The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, by Frederick Forsyth.

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The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, 

by Frederick Forsyth. 

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One may think one has read a reasonable amount on a subject of interest, and for decades not a whiff of a tremendous event, something in neighbourhood, is heard anything of, through the books one read. 

Then, a small paragraph in a Forsyth story changes that. 

Reading his earlier, sensational works - The Day Of The Jackal, The ODESSA File - was startling enough, in just how much information was packed in around a story that was plausible, to say the least. And this continued. Through decades, reading Forsyth, one got to know something vital and much factual in background of the stories, if not completely out front as in the one related to Biafra. 

But WWII? After reading several memoirs by extermination camp survivors and others, after the several volumes of stories by Maugham, apart from the excellent works of William Shirer, and even some works dealing with WWII in East, one is still electrified with a tiny detail he mentions casually, about Japanese invasion of Malaya that seems to have been carefully pushed under the rug by most, or at least hidden from those not professionally historians. 

Shame?

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Forsyth describes and explains at some length, in his preface, how a writer is an outsider to life, an introvert who isn't quite there even as people see him at a party, his he needs complete solitude and silence for his work. 

Then he proceeds to describe a life anything but introvert, solitary or silent! 

His adventures begin with a WWII childhood, from being at a nanny training school as a baby - leaving him askance at sight of Talc for life - to finding a Sherman tank parked half on his home lawn and proceeding to climb it, to being plonked in cockpit of a plane by his father at five, and as a consequence getting a pilot's licence before finishing his school, and meanwhile hitchhiking through France on minimal funds. 

And that's just the beginning. 

Summing up his hitch-hiking across France with a schoolmate on minimal funds, Forsyth comments - 

" ... The Fifties were a good, carefree and uncomplicated time to be a teenager, before drugs and worries and political correctness. Materially we had infinitely less than youngsters today but I think we were happier."

Probably true. 

But then again one one feels very similarly about one's own younger years, despise differences of time and space, geographical locations, and much, much more, the same nostalgia about one's own young years bestowing them with a roseate golden glow, despite having not exactly forgotten hardships - or far worse. 

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Forsyth had a price put on his head by Nigeria, he states, dead or alive. 

Forsyth returned to London and had no job, no savings and no residence. He'd been smeared thoroughly, as had been Winston Churchill, the grandson of the 'war leader' as Forsyth terms him - he'd gone out as Times correspondent and written of the horror he saw. 

So Forsyth wrote a novel. (Dogs of War?) 

No, he began with memories of his Paris years. 

He was later told of how unprecedented his work was. Charles de Gaulle was still alive as Forsyth wrote, and no one else had written about an assassination attempt on a living leader except - or since - Geoffrey Householdt whose gunman didn't go through with it. 

Also unusual, no one else had written an entire novel with an anonymous hero, or with real politicians and police officials in a fictional manhunt. And that Forsyth had an obsession for technical accuracy. 

" ... Still, when you have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, you might as well get on with it."

He finished it in thirty-five days, wrote the title - The Jackal sounded like a documentary on African jungle, so he added The Day Of - and hasn't changed a word since. 

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Forsyth recalls the routine rejections and the normal practices of publishing houses, travails of both sides and horror stories or rejections. 

He had, after a few rejections, a lucky break in meeting someone socially, whom he cornered next morning in office, and the publisher asked for a three book deal. 

" ... While in East Berlin I had heard about ... ODESSA but I had thought it was part of the relentless East German propaganda against the Bonn government."  

Funny, was it only a couple of years ago that one finally finished an extremely badly written thesis published and sold as a book -

Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice 

by Gerald Steinacher.

 - about rat-lines used by and available to nazis, including Vatican and red cross and CIA - which asserted, rather too strenuously, that ODESSA  was a fictional invention, that it never existed, that there was no such organisation, not by that name anyway? 

That was by someone Austrian, or at least graduating from Austria, anyway. It was difficult to read, and postponed several times while one read other books. 

One had to wonder why he denied existence of something, usually impossible to prove, a folly in logic which atheists - and others, such as flat-earthers, creation theorists strenuously denying evolution, monotheists, et al - commit routinely. 

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Forsyth wrote down sketches of The ODESSA File and Dogs Of War, and Howard Harris okayed them, asking for ODESSA first. 

Forsyth didn't know at the time that Howard Harris was Jewish, had been in British intelligence, and had been asked to interrogate a prisoner who had bit on his cynide pill just before Harris arrived - Heinrich Himmler.

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Forsyth was referred to Simon Wiesenthal for current information on pro-nazi elements, and went to Austria with a letter of introduction. 

Wiesenthal was enthused when he'd heard Forsyth's proposal for the book; they spent days pouring over his research. 

But the key was, Forsyth wanted a character who'd disappeared right there in Germany, not a fugitive across South Atlantic. 

" ... The response of Herr Wiesenthal was that the right choice might be difficult, not because there were so few but because there were thousands of them." 

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Forsyth asserts here, presumably from information provided by Wiesenthal, that there were two organisation's, Kameradenschaft or Comradeship, and ODESSA, which, Forsyth asserts emphatically, very much did exist - at least, it did then! 

So why the lie by the Austrian doctoral student stressed so repeatedly in his dissertation, and why did he get a doctorate in Austria for it? 

Or was that claim, about the book being a doctoral dissertation, a lie? 

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Forsyth explained the character he had in mind, and Simon Wiesenthal said he had a dozen real ones that fit the description. They poured over the files, and settled on Edouard Roschmann, The Butcher Of Riga. 

Forsyth learned of a single US army jeep in spring of 1945 discovering the entire SS files in process of bring burnt by a bunch of them, and had saved it; only 2 to 3 percent had been consumed until then by flames, the rest was saved and - Forsyth states - rest was in US custody in West Berlin, at least until this book was published, or at least until he discovered the fact while with Simon Wiesenthal. 

This saved collection in care of US contained the entire files on Edouard Roschmann. 

"The real irony was that I could say anything I wanted about this monster. Wherever he was, he was hardly likely to come out of hiding to sue." 

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Forsyth thought that Simon Wiesenthal's 

" ... conviction  that German officialdom was comprehensively penetrated by a generation steeped in either participation in, or sympathy for, what had happened between 1933 and 1945 might be just paranoia, but it was nothing of the sort. It all came down to the issue of which generation.

"A fanatical Nazi aged twenty-five at the end of the war would have been born around 1920. He would have been steeped in Nazi education from age thirteen onwards and almostcertainlya memberof Hitler Youth fromthat age. He could well have been mass murderer by twenty-five."

By the time of his research, Forsyth saw, such a man would be fifty-one or two; that is, at the prime of life and a high ranking official in any one of a hundred positions. 

"Nor would I receive obstruction s only from wanted criminals. ... "

Behind them was a guilty army of bureaucrats, without whose co-operation - organizational flair, as Forsyth terms the specific skill necessary, and accorded when asked - holocaust couldn't have happened. 

"This was the generation that now ran Germany ... "

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Forsyth expounds on the difficulty that Konrad Adenauer, the anti-nazi German Chancellor had had in 1949. If he'd banned all Myers of nazi organisation's, he couldn't have run the country. So he cut a 'Faustian pact' as Forsyth terms it, and - as Simon Wiesenthal told Forsyth - 

" ... every branch of public function was impregnated with the bureaucrats who had not pulled the trigger but helped those who did. Research, he said, was not a question of open hostility but of closed doors. ... "

Simon Wiesenthal also pointed him towards groups who believed in fourth Reich arriving in future, whose meetings Forsyth could attend with his German language proficiency. 

Forsyth did. 

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" ... Communists of the East, behind the Iron Curtain, offered no help whatsoever. ..."

Forsyth found most of lawyers in Hamburg were unwilling to talk, but began to find some, either younger or those who'd been anti-nazi and lived through it; they were willing to talk, but furtively, in dark corners of pubs, once convinced that Forsyth was a British investigative reporter. 

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Forsyth found a Jew in Vienna who had lived in Riga, and been on the death March west when Russia advanced. His wife said he never talked of it, and wouldn't, but he did, for twenty hours, Forsyth writes - he began to correct as Forsyth told him the story as he'd sketched it. Salomon Tauber was only shifted to Hamburg from Vienna by Forsyth, as he puts it; the testimony in the book is what he heard in Vienna, detail by detail, as Forsyth terms it. 

The investigative trail of Peter Miller of The ODESSA File matches his own, Forsyth writes. 

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Forsyth recounts the quixotic twist as he terms it, of the ODESSA File story. 

When the film came, a viewer in a hall on coast south of Buenos Aires, realised that the real Edouard Roschmann, thinking he was safe, had reverted to his own name and was living down the street. He denounced him. 

Argentina arrested him, and West Germany wanted him extradited. Roschmann, out on bail, ran to Paraguay to escape. He waited at border for the ferry across river. 

Witnesses said he had a heart attack in middle of the river and was dead before he hit the deck. 

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On Paraguay bank, the official refused to take charge of the body on ground that it belonged to Argentina. 

The cadaver went back and forth four times, before detectives arrived from Vienna to identify it, which was possible due to dental records and fingerprints courtesy a US jeep in Bavaria. Proof positive was established, courtesy two missing toes, amputated when he'd fled through the border snows from British custody. 

Ferry refused to take the body back, so Paraguay buried it in an unmarked grave by the river. 

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*

" ... With great luck I had managed my O levels at fourteen and my A levels at fifteen, about three years earlier than required. In this my fluent French and German, provided by the prescience of my parents, had been invaluable."

Tonbridge didn't approve. 

" ... Strings were pulled in the background and I was secured an interview at Clare College, Cambridge. With the Master, no less. For my schoolmasters this was close to a visit to Parnassus. 

"I was furnished with a rail warrant to London and another from London to Cambridge, return. ... "

After a very short interview, the master escorted him to the door, opening it, and thanked him for the most honest interview. His report arrived at Tonbridge. 

" ... But tenacity is a rather British trait and Tonbridge certainly had it. They sent for my father. 

"I was not in the room but he told me about it later. There were four of them: the headmaster (whose summer repose I had ruined), my housemaster, the head of studies and the chaplain. He said it was like a summons to the High Court. They were all in their scholastic robes, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. The shopkeeper they confronted came from Chatham Dockyard and they knew it. 

"The lecture was not hostile but deeply earnest. His son, they told him, was making a grievous mistake. Brilliant exam results stemming from an expensive education. The sort of background that could one day, after two more years at Tonbridge, result in an exhibition, possibly even an open major, to Oxford or Cambridge. A first-class degree could open the doors to the Civil Service. Why, his son might even be able to return as a junior master at Tonbridge, something they clearly regarded as the pinnacle of achievement. 

"And in the face of all this the lad had some weird dream of becoming little more than a mechanic. It was all very infra dignitatem – beneath one’s dignity, a Latin phrase my dad had never heard. 

"In the raging snobbery of those days it seemed that Dartmouth College (Royal Navy) or RMA Sandhurst (Army, good regiment of course) was just acceptable, but volunteering for boot camp, RAF, was distinctly bizarre. It was his (my father’s) clear duty to do everything in his power to dissuade his son from avoiding those last two years at school and inexplicably declining to go to Cambridge."

His father thanked them, politely, and said his son would be what he wished, and he'd help him. 

But Forsyth's account is yet another evidence of caste system of British and European social structure, and corroboration of testimony by other authors such as George Eliot and John Galsworthy. 

But even more importantly, it's a fact that's hidden under rug by every non-Indian, non- Hindu, speaker or author on the subject, fraudulently pretending that only Hindu society has a caste system, fraudulently equating caste system with India, instead of admitting that every society has a caste system and that the only difference is that India has a vary different foundation of her caste system, against all other such systems. 

And British dud impose their own caste system in name of disapproval of the Hindu caste system, with additional rungs added below those of British, with all Hindus at bottom thereof, instead of treatment of equality for all, the only seemingly fair alternative as envisioned by left - or a caste system based on merit, as would be fair anywhere. 

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Forsyth describes how his scholarship fund, unutilised until then, and with conditions allowing him to study another language at any place, was used to get him to study Spanish at Granada University, but in Malaga instead of Andalusia. 

" ... Before the war (the Spanish civil war, which was the conflict that still consumed Spain), the matador Carlos Arruza had performed in the Malaga ring, while suffering from flu and a raging temperature, a corrida so spectacular that he had been awarded two ears, the tail and one hoof from the dead bull, a feat never matched since."

" ... Pablo Picasso, still alive and painting but in exile in France after bitterly opposing Franco and painting Guernica, had been born there. ... "

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"Malaga was still a sleepy, quaint and intensely traditional community. Each evening the girls of the respectable classes not yet ‘spoken for’ would slowly parade the length of the palm-lined Paseo, duly chaperoned by mother or aunt. From the sidelines they could be observed by the young men not yet engaged. It was a marriage market of great decorum.

