From Fleet Street to Biafra . . . and to MI6

When I interviewed Frederick Forsyth in 1982, he spoke about his time as a BBC correspondent in Biafra during the late 1960s. He had predicted a genocidal race war there, but his editors didn’t want to hear about it. This led to his departure from Fleet Street and a two-year odyssey as a freelance reporter following the mercenary “hard squads” in the region. His reporting culminated in his first, little-known book The Biafra Story. Forsyth never let on to me about his involvement with MI6 at the time. But he reveals it now in a new autobiography, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue. My sketch of him is included in The Z Collection, about writers I have known, worked with, or written about. It has just been published by AC Books in New York and is available in the U.S. from RAM.