Frederick Forsyth, Master of the Geopolitical Thriller, Dies at 86

 

 

"When his editors at the BBC tried to rein him in, he resigned in protest and returned to Africa as a freelance journalist. He also began providing information to MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency.

Mr. Forsyth’s work for British intelligence eventually went beyond simply providing information. In 1973, he said, he traveled to Dresden, then in communist East Germany, to retrieve a package from a Russian mole, and was almost caught by the K.G.B. station chief.

(Mr. Forsyth recalled that the station chief was Vladimir V. Putin, the future president of Russia, but Mr. Putin did not arrive in Dresden until 1985.)

“He thought he would stop me himself, but he quartered the wrong road,” he told The Times of London in 2024. “I wasn’t on that road. I was on the other one. So I got through the border with about 10 minutes to spare. Or maybe less.”

read the obit by CARL RISEN

 Frederick Forsyth, Master of the Geopolitical Thriller, Dies at 86 – DNyuz