"The girls would have high ivory combs in their hair, draped with a black lace shawl, the mantilla. The young men often wore the short jacket, the traje corto, and the wide-brimmed black or dove-grey hat known as the Cordobes. 

"If or when a young man saw a girl he really fancied he would ask around for her name. When he had it, he would go to his father, who would then enquire about the girl’s own father, and if he was also of a respectable family in a good house and with a worthy profession the two fathers would meet to confer over a possible union of their offspring. There was no question of the youngsters meeting for a chat."

Then tea with her family, where she'd see him first. 

Did she have a say? Forsyth doesn't consider the question. 

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"Tangier was also a free port into which freight ships would arrive to unload out-of-bond cargo immune from even French or Spanish taxes. The cargoes underpinned the smuggling operation, which was considerable. Lined up at the quay was a line of lean, grey Second World War motor torpedo boats, war surplus bought cheap but easily able to outrun the motor boats of the Spanish customs across the water. 

"Thus each evening as the sun set they would slip mooring and head towards the Spanish coast, loaded with perfume, toilet soap, silk stockings and, above all, cigarettes, mainly Camel and Lucky Strike, which were contraband but highly prized and therefore expensive in Spain. 

"They would cruise through the darkness slowly, lights doused, engines rumbling quietly, until the first flashlight on the shore indicated where the mule trains were waiting. Then it was a fast run to shore, frantic hands discharging the cargo before the arrival of the Guardia Civil, and the mules lumbering away into the olive groves. A fast run back out of Spanish territorial waters and a slow cruise home brought them back to Tangier by dawn.

"The going rate for a deckhand was 50 pounds per trip, which was a lot of money back then, so I went down to see if anyone would take me on, but was rebuffed. No vacancies. The jobs were extremely sought after despite twenty years in a Franco jail if caught, and anyway I had no seamanship."

Difficult to imagine Forsyth's books being written in a French prison, however good - the experience of world evident is only comparable with his research. 

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"There was a British warship moored in the outer harbour on what is called a ‘flying the flag’ mission. The idea was to spread pro-British goodwill along the African coast. It was in a dockside bar that I came across a group of marines who were having terrible trouble making themselves plain to the bar staff, who spoke only Moorish Arabic and Spanish. 

"I tried to help and was promptly pressganged as unit interpreter by the senior sergeant. They were all from Glasgow, from, I believe, Gallowgate or the Gorbals; about five feet tall and the same wide. 

"The problem was not between English and Spanish. That was easy. It was between English and Glaswegian. I could not understand a word they said. Eventually a corporal was discovered whom I could decipher and the three-language enigma was solved. ... "

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Humour is back, as Forsyth describes his failure to get in RAF for short stint of two years through National Service, even as most others were inventing health reasons to stay out - he wasn't eighteen yet. 

His father again helped, by donating the much needed Leopard-skin to the drummer, which got a call of gratitude from a patron, a retired air marshal who, after hearing what he could do, did oblige. 

Forsyth received the OHMS envelope inviting him for further proceedings. 

"Since the end of the Second World War, the procedure had been that those getting their wings during National Service would go back to Civvy Street but remain on the roll of the Auxiliary Air Force, flying at weekends with one intensive two-week refresher course per year. 

"But it was becoming very plain that weekend warriors were not going to be any match for the Soviet Union’s MiGs and Sukhois if it came to World War Three. The economists in London were even then pointing out that training someone to fly fighters, which took two years anyway, then losing him a fortnight later was a waste of money. ngly, sustained only by the inertia of all bureaucracies.

"Awarding a boy a flying scholarship was going to cost the Air Ministry only thirty hours in a Tiger Moth at six pounds per hour. From zero to wings on a single-seater jet, even back then, cost over one hundred thousand pounds. The system continued, but unwillingly, sustained only by the inertia of all bureaucracies."

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"CARDINGTON HAD ONCE been the base of the barrage balloons that had floated over British cities to deter the bombers of the Luftwaffe. The gigantic hangars that housed them proved perfect for the masses of stores needed to transform a generation of young men from civilians to aircraftsmen."

Forsyth points out how national service brought together young males across geographical distances and castes within UK, to learn to be together and on their own, without parents' - especially mothers' - care. 

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" ... Each of us longed for the morning when we would go down to the hangars to be introduced to what we all longed to fly. The de Havilland Vampire."

"For years after 1945 the Vampire, along with her contemporary the Gloster Meteor, had been the principal front-line fighter of the RAF. Although relegated to an advanced flying trainer, she was in essence just the same. The four Aden cannon had been retained for the purposes of balance and only stoppered at the front end. The gunsight had been removed from the cockpit but that was all."

" ... Then one of us made an interesting remark. 

"‘Flight, it’s got no ejector seat.’"

"But fly in it we did, aware that with dinghy pack and parachute strapped to your rear end, like the bulbous home of a spider on its backside, you could stand up in the cockpit but never get out. The front coaming of the windscreen would jab you in the stomach before the parachute could clear the back of the seat. Like a champagne cork, you were stuck and could only sit back down again.

"And that was while stationary on the apron. In the stratosphere, a 300mph slipstream would simply bend you back until your spine snapped."

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"It was all learning, a huge curve of new expertise to be ingested and assimilated. And the ground instruction: classroom lessons on aerodynamics, meteorology, aviation medicine, the stresses and strains of G-forces up to six times gravity in the turns and dives, the effects of anoxia (oxygen starvation) if the breathing apparatus packed up."

" ... In northern England there would be cloud, masses of cloud, and once that great ocean of grey cotton wool closes around you, only the instruments will keep you alive and bring you back to a safe landing. 

"Every emergency procedure was practised over and over again from engine flame-out to loss of radio. 

"Sometimes we would find an American bomber out of Lakenheath, patrolling towards the North Sea, formate alongside and give the ally a cheery wave. Other times we would find a Soviet bomber over the ocean, probing the defences. Another wave, but they never replied."

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*

Forsyth gives grim account of an accident, when faulty reading of altimeter in Pennines had the pilot and trainer crashed to death. 

"It was on a bleak winter’s day of sheeting rain that eight of us, chosen for equal height, carried Derek’s coffin to the Retford grave and stood in the downpour as the obsequies were completed. Then we went back to Worksop and flew again. 

"I think that in the lives of most young men there comes a moment when the boy simply has to grow up and become a man. For most of us it was the day we buried Derek Brett. We realized this thing, this Vampire, was not just a great-fun sports car loaned by a generous queen for us to amuse ourselves over the north of England. It was ten tons of aluminium and steel that, if you did not treat it with respect, would kill you."

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*

" ... On my first summer vacation, unable to afford a holiday, I managed to be taken on as a deckhand on a German freighter called the Alster. She plied between King’s Lynn and Hamburg. I spent two weeks on her."

" ... My deckhand wages did not afford much more than a few beers but some of these were taken in the old Zillertal, a beer hall famous for its foaming steins of ale and oompah-oompah brass bands. I went there because my father had told me about it.

"In spring 1939, when I was still a baby, he and a friend from Ashford had treated themselves to a short vacation and picked Hamburg, where they arrived by car. They both went to the Zillertal but on emerging heard a scuffle down a side alley. Peering into the gloom, they observed two Nazi thugs beating up an old Jew. 

"He and Joe Crotnall may have just been shopkeepers from a small market town who knew nothing of the reality of Germany under the Nazis, but it had only taken them twenty-four hours to take a dislike to the strutting young men with their armbands and the sign of the broken cross. Neither was Jewish either, but they just waded in. 

"In his time in Chatham Dockyard School my dad had been a useful middle-weight and his father had once been boxing, wrestling and bayonet-fighting champion of the Nore Command, which then contained 50,000 sailors. Anyway, he and Joe Crotnall (who told me the story ten years later) flattened the two assailants. Then, as a crowd gathered, it was time to get out of there. They ran for their car and sped out of Germany into Holland before getting into any more trouble."

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"Then in 1960 I crashed the MG and was lucky to survive. ... "

Forsyth drove faster than the car could on a 90° right turn, and he describes the horrible accident. His passenger was lucky. 

"There was a triangular hole in the skull on the left side with the bone fragment embedded inside. A junior surgeon on the staff managed to retrieve the triangle of bone and draw it back into the aperture where it was supposed to be. Then he bandaged it and hoped it would knit back. It did.

"A Dr Bannerjee worked on the ear. This was long before micro-surgery. He put it back where it should have been, sutured the meat back into place and hoped the blood vessels and nerves would find each other and reconnect. Miraculously they did. Apart from some puckering, the ear has worked perfectly well ever since.

"A Mr Laing, a dental surgeon roused from his bed, worked on the mouth. All five of the top row front teeth had been smashed out and even the roots were in bits. He plucked out every last fragment and sewed the gums closed, leaving tendrils of thread hanging down like something from a horror movie. But the big problem was the left hand. It was pulp.

"It just happened that two years earlier one of the finest orthopaedic surgeons in England, after a long and prestigious career in the London teaching hospitals, had retired to his native Norfolk and settled in a village a few miles away. He had met Matron and suggested that, although he was fully retired, if she ever had a really bad one she could call him. That night she did. I believe he was called Mr North. He too left his bed and came to the emergency ward.

"He would have been perfectly entitled, I was told afterwards, to amputate at the wrist. Another surgeon told me later, after seeing the X-rays, that he would have done so. That would have been the unchallengeable decision – a clean, thirty-minute removal of what was left of the hand. The alternative was risky. The trauma was so bad that the young driver could easily die on the slab rather than take a six-hour operation. But he took the risk.

"Through the night, as the anaesthetist constantly checked the life-signs, the surgeon plucked out the tiny fragments and chips of bone and rebuilt the knuckles and metacarpals. He finished around sunrise. His patient was still breathing. Then he had a cup of tea and drove home."

" ... Dr Bannerjee was too shy to return to be thanked for his amazing work on the ear. Mr North would accept nothing from my father save a redecoration of the nurses’ hostel, which was accomplished. I remain grateful to them all, though, as I was then twenty-one, I doubt any can still be alive."

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Forsyth tells of a tailor, a palmist, who was next patient in the general ward, who predicted details of his future, after telling those of his life so far. Forsyth admis they've come true, so far. 

"I had just turned twenty-three; it was autumn 1961. I was heading for London and for Fleet Street, the capital of British journalism, and I still intended to become a foreign correspondent and see the world."

Forsyth had a lucky break at lunch, after a morning of series of rejections on Fleet Street, and was sent to meet a prospective employer. 

"Doon Campbell was news editor of Reuters, a name so prestigious I had not even thought of it. Not just a few foreign correspondents but an entire agency dedicated to foreign news, reported from their myriad bureaux all over the world. He was actually a very kindly man but his first, deliberate, impression was of a no-nonsense sergeant-major. ... "

"I knew I would get no Brownie points for walking out on the EDP without notice, so I told him I would need to work out my month and could join Reuters in December. He nodded dismissively and that was that. I had landed a slot in the world’s best-regarded agency for foreign news by a series of flukes. ... "

" ... In May I got my break. 

"The deputy chief of the Paris bureau was diagnosed with a heart murmur and had to be flown home without delay. The British National Health Service was free and the French was not. A head poked round the door of the Home Reporters’ room and asked: ‘Anyone here speak French?’"

Forsyth was taken to meet the French language service, chief Maurice, who was French. 

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"Maurice was bent over his typewriter and without looking up asked in French: ‘What do you reckon to the situation in Paris?’"

Here's genesis of The Day Of The Jackal. 

"It was back then in a state of crisis. It had just been revealed that President de Gaulle had for months been secretly negotiating with the Algerian resistance at Vichy and had fixed 1 July 1963 for a French pull-out from the disastrous Algerian independence war and Algerian independence for the same day. The French extreme-right and elements of the elite of the army had declared war on de Gaulle personally. France stood on the verge of coup d’état or revolution.

"I let Maurice have a torrent of French complete with a brace of slang expressions that a pretend-speaker would never have known. Maurice had served with the Free French in the war, based at first in London with de Gaulle, then fighting his way across his own homeland as it was liberated under Marshal Juin. But he had married an English girl and settled in London. He stopped typing and looked up. 

"‘You’re French-born, right?’"

Forsyth said he was English. 

"‘Better get him over there. I’ve never heard a Rosbif talk like that.’"

" ... I phoned my parents in Kent and was on the morning flight to Paris. A new chapter was opening that would eventually, and totally unforeseeably, lead to a book called The Day of the Jackal."

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*

"In 1958 de Gaulle, who had retired in 1947, or so it was presumed, was recalled as prime minister and the following year was elected president. In his campaign he had used the magic words: ‘Algérie Française’. Algeria is French. So the army and the right-wing worshipped him. A few weeks into office as premier he realized the situation was hopeless. France was being bled white in a war it could not win. As president he began secret negotiations to end it. When that news broke it was like a nuclear explosion. 

