He noted that many British volunteers gave information back home to MI6 at the time that it wasn’t believed out of place.
“There was no fee, no reward, you just do it. It was a different attitude back then.”
The journalist continued that he gave information to the MI6 over a period of 20 years from other places such as Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe), South Africa and, East Germany during the cold war.
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“It was normally a phone call: ‘can we meet – why don’t you join us for lunch? We have a little problem – would you mind slipping into East Germany and picking something us for us?’” he said.
Forsyth later assisted Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Biafran secessionist leader. He wrote a biography of Ojukwu tilted: “Emeka” (1982).
He had recently written a book about the war in 1969 – “The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend”.
The Nigerian Civil War broke out on 6 July 1967. The war was the culmination of an uneasy peace and stability that had plagued the Nation from independence in 1960.
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