The thriller writer Frederick Forsyth has revealed how he smuggled secret documents out of the former East Germany while working as an agent for MI6 at the height of the Cold War.
The bestselling author said that he conducted missions for the secret intelligence service for more than 20 years.
In his new autobiography, The Outsider, serialised in The Sunday Times, he described how he was sent into East Germany in 1973, two years after publication of The Day of the Jackal, his first novel.
“There was an asset, a Russian colonel, working for us deep inside East Germany and he had a package that we needed brought out,” he said. “ ‘There is no question of trying to pass for a German,’ they told me, ‘so no refresher course. Just a question of a British tourist slipping inside and bringing something out.’ ”
The exchange took place in Dresden, at the Albertinum museum. “Graeco-Roman treasures were my new enthusiasm and there were books to study as if for an exam,” Forsyth said. He met the contact in the lavatory and the files were handed under the cubicle door.
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“I have never seen him since. I hope he is all right. There were still 18 years of the USSR to go, and the KGB had a very nasty procedure for traitors.”
Forsyth hid the documents inside his Triumph Vitesse car, although the mission nearly ended in disaster when he was pulled over by the Volkspolizei as he approached the Bavarian border.
He was first approached by MI6 while covering the Biafran war as a journalist. He went to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, to find out the intentions of the Ian Smith government, and to South Africa to discover what F W de Klerk’s government planned to do with its nuclear bombs when it handed over power to the ANC. Pik Botha, the foreign minister, told him over a campfire at a game reserve that they would be destroyed.