"In Algeria vital sections of the army mutinied and marched into exile, taking their weapons with them. Five generals went with them. These were not the raw recruits but the Foreign Legion and the Paras (Airborne), the cream of the cream. The numerical bulk, the military service inductees, wanted to come home so they stayed loyal to Paris. But hundreds of French civilians, settled in Algeria, realizing they would be thrown out or at least dispossessed by a new Algerian government, threw in their lot with the rebels, who called themselves the Secret Armed Organization or OAS. Their aim: assassinate de Gaulle, topple his regime and install the hard-right.

"The Paris into which I landed that May 1962 was in turmoil. The biggest communist party in Europe, west of the Iron Curtain, was French, completely loyal to Moscow, which had been arming and funding the Algerians. Hard-left students marched and clashed violently on the streets of Paris with those supporting the right. Plastic bombs exploded in cafés and restaurants.

"Between the warring sides was the newly formed anti-riot police, the CRS, whose methods were not gentle. Almost every street corner featured a couple of them demanding identity papers, as in a city under occupation. Surrounding de Gaulle’s person and keeping him alive were two forces: the Action Service of the counter-intelligence arm, and his personal squad of four bodyguards, backed by the Gendarmerie Nationale. For a young foreign correspondent it was some baptism and the peak of all the possible postings."

................................................................................................

"On arrival I reported to the bureau chief, the formidable Harold King. He was a legend. Born German, he had fought in the First World War, but for the kaiser. He emigrated to Britain and naturalized. In 1940 he was Reuters’ man in Moscow, following the Red Army deep into Poland, before being repatriated to London. Then he followed the Free French into France and became utterly convinced of the claims and policies of Charles de Gaulle. After the liberation he told Reuters he would head up the Paris Bureau or quit. He got Paris. 

"When de Gaulle resigned in disgust in 1947 he was presumed to be gone for ever. Only Harold King, like a Jacobite waiting for the return of the king, insisted de Gaulle would one day return to lead France back to glory, and until it all came true in 1958 King was indulgently regarded as a fantasist. Now in 1962 he was the king (literally) of the Paris foreign press corps. His loyalty to de Gaulle was quietly rewarded with tip-off after tip-off. "

"Back then French lunches lasted nearly three hours. We strolled back into the office at close to four. I did not know it but I had been, in a way, adopted, and the friendship lasted until he died. The mentoring that Frank Keeler had started in King’s Lynn Harold King completed in Paris, upholding Reuters’ house style of rigorous accuracy and complete impartiality – even though he was very partial to Charles de Gaulle and the compliment was constantly repaid. He was the only Britisher the French autocrat had any time for.

"Because I was the youngest and the most junior, and a single man with no family to hurry home to, Harold King gave me a rather unusual assignment. It was to shadow Charles de Gaulle every time he left the Elysée Palace. I was not the only one."

" ... He knew exactly what we were there for. It was not to cover his visit to the Senate or whatever. It was for that cataclysmic moment when he was assassinated. He knew and he did not give a damn. He despised his enemies and he despised danger. He just shoved his beak of a nose even higher and stalked through."

................................................................................................

*

"OAS sympathizers also frequented the bars of the 9th, and so did I. This was largely because the second day-shift at the office ended at 10 p.m. and I did not need or wish to sleep until well after midnight. So I nursed a beer, stared vacantly at the wall and listened. That gave me some knowledge of de Gaulle’s deadly enemies.

"I also developed my ‘Bertie Wooster mode’, an adopted persona based on P.G. Wodehouse’s witless hero: helpless, well-meaning, affable but dim as a five-watt bulb. Affecting to speak little French and with the usual appalling British accent, I was assumed by both bar staff and customers not to understand what they were talking about. The reverse was the case. In the years to come Bertie would get me out of a lot of trouble. This is because the harmless fool with a British passport is what Europeans want to see and believe."

................................................................................................

Forsyth describes the real life attempt by OAS on life of de Gaulle, on 22nd August,  1962. 

"A pretty shattered Mme Yvonne was helped into the ’copter. De Gaulle emerged, shook shards of glass from the lapel of his Savile Row suit (the only British thing he would have about him) and gave his verdict. 

"‘Ils ne savant pas tirer,’ he sniffed. They can’t shoot straight."

"That October saw the Cuba missile crisis, a hyper-tense four days when it really looked as if the world might come to thermo-nuclear war and be wiped out. To be fair to de Gaulle, rightly described as no admirer of the USA since his blazing rows in the war with General Eisenhower, he was the first in Europe to ring Washington and pledge his total support for John F. Kennedy."

Forsyth describes three attempts against life of de Gaulle, of which second one seems to be the one in his work is modelled on, involving a sniper. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth was informed that Reuters wanted to send him to East Berlin. 

"At the Ostbahnhof station I disembarked and the man I was replacing, Jack Altman, was there to greet me. He had had a year of it and was yearning to get the hell out. 

"He had a car, which I would take over, and a spacious flat-cum-office in the Schönhauser Allee, which I would also inhabit. After lunch he took me to meet the hatchet-faced officials with whom I would have to deal. I noticed that he spoke good German but would never pass for one. In front of officialdom I made heavy weather of vocabulary and grammar, and affected a clumsy accent. I noticed the officials relaxed at that. This one would be no problem. 

"He introduced me to the office secretary, Fräulein Erdmute Behrendt, an East German lady who clearly would also be under constant surveillance by the police and the SSD, the formidable Stasi. Two days later he was gone."

................................................................................................

Foster discovered the planted bugs and watchers of his apartment soon enough. 

"One of the nastiest pieces of work in the regime was the press secretary to the Politburo, a certain Kurt Blecha. He had perhaps the falsest smile on earth. But I knew a few things about Master Blecha. One was his birthday and another was that in the Thirties he had been a red-hot member of the Nazi Party."

He'd pretended to be converted as soon as Russian forces found him, and returned to be part of regime. 

................................................................................................

*

"I also learned how to shake the Stasi tail. As the Reuters correspondent I was allowed through Checkpoint Charlie into West Berlin but the secret police tail was not. They always pulled over to the kerb as I approached the barrier. Once through, I could race down the Kurfürstendamm, from there to the Heerstraße and on to the border leading back into the republic of East Germany at DreiLinden.

"It was sometimes thought in the West that Berlin was a border city between East and West. Not so; it was buried eighty miles inside East Germany, with West Berlin surrounded on all sides. Head west out of West Berlin through the Drei Linden crossing point and you were on the autobahn to West Germany, which was also allowed. Once on it I could leave the autobahn at the first off-ramp and disappear into the countryside. With a set of shabby local clothes and an East Berlin-registered Wartburg car, eating at roadside halts and sleeping in the car, I could stay off radar for a couple of days.

"There were good stories to be had once outside the cage. In theory everyone was so happy in the workers’ paradise that there could not be any dissent to report. The truth was that resentment among workers and students seethed under the surface, occasionally breaking out in strikes and student marches – always short-lived and punished as the Volkspolizei, the People’s Police, known as VoPos, struck back."

................................................................................................

Blecha interviewed him every time he reappeared, pretending worry, asking him to let them know next time so they could could make introductions. 

Forsyth claimed he'd gone looking at old churches, and had a book at home on architecture that they could see. 

................................................................................................

*

"I arrived in East Berlin in early October. In late November the world was hit by a thunderbolt."

Wonder why he never wrote about that one huge crime, committed right on world stage. 

It took a Jim Garrison to unravel and bring it out to people, and an Oliver Stone to immortalise the story in his unforgettable film, JFK. 

................................................................................................

"I happened to be dining in West Berlin with a stunning German girl called Annette. We were at the Paris Bar, just round the corner from the Reuters office. It was full and behind the clatter and chatter there was muzak playing. Out of nowhere it stopped and an urgent-sounding voice barked: 

"‘Wir unterbrechen unser Programm für eine wichtige Meldung: auf den Präsidenten Kennedy wurde geschossen.’"

Music resumed. They thought it had been a joke, or a glitch. Then it repeated. 

"Then the world went crazy. 

"Men stood up and swore repeatedly, women screamed. Tables were overturned. Kennedy had been there in June, speaking at the Wall. It is hard to describe to those who came later how he was hero-worshipped, and in this city of all cities. ... "

................................................................................................

Forsyth rushed to get to his office in East Berlin,  crossing Checkpoint Charlie. 

"The checkpoint was in the American sector of the four-power-divided city and in their glass booth the GIs were bowed over their radio. You could have driven a herd of buffalo past them and they would not have noticed. The American barrier was up as always. I drove past it and swerved to the East German control sheds. They too had heard."

"The story was still recent of Peter Fechter, an eighteen-year-old student who had got through the minefield and was halfway up the Wall when the searchlights found him. He was hit by a burst of fire from a watch tower. No one wanted to go through the mines to get him down. In sight of the West Berliners, he hung there on the barbed wire, screaming until he bled out and died.

"The only good news about that awful night in 1963 was to see these brutes bleating with panic. They surrounded my car asking: ‘Herr Forsyth, wird das Krieg bedeuten?’ Will this mean war?"

................................................................................................

"The media concentration was on a panicking America, but that fear was as nothing to the situation on the Iron Curtain. I rang the East German Foreign Ministry for a comment. They were fully awake with desks staffed but not knowing what to say until told by Moscow. So terrified voices were asking me, rather than the way it should have been.

"The point about a communist state, or any dictatorship, is that independent media are out of the question. So despite denial after denial the authorities persisted in the myth that the Reuters man in their midst had some kind of a direct line to the British Government. On each of the two occasions I flew back to the UK during my year in East Berlin I was given earnest messages for the British Foreign Secretary, whom I had not the slightest intention of visiting, nor he me. When I said I was only going to visit my mum and dad, they tapped the sides of their noses and said: Ja, ja, we are men of the world. Wink, wink."

................................................................................................

"By mid-morning word was coming through that the assassin of Dallas was in handcuffs and an American Communist. The panic deepened. On the streets terrified passers-by glanced at the skies expecting to see the bombers of the Strategic Air Command heading east with their nukes. Then Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald right in the heart of a police station. If anything was possible to fuel the fires of conspiracy theory, it was that. And indeed the incompetence was pretty hard to believe. 

Did Forsyth never did suspect the truth? 

Or see that there were just too many discrepancies in the official story? 

................................................................................................

"But the USA kept its nerve. The vice-president took over and was sworn in. The bombers remained grounded. The panic slowly subsided to be replaced by grief as the TV pictures flashed up of the funeral with the riderless horse. When another shot showed a small boy saluting his father’s catafalque, all Berlin, East and West, was in tears. Extraordinary times."

Did he not realise, or even suspect, even after Jim Garrison proceeded with his case, that the lone shooter made no sense? 

Did he not realise, or even suspect, that Garrison was right? 

................................................................................................

"West Berlin lived in a slightly hysterical mood all those years while the Wall stood, aware it could be snuffed out within a night if the order was given in Moscow, like a partygoer drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. That Christmas it let rip. The East Berliners did their best, but the contrast in prosperity of the two political and economic systems was stark."

This was desperation, not joy. 

One is reminded of the explanation given by someone, decades ago, of how West Berlin survived. 

When you see a wolf approach, you are frightened. When it's close, you panic. But when you're inside it's jaws, you settle down between the teeth and enjoy life - while you can. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth talks of the currency restrictions then in East Europe - one had to convert 80% to Eastern currency, which couldn't be brought out. 

There was little worth buying. So Reuters had huge balance, which he'd been informally asked, before going to East Berlin, to reduce. 

There were some superb things, such as Czech records and Hungarian leather bags. Each country of east Europe maintained a loss making prestige shop in East Berlin. 

East German guards ignored his trunk when he crossed to West, and he ignored some oranges missing when he entered East Berlin. 

"Each Soviet satellite country maintained a prestige restaurant in East Berlin. There was a Haus Budapest with Hungarian cuisine, a Haus Sofia for Bulgaria and so on. The Haus Moskau served borscht, Stolichnaya vodka … and caviar. That first Christmas I really helped Reuters reduce its surplus Marks-pile with a mountain of Beluga and enough Stolly to ensure that all the bugs in my bedroom could record were the snores."

................................................................................................

Forsyth recounts a true story of adventure, tailor made for his thrillers - a telex alert in small hours, his rushing across Checkpoint Charlie and out towards Magdeburg to find the plane shot down by Soviets, his being ignored by locals until he said he was from London and showed his British passport, and then helped readily and copiously, finding an old farmer who knew exactly where the wreck was and finding the wreck, hearing the story of the three ejected crew seen being taken and driven by Soviets towards Magdeburg. 

"Then the luck ran out. I was stumbling back to where I left the car when I heard voices among the pine trees. I dropped to my knees in the undergrowth. Too late. 

"I heard a barked Stoi and saw a pair of serge combat trousers ahead of my face. An angry Mongoloid face was staring down at me. These Mongol regiments came from the Russian Far East and have always been used as cannon fodder. I stood up. He was shorter than me but the tommy gun pointing at my face created its own very persuasive argument.

"Surrounded by his mates I was marched out of the forest to a meadow where a group of officers was standing round a colonel seated at a trestle table studying a map. One of them looked up, frowned and came over. He spoke to the soldier in a tongue I could not understand. Certainly not Russian. So, a White Russian officer from a Mongoloid regiment recruited somewhere way out along the river Ussuri. Or maybe the Amur. A long way away."

................................................................................................

Forsyth refers to the officer as 'White Russian', amongst what he terms Mongoloid soldiers. 

It's completely unclear whether he means White, as in not Red - or as in of European descent. 

Or both. 

Presumably, or at least possibly, he's indicating or implying that someone speaking a language he didn't understand was, judging by his conversation with the Mongoloid soldiers, accustomed to Asian parts of Russia, and this amounts to his having lived there, possibly as a White Russian hiding post revolution in East, unable to leave.

................................................................................................

"He asked for an explanation. I dropped into Bertie Wooster mode – hapless, harmless and very dim. I told him my car had been run off the road and was stuck in a sand drift. I had been told there was a farmer in the woods with a tractor who might pull me out. Then I dropped my car keys and was scrambling around trying to find them when his kindly soldiers guided me out of the forest. 

"He took my press card and went to show it to the colonel. There was a jabber of Russian. The colonel shrugged and gave him back my card. He clearly had problems more serious than idiot East Germans getting stuck. The captain came back and handed me my press card, and told me to get the hell out of there. I must have been a bit punch drunk because I said in halting German: 

"‘Herr Captain, it was your trucks that ran me into the sand drift. Your lads couldn’t push me out, could they?’"

Forsyth's car wasn't stuck, but he braked while they pushed, and then released it so it shot forward, with friendly waves by the soldiers. 

................................................................................................

He needed to get his story through to West Berlin. He found an old gasthof. 

"Presenting my German ID and speaking like a German, I took a room, pleading car trouble for the lack of reservation, went upstairs and placed a call to my East Berlin office. Fräulein Behrendt had checked in at nine that morning, read my scrawled message, and was still there. With headphones on, she took down my fifteen-page despatch."

He told her to run it through on telex at maximum speed. She managed fourteen pages before the line messaged technical problems, the usual trick. It took that long for them to stop it because they needed to check with bosses. 

................................................................................................

"I learned later that it had ‘gone viral’ before that phrase was invented. Client newspapers used it across the globe. Wiesbaden was very happy and a staff car was despatched to Magdeburg to demand the three crewmen back. (They came home pretty quickly. The nervousness caused by Lee Harvey Oswald was apparently still alive in Moscow.) 

"I should have driven back to East Berlin that night but I was bone-tired and hungry. I ate a hearty supper, went back to my room and slept until morning. After breakfast I paid up and emerged. 

"Outside the main door I was reminded of those society weddings where the bridegroom’s mates all line up in two columns forming a walkway between them."

................................................................................................

He was escorted to Magdeburg by the complete collection of various security forces, and interviewed strenuously. He did his Bertie Wooster bit, arguing that he had to do his job, asking if they wouldn't do exactly that if they were reporters in London. 

"The senior goon facing me would probably not have had a clue what to do with a hot news story. As he was well over forty I suspected he had been serving the Nazis twenty years earlier and had switched seamlessly to the Communists. Secret policemen are like that; they’ll serve anyone.

"Years after Berlin the pretty vicious DINA, the secret police of the not-so-saintly Salvador Allende of Chile, transferred without a blip to the service of General Pinochet. They even used the same torture chambers. Only the victims changed. 

"As he had never lived in a free country at all, asking him to agree with what a free journalist would do was simply embarrassing. I just had to hope my façade of a lucky but gormless fool, and thus too dim to be a spy, would hold up. It did."

He was, after a day and night of questioning, escorted to East Berlin, but at a border crossing Checkpoint between East Germany South of East Berlin, avoiding West Berlin. 

"Someone in Berlin had decided they wanted this whole (for them) miserable affair quashed. We drove fast back to East Berlin but not via West Berlin. As East German drivers swerved off the highway as the blaring sirens came up behind them, we made record time, driving round West Berlin to enter East Berlin from the south. Many never knew that there was a second border separating East Berlin from East Germany proper. It was to prevent Western tourists who were allowed through Checkpoint Charlie from driving straight on into East Germany unmonitored."

Someone tapped on his window, and told him not to come back to Magdeburg, ever. 

Forsyth says he never has, so far. 

................................................................................................

"It was 24 April 1964, and it was two o’clock in the morning. I was in my car, twisting and turning my way through the coffin-dark streets of East Berlin back to my flat ... "

He was stopped by a soldier posted at an intersection, who turned back to face the main road Forsyth was attempting to cross, and Forsyth heard a rumble. 

"As I watched, the first vehicles appeared, coming from the right, meaning the east, and heading across the junction towards the west. They were lorries packed with soldiers and it was obviously a very large convoy. It just went on and on. I got out of the car and watched for a few minutes. The trucks were then replaced by low-loaders carrying tanks. Nothing else moved. Apart from the Russians the streets were abandoned."

Forsyth did a u-turn, wanting to get back to home and office sooner, but same thing happened at another crossing of a different main road. This repeated at least three times. 

"The third time, the slowly rumbling traffic on the crossing involved more low-loaders but carrying mobile bridges. Then more mechanized infantry with motorcycle outriders. Though no expert, I calculated what I had seen as between four and five divisions of the Soviet army, in full battle order, moving through the darkness towards the Wall."

................................................................................................

"The West Berliners lived with the daily fear of the moment the twenty-two divisions of Soviet-based military in East Germany got their marching orders. That was why their mood was always slightly hysterical and their partygoing and sexual mores entertainingly louche. 

"And finally, with Kennedy dead and Khrushchev locked in a power struggle with rivals in the Kremlin, the spring of 1964 was as tense a time as had ever been. Not long after, the Russian tanks of General Abrassimov and the US tanks of General Lucius Clay would be parked barrel-to-barrel at Checkpoint Charlie with the Reuters man dodging between them.

"What I had seen was not merely rolling, it was rolling towards the Wall. In silence, apart from the low rumbling, at 2 a.m. In rising anguish I made it back to the Reuters office-cum-apartment and rushed upstairs. ... "

................................................................................................

"There was no question of calling anyone to consult. Telephonically West Berlin and West Germany were cut off. All the East German ministries were closed."

Forsyth decided to communicate exactly what he'd seen, without comment. Then he waited. He heard later of subsequent events, partly guessed by him. 

Reuters office, instead of forwarding the message worldwide, did so only to London, where superiors were woken up, and contacted Moscow. Kremlin was bewildered, and eventually contacted East Germany. 

"A puzzled Soviet commander-in-chief of Warsaw Pact forces in East Germany explained that it was only a rehearsal for the May Day parade due in exactly one week. 

"In a rare extension of consideration for the citizens of East Berlin, the Soviets had decided to hold their multi-division military party in the middle of the night when the streets were empty, and being Communists it never occurred to them to tell anybody."

Forsyth was ridiculed until he pointed out that if he didn't know, nor had they, so a truce was agreed upon, yo not refer to it. 

And it's been relatively unknown, so far. The few in the know never publicised it, although it may have been talked of in intelligence circles. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth describes an unpleasant encounter, after visiting Buchenwald, at a local pub with a sneering middle aged ex-guard of a different concentration camp, 

"‘Were you there? In the old days?’ I did not mean as an inmate, I meant on the staff. He shook his head, then confirmed my suspicion. 

"‘Not that one.’"

and wondering how children grow up to turn into such monsters. 

He need not have looked far. 

Racism is half the cause - slavery in US, British treatment of locals in India and elsewhere, are all testimony thereof - and then there are the later abrahmic creeds that are all equally fanatic about converting the world, as much as they are assured constantly by their respective priests that, regardless of individual virtues, all followers of any other creed are going to hell. In case of an atheist Abrahamic-IV, read that demons from hell, since they wouldn't preach a future heaven away from earth. 

Memoirs of survivors of those camp, and others, attest to local churches having preached antisemitism, definitely every Easter, if not roitinely weekly - and consequently being attacked every Easter Sunday after mass, with stone peltings. 

................................................................................................

" ... Further discreet enquiries with some of my contacts in West Berlin revealed whose address it was. 

"I recall driving back into East Berlin through ‘Charlie’ that night with the words of a popular song running through my head. The opening line was: the party’s over, it’s time to call it a day.fn1 I had been sleeping with the mistress of the East German defence minister, General Karl-Heinz Hoffmann.

"General Hoffmann was not renowned for his sense of humour. I had just turned twenty-six in October 1964 and hoped for a few more birthdays yet to come. Outside of a prison cell if possible."

Forsyth asked Reuters to transfer him, and he'd finished a year, so they agreed - no one lasted over a year in East Berlin. He flew out. 

" ... I looked down at the divided city convinced I would never return to East Germany. As it turned out, I was wrong about that."

................................................................................................

Forsyth was sent back to Paris, and watched funeral of Churchill on television in a Cafe in Paris, remarking that everyone was silent, despite being no admirers of all things British. He'd decided that future was with radio and television, and applied to BBC, ending up in home radio division. 

But BBC was more bureaucracy and establishment than news, he discovered. 

Is BBC 'auntie'? Of the chapter title? 

"Then it got worse. ... "

Forsyth writes about Sir Hugh Carleton-Greene, brother of Graham Greene, who'd set up North German radio after WWII, but was disgusted with BBC and resigned. 

" ... Only later did I learn about office politics, just as they effectively destroyed me."

Forsyth applied for foreign correspondent job and got it. He writes ruing it in hindsight, having then not known about Commonwealth Relations Office and Foreign Office, or about "slavishness of BBC" to them.  

" ... But awareness came late, too late."

Next chapter title involves Africa, so presumably this had to do with what eventually he wrote up in his book on Biafra. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth's boss had wanted to bring in a protégé of his own. 

His job involved attending briefings at Commonwealth Relations Office and Foreign Office,  and he remarks that other correspondents had gone native, copying attitudes and postures of the bureaucrats there who briefed them 

" ... I never recall a penetrating question or a hint of a disagreement ... by mid-morning a single issue was dominating all others : the Middle East. Gamal Abdal Nasser of Egypt was steadily preparing for war with Israel." 

" ... Nasser was no friend of Britain nor vice-versa.  ... "

"Yet in the Foreign Office the anti-Semitism was unmissable. ... pn most issues ... lofty disdainof foreigners, yet a preferencefor Arabs and Islam.  This was mirrored in the left-wing media."

Strange concoction, and copied ditto in India (until 2014), by all congress related regimes. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth went on leave, frustrated about nit being sent to Middle East, and watched the Six DAY War via media. 

"In Britain the left had been practically salivating at the imminent destruction of the Jewish state and could only watch in slack-jawed amazement. Most of the Britishpeoplejust cheered. The heto of the hour across two continents, Europe and America, was ... Moshe Dayan."

Forsyth returned to work from leave, a minority opinion on the topic in media and Foreign Office.  He plunges into his nobody was paying attention to crisis in Nigeria.  

Hereon it's familiar territory if one has read his work on Biafra. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth was called by Hutchinson's deputy to go to Nigeria. He protested that he knew nothing about it, cared less and didn't want to go. He had to give in. His briefing was by someone ignorant and prejudiced, as evident from reading his own book on the subject. 

"The Rebel army was a rabble of cooks and bottle-washers who would be no match for the very fine British trained Nigerian army ... "

Events in capital Lagos were covered by someone else. Forsyth was to go to Biafra via Cameron. He was to meet up Jim Parker, British deputy High Comissioner, stuck to him and evacuate after Nigeria occupied Biafra, returning to file 'upsummer'. 

He met Jim Parker who knew the region, and asked what Forsyth had been told. He knew where it had come from, the British High Comissioner David Hunt, whom Forsyth describes as someone racist who'd missed every plum diplomatic post to end up in Nigeria. They met years later. 

"Every word I had been given was complete and utter garbage. ... " 

And Hunt was the source. 

After meeting Ojukwu, who was very well educated son of a millionaire and nothing like portrayed by those who'd briefed Forsyth, he went to the hotel where expatriates, mostly British, stayed. They were as knowledgeable as Jim Parker about local affairs and would confirm all he said. 

Forsyth went back for tea with Jim Parker who explained why his briefing had been what it was. 

"It was a chastening seminar to confirm the old adage. Never mind what the embassy says, go and ask the old sweats who have been there for years."

................................................................................................

The next chapter, titled End of Career, has Forsyth give here, briefly, what he expounds on in his work on Biafra at more length, focusing here a tad more on British mistakes, prejudices and arbitrary nature of decisions. 

Over and over, it reminds one of 1971, as it did when readingthe book - except that Biafra had no saviour, as East Bengal did in Mother India. 

Forsyth was ordered home for reporting facts, and reduced again to home reporter. He "wandered around the corridors" until he'd "found Tom Maltby". 

................................................................................................

"Tom Maltby was a very decent man and kindly. ... "

Tom Maltby explained to him that his crime had been to contradict the version by establishment, however truthfully. Moreover, if the war golden as per their predictions, he'd be held forever as wrong; but if not, they'd have to reconsider. Maltby suggested he shouldn't resign in a hurry. 

He was transferred to the Parliamentary Desk at the House of Commons, rather than moping around the reporters' room. Forsyth writes that he thereby learned how the British government actually functions. 

Forsyth was able to avoid politics of coterie at BBC while stationed at House of Commons, and get disillusioned regarding virtues of MPs and peers, he writes. 

"In the interim, the Nigerian civil war had not ended or improved. It had gotten worse. ..."

Wilson's British Government was quietly arming Nigerian army while claiming to be neutral, Forsyth writes. 

But Biafra, headed by the educated and intelligent General Ojukwu, fought back, on several fronts, including economic and financial security,  arms and military bases, and foreign connections, chieflywith Spain and Portugal. He also established an office in London to tell of the Biafra side. 

Forsyth sought to join the all media group travelling at invitation of General Ojukwu, but he was told that BBC was not covering the war and he wasn't going anywhere. He decided to go without telling while on a week's leave.

................................................................................................

Forsyth flew to Lisbon, met Hank Wharton who was shipping arms and got a ride, with adventure of bring shot at - most African regimes bring military dictatorships, they had to gly out over Atlantic and approach via South. He was assigned an army jeep, driver, and free access by General Ojukwu. 

"Within three days it was clear the war wasn't going to end anytime soon. ... "

General Ojukwu negotiated about oil fields with Shell BP, and France, never slow to exploit something to British disadvantage as Forsyth terms, was helping Biafra with weapons. 

Forsyth found his flat broken into on his return, by two BBC guys, everything pilfered, and he paid the landlord and spent two nights on a friend's sofa, and wrote a long letter, of his resignation, to Tom Maltby. He flew back to Lisbon and hitched another ride from Hank Wharton to Biafra. 

Forsyth joined as a freelance journalist to report on what he saw, travelling with Biafra military. 

His first two months were almost completely idle in Biafra, so he recalled a standing invitation from a friend to visit Israel and flew thence. 

................................................................................................

Israel was still in a spirit of euphoria due to six day war, Forsyth writes; its territory had doubled. Diggers were revealing Wailing Wall. 

" ... Seen from forty-five years later, it was the product not of gloating but of a slightly touching naivete."

Forsyth met David Ben-Gurion. 

Forsyth recalling that older people recall younger days far more clearly and that everyone must have asked him about the Six-Day War, asked instead how he'd felt when first looking on the shore of Israel. 

"He stared for several seconds and then came alive as if jolted by an electric charge. ... "

"Over the years he'd seen it all: both world wars, the Mandate betweenthem, the rise of Zionism, ...  He'd met the generals and giants, Roosevelt and Churchill."

" ... He had fought all his life for his dream yet seemed to hate no one, not even Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who so admired Adolf Hitler and wanted every Jew on earth dead. ... "

Forsyth says he just sat and listened, although he could have filled ten notebooks. 

" ... David Ben-Gurion died six years later at the age of eighty-seven. He was one of the greatest men I ever met." 

................................................................................................

The three day conquest of a war fought along north Sinai had brought all of dinar under Israel, including the Sinai Bedouin,  who had been treated by Egyptians with contempt and never accorded them a doctor, as Israel did. 

Sinai is virtually an island, Forsyth explains, and Bedouin seldom cross water, he tells. They have seen various armies march, fight, retreat, and never interfered, merely withdrawing into the desert while battles went on usually in North Sinai, and watching without taking sides. 

" ... After July 1967, Israeli were the first people to treat them decently. "

Israel built a pipe from Eilat to Suez canal, free drinking water available every few miles with a tap and a trough. And a medical clinic. 

"The Bedouin replied in kind. You fo mot see the Bedouin unless they allow you to, but they see everything.... "

Israel always got information about Egypt raids, were ahead to capture them before sending them back disarmed. 

Forsyth travelled on a two day tour of Sinai with an Israeli army group. 

" ... we took coffee with the Bedouin while the women crouched out of sight inside the camel-hair tents."

................................................................................................

Forsyth, after he saw Jerusalem wandering around as a tourist, was invited by Moshe Dayan to talk, when he was taking tea at King David Hotel. 

Next day he met Ezer Weizmann. He was invited by the latter to co-pilot a Cessna/Piper variety of a high-wing monoplane. So Forsyth asked him, after they were over 5,000 feet, about how he'd established IAF. 

Marshall Tito had provided them four planes abandoned by Germans, still in their original crates - Tito needed money for Yugoslavia, and Israel was anti-imperialist. An Israeli team had gone to Yugoslavia to assemble them. Weizmann and three pilots had followed, to fly home the planes with nazi insignia! 

They flew south, on the day of independence, and were told Egyptian planes were coming to attack. They had turned south instead of refuelling and engaged the Egyptian force flying British Hurricanes. Thus the first airfight was between Egyptians in Hurricanes and Jews in Messerschmitts. 

Forsyth flew the plane when Weizmann took his hands off to gesticulate, after it went into a dive; he took control back to land, before speeding off. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth spent his last evening in Tel Aviv in a pub, talking to a crowd that was reminiscing about pre-independence days. 

British soldiers were all right, they said, having grown up with Jews and having fought in WWII, and seen concentration camp horrors. They were sympathetic, and let the melons covering weapons go by undisturbed. 

"The anti-Semitic attitude came hot and strong from the foreign office, the senior servants and senior officer corps, who rarely disguised their preference for the Arabs. ... "

The confession mentioned in the title of the chapter was by a guy who took him apart and said he was the one who'd driven the truck with ammunition that killed people in King David Hotel. But he had called, immediately after parking the truck. 

A British officer gad heard him, and told him it was impossible. 

"Then he put the phone down. Twenty minutes later it went off. But I tried. Please believe me, I really tried." 

Forsyth said he did believe him, and asked why he wouldn't tell the crowd in the pub (who were all Israeli). 

Because they'd kill him, he said. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth talks of intelligence agencies, particularly of GCHQ, and the product sharing between them and NSA of US,  explaining that the 'special relationship' refers to that, not to politicians. 

He tells of how British intelligence has an unusual asset, of willing volunteers. Ronnie from intelligence had approached Forsyth about information regarding Biafra. 

"But there was a debate beginning after fifteen months of the Nigeria-Biafra war, and made mire intense by the torrent of hideous pictures showing Biafran babies reduced to barely alive skeletons."

" ... But the argument for a ceasefire lost because of two reasons - the vanity factor and the cowardice factor." 

Ronnie needed a man on ground in Biafra. Forsyth was to be his asset. He was supposed to report via various journals etc, especially on humanitarian crisis. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth gives succinct description of the Nigeria-Biafra war and the background details, of British mendacity in claiming neutral status while arming Nigerian side. 

But for India helping, and Russia protecting India, that'd be repeated in 1971, except butchering in East Bengal had been reported by US top man in Dhaka long before India stepped in - which, also, was because pakis had first attacked India, after months of butchering East Bengal! 

................................................................................................

Forsyth writes about the 'most extraordinary mercy mission world has ever seen', after photographs of babies were published. 

Ordinary people protested, and donated. A Scandinavian priest convinced pilots of all Scandinavian airlines to fly relief planes with baby food and milk powder to Biafra. Nigeria had taken Enugu, so there was a new airstrip, out of a road, and planes flew in from two islands, one Spanish and one Portuguese. 

" ... It was called the Nord Church Air. ... "

Nigerian military junta acquired military planes and weapons to shoot them down, so relief planes had to come in strictly at night. 

................................................................................................

British continued lying. 

One official, Leonard Cheshire VC, a celebrity, sent expressly to confirm them, refused to not go to Biafra, and shocked and disgusted, returned to denounce the official lies. 

" ... He was immediately smeared as a gullible fool. 

"The smearing of every journalist who expressed disgust at what was going on as either a mercenary arms dealer or Ojukwu propagandist was pretty standard, even though a million pictures are hard to dispute."

" ... what happened could not have happened without the wholesale and covert contribution of the British government. "

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Forsyth tells of accompanying a bunch of mercenaries and Biafrans going behind Nigerian lines to blow up a bridge, with the South African man, Taffy, saying he was the only one who could prove he was sane. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth recounts accompanying a Biafran party to ambush Nigerians, and hearing a British voice, stopping a Biafran from shooting him dead. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth was informed by an SAS operative that he'd had Forsyth in his cross-hairs, but didn't pull the trigger, thus exposing the official lie. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth describes being under mortar fire. He tells of why he came to loathe them. 

Nigerians emptied the automatic weapons in seconds, he says, and always used automatic settings, aiming high, so trees were hit. 

" ... That apart, ... recruits had trouble hitting a barn door at ten paces. ... " 

Forsyth recounts bring strafed by a MiG, and ends with a time when he outwitted a series of mortar aimed at him. 

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Forsyth expounds on 'white' mercenaries hired by Biafra, under the impression - due to their use in Congo - of their bring invincible, which proved a costly mistake. 

Forsyth speaks of individual mercenaries who stayed after the first rout, after most had fled. 

Armand from Paris had arrived there because the chief of police had, in friendliest way, advised him to leave Paris for a while to avoid arrest. 

Once there, he stayed despite everything, and in fact sought out Irish missionaries and gave his monthly pay to them, for explicitly mentioned purpose of feeding the children. 

When Forsyth discovered it, Armand told him it'd displease him if word got out. 

" ... One did not lightly displease Armand so I kept quiet."

Forsyth was designated 'Major Atkinson', by General Ojukwu, personally. He'd insisted Forsyth dress appropriately when accompanying Biafran troops, for safety of everyone Biafran, and himself. He carried a small gun in case of capture, to avoid Nigerian atrocities. They hated whites. 

But on return from a sortie, he was recognised by a member of British press, and story was published in UK. 

His protestations about not carrying the weapon, except for self defense on a sortie, were ignored. 

"As for the real mercenaries, I think they are mostly dead now, though when this book comes out I might be in for a couple of surprises."

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Forsyth speaks of his estimation of war, asserting that there's nothing noble about it except when in a cause of national defense, and by itself it's cruel, coarsening. Worst of all is civil war, he asserts. 

In this, he's agreed with by Margaret Mitchell, who didn't write explicitly of horrors of battles, only of effect on society back home, and in the lasting effect it had, on the gallant, laughing youth who had been Scarlett O'Hara's neighbour's, friends, beaux. 

................................................................................................

Of his memories of when he was reporting from Biafra as a freelance journalist, published in Britain, Europe and US, while he was trying to convey the realities of Biafra to them, he says - 

" ... the most abiding is that of dying children."

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Forsyth describes a lasting memory of a little girl, holding hand of a little brother, who asked him for food, silently. He had none. His memory is of the dignity with which, having understood, she walked away. 

He sat down and wept. 

He remarks on his no one has discussed why this happened. 

" ... For the Whitehall establishment the subject is closed. It is taboo." 

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Forsyth was co-pilot of a plane offered for Ojukwu as he left for exile, by a South African Van Der Merwe, who had arrived volunteering for the purpose but refused politely - 

Ojukwu had had a plane sent by another African nation offering refuge. So the plane was used by the Irish nuns for extraction of children. 

Forsyth had a price put on his head by Nigeria, he states, dead or alive. 

Forsyth returned to London and had no job, no savings and no residence. He'd been smeared thoroughly, as had been Winston Churchill, the grandson of the 'war leader' as Forsyth terms him - he'd gone out as Times correspondent and written of the horror he saw. 

So Forsyth wrote a novel. (Dogs of War?) 

No, he began with memories of his Paris years. 

He was later told of how unprecedented his work was. Charles de Gaulle was still alive as Forsyth wrote, and no one else had written about an assassination attempt on a living leader except - or since - Geoffrey Householdt whose gunman didn't go through with it. 

Also unusual, no one else had written an entire novel with an anonymous hero, or with real politicians and police officials in a fictional manhunt. And that Forsyth had an obsession for technical accuracy. 

" ... Still, when you have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, you might as well get on with it."

He finished it in thirty-five days, wrote the title - The Jackal sounded like a documentary on African jungle, so he added The Day Of - and hasn't changed a word since. 

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Forsyth recalls the routine rejections and the normal practices of publishing houses, travails of both sides and horror stories or rejections. 

He had, after a few rejections, a lucky break in meeting someone socially, whom he cornered next morning in office, and the publisher asked for a three book deal. 

" ... While in East Berlin I had heard about ... ODESSA but I had thought it was part of the relentless East German propaganda against the Bonn government." 

Funny, was it only a couple of years ago that one finally finished an extremely badly written thesis published and sold as a book - about rat-lines used by and available to nazis, including Vatican and red cross and CIA - which asserted, rather too strenuously, that ODESSA  was a fictional invention, that it never existed, that there was no such organisation, not by that name anyway? 

That was by someone Austrian, or at least graduating from Austria, anyway. It was difficult to read, and postponed several times while one read other books. 

One had to wonder why he denied existence of something, usually impossible to prove, a folly in logic which atheists - and others, such as flat-earthers, creation theorists strenuously denying evolution, monotheists, et al - commit routinely. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth wrote down sketches of The ODESSA File and Dogs Of War, and Howard Harris okayed them, asking for ODESSA first. 

Forsyth didn't know at the time that Howard Harris was Jewish, had been in British intelligence, and had been asked to interrogate a prisoner who had bit on his cynide pill just before Harris arrived - Heinrich Himmler.

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Forsyth was referred to Simon Wiesenthal for current information on pro-nazi elements, and went to Austria with a letter of introduction. 

Wiesenthal was enthused when he'd heard Forsyth's proposal for the book; they spent days pouring over his research. 

But the key was, Forsyth wanted a character who'd disappeared right there in Germany, not a fugitive across South Atlantic. 

" ... The response of Herr Wiesenthal was that the right choice might be difficult, not because there were so few but because there were thousands of them." 

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Forsyth asserts here, presumably from information provided by Wiesenthal, that there were two organisation's, Kameradenschaft or Comradeship, and ODESSA, which, Forsyth asserts emphatically, very much did exist - at least, it did then! 

So why the lie by the Austrian doctoral student stressed so repeatedly in his dissertation, and why did he get a doctorate in Austria for it? 

Or was that claim, about the book being a doctoral dissertation, a lie? 

................................................................................................

Forsyth explained the character he had in mind, and Simon Wiesenthal said he had a dozen real ones that fit the description. They poured over the files, and settled on Edouard Roschmann, The Butcher Of Riga. 

Forsyth learned of a single US army jeep in spring of 1945 discovering the entire SS files in process of bring burnt by a bunch of them, and had saved it; only 2 to 3 percent had been consumed until then by flames, the rest was saved and - Forsyth states - rest was in US custody in West Berlin, at least until this book was published, or at least until he discovered the fact while with Simon Wiesenthal. 

This saved collection in care of US contained the entire files on Edouard Roschmann. 

"The real irony was that I could say anything I wanted about this monster. Wherever he was, he was hardly likely to come out of hiding to sue." 

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Forsyth thought that Simon Wiesenthal's 

" ... conviction  that German officialdom was comprehensively penetrated by a generation steeped in either participation in, or sympathy for, what had happened between 1933 and 1945 might be just paranoia, but it was nothing of the sort. It all came down to the issue of which generation.

"A fanatical Nazi aged twenty-five at the end of the war would have been born around 1920. He would have been steeped in Nazi education from age thirteen onwards and almostcertainlya memberof Hitler Youth fromthat age. He could well have been mass murderer by twenty-five."

By the time of his research, Forsyth saw, such a man would be fifty-one or two; that is, at the prime of life and a high ranking official in any one of a hundred positions. 

"Nor would I receive obstruction s only from wanted criminals. ... "

Behind them was a guilty army of bureaucrats, without whose co-operation - organizational flair, as Forsyth terms the specific skill necessary, and accorded when asked - holocaust couldn't have happened. 

"This was the generation that now ran Germany ... "

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Forsyth expounds on the difficulty that Konrad Adenauer, the anti-nazi German Chancellor had had in 1949. If he'd banned all Myers of nazi organisation's, he couldn't have run the country. So he cut a 'Faustian pact' as Forsyth terms it, and - as Simon Wiesenthal told Forsyth - 

" ... every branch of public function was impregnated with the bureaucrats who had not pulled the trigger but helped those who did. Research, he said, was not a question of open hostility but of closed doors. ... "

Simon Wiesenthal also pointed him towards groups who believed in fourth Reich arriving in future, whose meetings Forsyth could attend with his German language proficiency. 

Forsyth did. 

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" ... Communists of the East, behind the Iron Curtain, offered no help whatsoever. ..."

Forsyth found most of lawyers in Hamburg were unwilling to talk, but began to find some, either younger or those who'd been anti-nazi and lived through it; they were willing to talk, but furtively, in dark corners of pubs, once convinced that Forsyth was a British investigative reporter. 

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Forsyth found a Jew in Vienna who had lived in Riga, and been on the death March west when Russia advanced. His wife said he never talked of it, and wouldn't, but he did, for twenty hours, Forsyth writes - he began to correct as Forsyth told him the story as he'd sketched it. Salomon Tauber was only shifted to Hamburg from Vienna by Forsyth, as he puts it; the testimony in the book is what he heard in Vienna, detail by detail, as Forsyth terms it. 

The investigative trail of Peter Miller of The ODESSA File matches his own, Forsyth writes. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth recounts the quixotic twist as he terms it, of the ODESSA File story. 

When the film came, a viewer in a hall on coast south of Buenos Aires, realised that the real Edouard Roschmann, thinking he was safe, had reverted to his own name and was living down the street. He denounced him. 

Argentina arrested him, and West Germany wanted him extradited. Roschmann, out on bail, ran to Paraguay to escape. He waited at border for the ferry across river. 

Witnesses said he had a heart attack in middle of the river and was dead before he hit the deck. 

................................................................................................

On Paraguay bank, the official refused to take charge of the body on ground that it belonged to Argentina. 

The cadaver went back and forth four times, before detectives arrived from Vienna to identify it, which was possible due to dental records and fingerprints courtesy a US jeep in Bavaria. Proof positive was established, courtesy two missing toes, amputated when he'd fled through the border snows from British custody. 

Ferry refused to take the body back, so Paraguay buried it in an unmarked grave by the river. 

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Forsyth talks about the research and genesis of this book, and the weird fact that subsequently, Bob Denard's mercenaries who took Comoros Island in Mozambique Channel, imitating the action were carrying copies if the book in French 

" ... so that they could find out what they were supposed to do next. Bob Denard succeeded because he came by sea.

"In 1981 South African mercenary Mike Hoare tried the same trick on the Seychelles, but he failed because he came by air."

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Forsyth tells the story of his research into technical details, such as weapons and acquisition thereof. He was referred to Otto X in Hamburg, and used the name of the South African pilot Merwe, with forged papers for evidence. He learned about details such as end user certificates and how to get false ones. 

But then, Forsyth tells, one morning Otto happened to glance at his face on the back cover of a German copy of The Day Of The Jackal, which had fallen inside the display window of a bookshop. 

Forsyth was warned by a telephone call to his hotel room by an unidentified voice with a British accent that they were coming for him; he left without luggage, using back stairs and ran to the station and into a train, jumping in at the window as it was moving. It was to Amsterdam, and he stayed with his uncle in Scheveningen  who got him onto a merchant ship to Flushing. 

Subsequently he wrote the book, finishing his three book deal. 

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Forsyth tells about taking Edward Fox to meet Armand, and being mobbed by streetwalkers, who were offering freebies to the filmstar. He didn't speak French more than minimal, and Forsyth didn't translate then, until they were in their seventies. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth was asked, in a meeting at a safe house, to go into Germany as himself, as a tourist, and bring something out. 

It was to be a package swap, meeting a Russian colonel in Dresden, by car so the package out would be safe from prying eyes and hands. 

Perfect Joy is re-entering the west, after having gone into East Germany to swap the packages, to sum up Forsyth. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth was among those swindled by Roger Levitt, as he learned in 1990. 

" ... there was only one thing for it. That was, at the age of fifty, to write a series of more novels and make it all back. So I did."

................................................................................................

Forsyth went for research for The Cobra, to Guinea-Bissau amongst other places. 

It so happened that, as his plane took off in Lisbon, there was a coup in Guinea-Bissau. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth tells about research for The Kill List. 

Forsyth wrote of this visit before 2013, at any rate after 2000, which was certainly after the Somalia fracas of attacking US facilities; one assumes so, because The Kill List was published in 2013, and presumably Forsyth didn't write it before and sit on it for over a decade. 

Google maps show locations of the latter a bit different from Forsyth's description, which, one infers, might be due to a renovation of the airport, or a newly built airport, at least a new runway.  

Couldn't be that the US embassy, shown now in Google maps as closed, moved after he wrote, could it? 

................................................................................................

Forsyth speaks of various parts of the city, inner city around the airport being 'white', who he says are hated by Somali. 

" ... But many jihadidts fanatics are also inside the cordon. That apart, there are the gangs. There are no police - their lifespan would be too short. ... "

................................................................................................

Forsyth finally flew a Spitfire. 

................................................................................................

Toddler of three, cute, sets the tone. That's only the beginning. 

Pictures then on continue amazing one with reminders from what one just finished reading, like meeting unexpected characters from one's past. 

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About the Book 

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"We all make mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one. To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

"During the course of my life, I’ve barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, been strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war and landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau. The Stasi arrested me, the Israelis regaled me, the IRA prompted a quick move from Ireland to England, and a certain attractive Czech secret police agent – well, her actions were a bit more intimate. And that’s just for starters. 

"All of that I saw from the inside. But all that time I was, nonetheless, an outsider. 

"Trained first as a pilot, then as a journalist, Frederick Forsyth finally turned to fiction ... "

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August 05, 2022 - August 05, 2022. 

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Contents

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Cover 

About the Book 

Title Page 

Dedication 

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Preface 

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Whispered Words 

A Large Jar of Talc 

A Little Boy’s Dream 

Learning French 

Learning German 

Back to Germany 

Languages 

A Step Nearer to the Stars 

A Long Hike 

A Silly Revenge 

A Gentleman of Clare 

Learning Spanish 

Tangier and Commandos 

Leopard-skin Solution 

‘I’m Jesus Christ’ 

Vampire 

King’s Lynn 

Fleet Street 

Paris Aflame 

Big Brother 

The Death of Kennedy 

Helping Out the Cousins 

Outbreak of War 

Headlights 

Beer with a Camp Guard 

A Very Unwise Choice 

A Mistake with Auntie 

A Day with the Arrows 

A Taste of Africa 

End of Career 

Farewell, Auntie 

Living History 

Eilat 

Jerusalem 

Confession 

Of Mice and Moles 

A Media Explosion 

A Useful Certificate 

Mr Sissons, I Presume 

Worth a Large One 

Bits of Metal 

Of More Mice – and Mercs 

Memories 

Flight Out 

An Unwanted Manuscript 

The ODESSA 

Dogs of War 

An Unusual Dinner 

Perfect Joy 

Friends and Opponents 

Five Years in Ireland 

A Neat Trick 

The Amazing Mister Moon 

Back to Zero – Start Again 

The Passing of Humpy 

A Very Burning Question 

From Maiko to Monks 

A Very Untidy Coup 

Peace Hotel and Tracers 

Dream Come True 

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Picture Section 

Picture Acknowledgements 

About the Author 

Also by Frederick Forsyth 

Copyright

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REVIEW 

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Preface

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"During the course of my life, I’ve barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, been strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war and landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau. The Stasi arrested me, the Israelis regaled me, the IRA prompted a quick move from Ireland to England, and a certain attractive Czech secret police agent – well, her actions were a bit more intimate. And that’s just for starters."

"The absolute need for extensive solitude and the permanent detachment from what Malraux called ‘the human condition’ explain why a writer can never really enter in. Membership involves self-revelation, conformity and obedience. But a writer must be a loner and thus always an outsider. 

"As a boy, I was obsessed by aeroplanes and just wanted to be a pilot. But even then, not one of an aircrew. I wanted to fly single-seaters, which was probably a warning sign, had anyone noticed. But no one did."

" ... I was my parents’ first born and remained an only child, and they are always slightly different. My parents might have had more children but the war intervened in 1939, and by the time it was over it was, for my mother, too late.

"So I grew into little boyhood largely alone. A boy alone in his playroom can invent his own games and ensure they are played by his rules and come to their desired conclusion. He becomes accustomed to winning and on his own terms. The preference for solitude is beginning.

"The second factor in my isolation was occasioned by the Second World War itself. My town of Ashford was very close to the coast and the English Channel. Just twenty-two miles across that water was Nazi-occupied France. For a while, the mighty Wehrmacht waited across that strip of grey water for the chance to cross, invade, conquer and occupy. The bombers of the Luftwaffe droned overhead to raid London, or, fearing the waiting fighters of the Royal Air Force, to turn back and dump their loads anywhere on to Kent. Other raids sought to destroy the great Ashford railway junction, just 500 yards from my family home."

"So why, eventually, become a writer? It was a fluke. I wanted not to write but to travel the world. I wanted to see it all, from the snows of the Arctic to the sands of the Sahara, from the jungles of Asia to the plains of Africa. Having no private funds, I opted for the job I thought would enable me to do this."

"But it was not the writing, it was the travelling. It was not until I was thirty-one that, home from an African war, and stony-broke as usual, with no job and no chance of one, I hit on the idea of writing a novel to clear my debts. It was a crazy idea. 

"There are several ways of making quick money but in the general list, writing a novel rates well below robbing a bank. But I did not know that and I suppose I must have got something right. My publisher told me, to my complete surprise, that it seemed I could tell a story. And that is what I have done for the past forty-five years, still travelling, no longer to report foreign news stories but to research the material needed for the next novel. That was when the preference for solitude and detachment became absolute necessities. 

"At seventy-six, I think I also remain part-journalist, retaining the two other qualities a reporter must have: insatiable curiosity and a gritty scepticism. Show me a journo who does not care to discover the reason why, and who believes what he is told, and I will show you a bad one.

"A journalist should never join the Establishment, no matter how tempting the blandishments. It is our job to hold power to account, not join it. In a world that increasingly obsesses over the gods of power, money and fame, a journalist and a writer must remain detached, like a bird on a rail, watching, noting, probing, commenting but never joining. In short, an outsider.

"For years I have fended off suggestions that I should pen an autobiography. And I still do. This is not a life story and certainly not a self-justification. But I am aware that I have been to many places and seen many things: some amusing, some gruesome, some moving, some scary.

"My life has been blessed by extraordinary good fortune, for which I have no explanation. More times than I can count, a lucky break has got me out of a tight spot, or procured me an advantage. Unlike the moaners in every Sunday tabloid, I had two wonderful parents and a happy childhood in the fields of Kent. I managed to fulfil my earlier ambitions to fly and to travel and the much later one to write stories. The latter has brought enough material success to live comfortably, which is all I ever wanted anyway."

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January 07, 2022 - August 05, 2022

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Whispered Words 

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"MY FATHER WAS born in 1906, the eldest son of a frequently absent chief petty officer, Royal Navy, in Chatham, Kent, and emerged at twenty from the Dockyard School to an economy that was creating one job for every ten young men in the labour pool. The other nine were destined for the dole queue. 

"He had studied to be a naval architect but as the Great Depression loomed no one wanted ships to be built. The Hitlerian threat had not materialized and there were more merchant ships than anyone needed to carry the diminishing industrial product. After five years scraping a living from little more than odd jobs, he followed the popular advice of the age: Go East, Young Man. He applied for and secured a post as a rubber planter in Malaya.

"Today it would seem strange to appoint a young man with not a word of Malay nor knowledge of the Orient to go to the other end of the world to manage many thousands of acres of plantation and a large labour force of Malays and Chinese. But those were the days of empire, when such challenges were perfectly normal. 

"So he packed his things, said goodbye to his parents and took ship for Singapore. He learned Malay and the intricacies of estate management and rubber production, and ran his estate for five years. Each day he wrote a love letter to the girl with whom he had been ‘walking out’, as they called dating back then, and she wrote to him. The next liner from Britain to Singapore brought the week’s supply of letters and they came to the estate in Johore on the weekly river boat.

"Life was lonely and isolated, illuminated by the weekly motorcycle ride south through the jungle, out on to the main road, across the causeway and into Changi for a convivial evening at the planters’ club. His estate consisted of a huge tract of rubber trees set in parallel rows and surrounded by jungle that was home to tigers, black panthers and the much-feared hamadryad or king cobra. There was no car because the track to the main road ten miles through the jungle was a narrow, winding line of red laterite gravel, so he rode a motorcycle."

He happened to save life of a boy in the village by riding through jungle at night to take him to hospital, eighty miles away. The man, Japanese, was grateful. 

"‘Tuan, my son will live. In my culture when a man owes what I owe you, he must offer the most valuable thing he has. But I am a poor man and have nothing to offer, save one thing. Advice.’ 

"Then he raised his eyes and stared my father in the face. 

"‘Leave Malaya, tuan. If you value your life, leave Malaya.’ 

"To the end of his days in 1991 my father never knew if those words caused his decision or merely reinforced it. But the next year, 1936, instead of sending for his fiancée he resigned and came home. In 1941 imperial Japanese forces invaded Malaya. In 1945, of all his contemporaries, not one came home from the camps."

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"There was nothing spontaneous about the Japanese invasion of Malaya. It was meticulously planned and the imperial forces swept down the peninsula as an unstoppable tide. British and Australian troops were rushed up the spine of the colony to man defensive points along the main roads south. But the Japanese did not come that way.

"Out of the rubber estates came scores of sleeper agents, infiltrated years before. On hundreds of bicycles the Japanese rode south along tiny, unknown jungle tracks, guided by the agents. Others came by sea, leapfrogging down the coast, guided inshore by winking lanterns held by fellow countrymen who knew the coast and all the inlets.

"The British and Australians were outflanked over and over again as the Japanese appeared behind them, and in strength, always guided by the agents. It was all over in days and the supposedly impregnable fortress of Singapore was taken from the landward side, her massive guns facing out to sea."

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"When I was a child, but old enough to understand, my father told me this story and swore it was absolutely true and it happened nearly seven years before the invasion of December 1941. But he was never quite certain that his village carpenter was one of those agents, only that had he been taken, he too would have died."

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August 05, 2022 - August 05, 2022. 

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A Large Jar of Talc 

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"THE SPRING OF 1940 was not a relaxing time to be in East Kent. Hitler had swept across Europe. France was overrun in three weeks. Denmark and Norway were gone, Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland swallowed.

"The outflanked British army in France had been driven into the sea off Dunkirk and Calais and only rescued, minus all their equipment, by a miracle of small inshore boats manned by civilians who chugged across the Channel from the English coast and brought 330,000 of them off the sand dunes against all the odds.

"All Europe was either occupied by Hitler, putting into office servile collaborator governments, or sheltering in their neutrality. The British prime minister had been tossed out to be replaced by Winston Churchill, who vowed we would fight on. But with what? Britain was completely isolated and alone."

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One begins to wonder what comes next, even when one knows the general picture. 

"The solution came in one of the customers at my mother’s dress shop. She was the principal of the Norland Institute, the training school of the famous Norland nannies who for decades had gone out to raise the children of the rich and royal worldwide. The institute was at Hothfield, a village outside Ashford. It was going to evacuate to Devon, far away in the southwest. My mother put it to her client: would they take me with them? 

"The principal was dubious but her deputy proposed to her that nannies in training would always need babies to practise on, so why not this one? The deal was done. When the train bearing the Norland Institute steamed out of Ashford, I went with them. May 1940: I was twenty months old.

"It is hard to describe in the modern world, or explain to the new generation, the anguish of those parents as Ashford was emptied of its evacuees, seen off by weeping mothers and a few fathers who thought never to see them again. But that was the way it was on Ashford station."

And at the macro level, one wonders how many did see children or parents again, especially if one went to war, or to London. 

................................................................................................

But Forsyth surprises again. 

"I cannot recall those five months I was in Devon as class after class of eager young nannies experimented at putting me to bed, getting me up and constantly changing my nappies. That was before Velcro fastenings and absorbent padding. It was all terry towelling and pins back then. 

"It seems I could hardly pass wind or let go a few drops before the whole lot came off to be replaced by a new one. And the standby was talc; lots and lots of talc. I must have had the most talc-dusted rear end in the kingdom."

Who knew Forsyth did humour, too?!!!! 

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"But the Few in their Spitfires and Hurricanes did the job. On 15 September, Adolf simply gave up. His vast army on the French coast turned round, took a last look at the white cliffs across the Channel which they would not conquer after all, and marched east. Hitler was preparing his June 1941 invasion of Russia. The landing barges bobbed uselessly at their moorings off Boulogne and Calais. 

"Sealion was off."

His parents decided to stay put, and get him back. 

"I recall none of this, not the going away, the ceaseless attention to the nether parts in Devon nor the return. But something must have struck in the subconscious. It took years until I ceased to feel trepidation every time I was approached by a beaming young lady with a large jar of talc."

Priceless! 

Hence the chapter title. 

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August 05, 2022 - August 05, 2022. 

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A Little Boy’s Dream 

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"THE SUMMER OF 1944 brought two great excitements to a small boy of five in East Kent. The nightly droning of German bombers overhead, leaving from the French coast for the target of London, had ceased as the Royal Air Force won back control of the skies. The rhythmic throb-throb of the V-1 rockets or doodlebugs, Hitler’s pilotless drones packed with explosives, had not yet started. But by May all the grown-ups were tense. They were expecting the long-awaited Allied invasion of occupied France. That was when the Texan came and parked his tank on my parents’ lawn.

"At the breakfast hour he was not there but when I returned in the mid-afternoon from kindergarten, there he was. I thought the tank, which turned out to be a Sherman, was immense and hugely exciting. Its tracks were half on the parental lawn, the fence reduced to matchwood, and half on Elwick Road. It simply had to be explored.

"It took a chair from the kitchen and a lot of climbing to reach the top of the tracks, and then there was the turret with its formidable gun. Having reached the top of the turret I found the hatch open and stared down. A face stared up; there was a muttered conversation down below and a head began to climb towards the light. When a tall lanky figure detached himself from the metal and towered over me I recognized that he had to be a cowboy. I had seen them in the Saturday-morning film shows and they all wore tall hats. I was looking at my first Texan in a Stetson.

"He sat on the turret, coming eye to eye with me, and said: ‘Hiya, kid.’ I replied: ‘Good afternoon.’ He seemed to be speaking through his nose, like the cowboys in the movies. He nodded at our home. 

"‘Your house?’ I nodded. ‘Waal, tell your paw I’m real sorry about the fence.’"

Frederick Forsyth would be the writer, after writing over a dozen superb thrillers - or what should one label them? - to turn the horrendous WWII into a happy memory of a five year old exploring a Sherman crashed over his fence! 

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Those soldiers expected to invade Europe and fight Hitler's defences, and perhaps die, soon. 

"My Texan was part of a huge decoy army that the Allied commanders had stuffed into East Kent to dupe the German High Command. Secretly they were planning to invade via Normandy, way down south, with another army then crouching under camouflaged canvas miles away from Kent.

"The soldiers of the decoy army might go over later but not on D-Day. Thinking they would be the first shock wave, with terrible casualties, thousands of them were jamming every bar in Kent to the doors, drinking in the final saloon. A week later a solemn voice on the radio, which was then called the wireless, announced that British, American and Canadian troops had landed in strength on five beaches in Normandy and were fighting their way inland."

................................................................................................

"I do not know when he ever slept for those five years. My mother ran the family furrier’s shop while Dad spent his days in a khaki uniform and his nights on a fire truck racing around putting out fires. My point is, he had a car and a cherished petrol allowance, without which he could not have done his day job. Hence the trip across the Weald of Kent to visit the grassfield fighter strip at Hawkinge. It was the base of two squadrons of Spitfires. 

"Back then the Spitfire was not just a fighter plane, it was a national icon. It still is. And for every small boy the men who flew them were heroes to surpass any footballer or showbiz personality. While my father conducted his business with the base commander, I was handed over to the pilots."

" ... One of them picked me up under the armpits, swung me high and dropped me into the cockpit of a Mark 9 Spitfire. I sat on the parachute, overawed, dumbfounded. ... I studied the controls, the firing button, the instruments; I gripped the control stick. I stared ahead along the endless cowling masking the great Rolls-Royce Merlin engine to the four-bladed propeller, stark against a duck-egg-blue Kentish sky. And in the manner of little boys I swore a little boy’s oath. 

"Most small boys swear to something they want to be when they grow up, but usually the promise fades and the dream dies. I swore that one day I was going to be one of them. I was going to wear the pale blue uniform with wings on the chest and fly single-seaters for the RAF. When I was hoisted back out of the cockpit I had made up my mind what I was going to do. I would be a fighter pilot and I would fly a Spitfire."

" ... When my father drove his little Wolseley saloon back to Ashford I was lost in thought. A month later I turned six and the dream did not die."

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August 05, 2022 - August 05, 2022. 

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Learning French 

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" ... Ashford, beginning with the letter A, was twinned with Amiens in Picardy. 

"My parents were matched with a French doctor, the Resistance war hero Dr Colin and his wife. Throughout the occupation he had remained the doctor assigned to the hundreds of railwaymen living and working in the great rail hub of the Amiens marshalling yards. Permitted his own car and free movement, he had observed many things useful to the Allies across the Channel and, at risk of discovery and execution, had passed them on to the Resistance. 

"The Colins came to visit in 1947 and the following year invited my parents back. But the shop came first and they could not take the time off, so I went instead, a pattern that would be repeated for the next four years. Not just for a weekend but for most of the eight-week summer school vacation. 

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"Like many families of the French bourgeoisie, the Colins had a country house far from the city fumes, buried deep in the countryside of Corrèze in the Massif Central in the middle of France. ... "

" ... The lady who lived there was the old family nanny, pensioned off but given a home for the rest of her days. Amazingly she was English but had been in France since her girlhood. 

"A lifelong spinster, Mimi Tunc had served the Colin family for many years and throughout the entire war had passed for French under the noses of the German authorities, thus escaping internment."

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"Lamazière-Basse was, as said, very old and almost medieval. A few homes, but not many, had electricity. For most, oil lamps sufficed. There were one or two archaic tractors but no combine harvesters. The crops were scythed by hand and brought home in carts hauled by yoked oxen. ... Both men and women wore wooden clogs or sabots."

" ... The village priest, always called Monsieur l’Abbé, was friendly to me but slightly distant, convinced that as a Protestant I was tragically destined for hell. Up at the chateau on the hill dwelt Madame de Lamazière, the very old matriarch of the surrounding land. She did not come to church; it came to her in the form of poor Monsieur l’Abbé, sweating up the hill in the summer sun to bring her mass in her private chapel. The pecking order was very rigid and even God had to recognize the distinctions.

................................................................................................

Just when one is lulled into his describing what sounds idyllic holiday for a boy, he describes his encounter with death of someone from the village, quite a fright. 

"I spent four happy summer holidays at Lamazière-Basse and when I returned from the fourth, aged twelve, I could pass for French among the French. It was an asset that would later prove extremely useful many times. 

"That summer of 1948 was the first time I had seen a human corpse. It would not be the last. Not by about fifty thousand."

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August 05, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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Learning German 

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"MY FATHER WAS a remarkable man. His formal education was from the Chatham Dockyard School, maths-oriented, and in what he knew he was largely self-taught. He was not rich or famous or titled. Just a shopkeeper from Ashford. But he had a kindness and a humanity that was noted by everyone who knew him. 

"At the very end of the war, being a major serving directly under the War Office, he was summoned to London without explanation. In fact, it was for a film show, but this one did not star Betty Grable. With a hundred others he sat in a darkened hall inside the ministry to see the first films, taken by the army photographic unit, of British soldiers liberating the concentration camp known as Bergen-Belsen. It marked him for ever. He told me much later that after five years of war he had not really understood what he and millions of others had been struggling to defeat and destroy until he saw the horrors of Bergen-Belsen. He did not know there could be such cruelty on earth. 

"My mother told me that he came home, still in uniform, but instead of changing he stood for two hours in front of the window, staring out, his back to the room, impervious to her pleading to tell her what was wrong. He just stared in silence. Finally he tore himself away from his thoughts, went upstairs to change, instructing her as he passed: ‘I never want to meet one again. I never want one in my house.’ He meant Germans.

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"It did not last. Later he mellowed, went to Germany, met and spoke civilly to many Germans. It is a mark of the man that when I was thirteen in 1952 he decided to send me to live during the school holidays with a German family. He wanted his only son to learn German, to know the country and the people. When my bewildered mother asked him why, he simply said: ‘Because it must never happen again.’

"But he would not, by the summer of 1952, have an exchange visit with a German boy, though there were plenty of such offers available. I would go as a paying guest. There was a struggling British–German Friendship Society and I think it was arranged through them. The family chosen farmed outside Göttingen. This time I flew."

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"There was a world gliding championship that year and it was held at a place called Oerlinghausen. We all went off there for a family day out. My host’s interest in flying stemmed from the fact that he had been in the Luftwaffe during the war, as an officer but not a flyer. 

"The huge expanse of grassland was crowded with gliders in a variety of club markings, scattered all over the field, waiting their turn to be towed into the air. And there were notable pilots round whom admiring crowds were grouped. There was one in particular who was clearly very famous and the centre of attention. And she was a woman, though I had not a clue who she was.

"In fact she was Hanna Reitsch, Luftwaffe test pilot and Hitler’s personal aviator. If he doted on her, his admiration was as nothing to the adoration she bore towards him. 

"In April 1945 as the Soviet army closed on the surrounded heart of Berlin, and Hitler, drawn and trembling, moped about his bunker under the Chancellery, Hanna Reitsch flew into the doomed enclave at the controls of a Fieseler Storch, a high-wing monoplane with an extremely short landing and take-off run. With amazing skill she put it down on an avenue in the Charlottenburg Zoo, switched off and walked through the shellfire to the bunker. 

"Because of who she was, she was allowed into the final redoubt where Hitler would blow his brains out a few days later, and ushered into the presence. There she begged the man she admired so much to let her fly him out of the Berlin death-trap and down to the Berghof, his fortified home at Berchtesgaden in southern Bavaria. There, she urged him, surrounded by SS last-ditch fanatics, the resistance could continue."

He refused, Forsyth says, because he preferred to die and have Germany destroyed. 

The latter is seconded in various accounts, in particular that of Albert Speer, the architect Hitler depended on for his dream projects for Berlin. 

But the former is now questioned, with evidence emerging that he may have escaped via a flight out, thence to be transported from Canaries in a submarine across South Atlantic, and live out his days in a bunker- like security on an island in a lake. 

................................................................................................

"A friend of my host, another veteran of the Luftwaffe, secured our admission into the admiring circle round the ace aviator. She was beaming and shook hands with my host and his wife and their teenage children. Then she turned to me and held out her hand. 

"That was when my host made a mistake. ‘Our young house guest,’ he said. ‘Er ist ein Engländer.’ 

"The smile froze, the hand was withdrawn. I recall a pair of blazing blue eyes and the voice rising in rage. ‘Ein Engländer?’ she squawked, and stalked off."

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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Back to Germany 

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Next year, 1953, he returned, to stay with another family. 

" ... Westphalia was in the British Zone, which was studded with British army camps and airbases. This force was simply known as the British Army of the Rhine and its vehicles could often be seen speeding through the streets. The invasion threat from east of the Iron Curtain was seen as very real."

"The infamous Berlin Wall, completing the encirclement of West Berlin, would not go up until 1961 to prevent the constant flow of East German graduates pouring out of the technical colleges and universities via West Berlin to seek a better life in West Germany. But the general air of threat after the Berlin Blockade of 1948/49 which nearly sparked World War Three meant that the British army, far from being resented by the Germans, was much appreciated. 

"In my own class I had a more practical use as a guest with a German family. Using my stiff blue passport I could enter a British base, go to the on-site duty-free shop and buy real coffee, which, after years of drinking bitter substitutes, ranked with gold dust."

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" ... it was thought practical that I should attend the German school until its holidays began a fortnight later. Here I was very much a figure of curiosity, the first Britisher they had ever seen, and presumed to have fanged teeth or at least a forked tail. There was considerable mutual relief that we all looked much the same. Both in the Dewald home and at the high school my German was improving rapidly. 

"A characteristic of German society that I was introduced to and which somewhat bewildered me was the worship of nature, the open countryside. Having been brought up amid the fields and woods of Kent I pretty much accepted Mother Nature as just being there with no need to adulate it. But the Germans made great play of going on long walks through it. These were called ‘Wandering Days’. The whole school, age group by age group, would be lined up to go on these country hikes. During the first I ever went on, I noticed something strange.

"While a similar group of British kids would simply amble along in an untidy mass, the German children within half a mile had somehow formed themselves into a column, rank upon rank, three abreast. Then the walking slowly transformed, with all the feet coming up and down in unison until we were marching. 

"This was soon accompanied by singing, specifically a song I can remember sixty years later. It started: ‘Whom God wishes truly to favour He sends out into the wide world to see His miracles in mountain, forest and field.’ All good, healthy stuff."

They encountered a British jeep and jumped aside to let it pass.  

" ... As it swept past, the corporal leaned out and shouted something in a clear East London accent. As the tail disappeared down the track and the sand and dust settled, the German children gathered eagerly round me to ask: 

"‘Fritz, what was that the soldier called out to us?’ 

"I felt it wise to be diplomatic. 

"‘He said: “Have a happy Wandering Day”,’ I reported. 

"They were delighted. ‘Ach, Fritz,’ I was told, ‘your British soldiers are so nice.’ 

"I had not the heart to tell them what he had really shouted. It was: ‘Practising for the next time, are we, lads?’"

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"There is simply no substitute for Cockney humour, and there was obviously a certain amount of reconciliation yet to be achieved. 

"I spent a third vacation with a German family the next year – the Dewalds again – and by 1954 could pass for a German in Germany. That too was to prove extremely useful when, a decade later, I was posted for a year to live in East Berlin and, after shaking my secret police ‘tail’, used to disappear into the heart of East Germany."

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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Languages

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"IT IS SOMETIMES thought that to speak a foreign language – really speak it rather than just get by with fifty words, a phrase book and a lot of gestures – it suffices to master grammar and vocabulary. Not so: there are, in all, three further aspects to passing unnoticed in a foreign language. 

"There is the accent. The British are spectacularly useless at mimicking foreign accents and there is absolutely no substitute for starting young and living with a family of the foreign country involved with the one proviso that the family should speak hardly a word of the student’s language. With English now the common language of virtually the whole world, this is harder and harder. Everyone wants to practise their English. 

"But after the accent comes the slang. Perfect, academic language is an immediate giveaway – because every people sprinkles its native language with phrases that appear in no dictionary or guide book and simply cannot be translated word for word. We do not even notice how often we do this, but it is constant. Listen in a crowded bar or at a lively dining table and it will become clear that in almost every sentence a speaker will use a colloquialism that will never be taught at any language class. 

"The last aspect is even harder to quantify or imitate. It is the body language. All foreign languages and the speaking of them are accompanied by facial expressions and hand gestures that are probably unique to that language group and are picked up by children watching their parents and schoolteachers."

There's more, which is not slang, and nor exactly set phrases but a sort of variation, in that what one says or is expected to say, and interpretation thereof, is immensely different from place to place, even with a good level of what you expect is the same language. 

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" ... Tonbridge, whatever its failings, was academically excellent, and a teacher who had served on the Arctic convoys to Russia offered a third language. My choice became Russian or Spanish. I chose Russian on the grounds that it would be much harder than Spanish, which I could learn later.

"The summer of 1954 would entail O level Russian and my dad thought some holiday tutelage might help. Somehow he tracked down a pair of Russian princesses in Paris who tutored in Russian and took in young paying guests. Their services were much patronized by the Royal Navy. (I think it was a navy contact who recommended them.) So that spring I was sent over during the school holidays to reside for three weeks at their apartment in Paris.

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"They were the Princesses Dadiani and they were actually Georgian, but pillars of the White Russian community of Paris. They were completely divorced from Planet Earth and charmingly dotty. But huge fun.

"Their world had more or less stopped when, in 1921, as the White forces lost the civil war to the Red Soviet army, they were evacuated by their father, the last king of Georgia, and arrived with only a suitcase of jewellery in Paris, which was then teeming with refugees from the Russian aristocracy.

"Over thirty years later they were still convinced that the Georgian people would rise any day, throw off the Soviet yoke and restore them to their palaces and oil wells. The jewels had lasted about five years – they had no taste for economizing – so after that they took in paying guests. They had a contract with the Royal Navy, who sent them midshipmen and sublieutenants, whom they much favoured because the navy paid promptly and had manners.

"Their flat was frequented by counts, dukes and the occasional prince, who either drove taxis or appeared as artists or singers at the Opéra. They always appeared to be clearing up after a party or preparing for the next one."

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"I never recall any formal lessons in Russian. I and the other three young navy men simply had to pick it up by listening and asking questions. But I recall the princesses with affection. Those three weeks helped me get O level Russian in the summer exams and years later listen to Russians talking in East Berlin while pretending to understand not a word."

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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A Step Nearer to the Stars 

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" ... RAF Flying Scholarship. The idea was that if you could pass all the tests, the RAF would pay for a young enthusiast to go to his local flying club and learn to fly to private pilot’s licence level. Of course I applied at once. That was spring 1955."

There was a week of thorough tests and interviews before acceptance. 

" ... Dad ran me to Bluebell Hill to get introduced and see what I would be learning on. 

"It was a silver Tiger Moth, a biplane like something out of the First World War and the standard workhorse of flying schools back then. Open cockpit, a speaking tube to communicate with the instructor, wind-in-the-hair sort of stuff. Marvellous, intoxicating. The only problem was Tonbridge School. The authorities there had already made plain my passion for flying was juvenile madness. I would never get permission. So I got a shed instead."

Shed? For what?

"Of course it was not on school grounds. It was down in Tonbridge town, on one of those small gardens called allotments, leased for a peppercorn rent by the municipality to those with no garden but who wished to raise their own vegetables. The kindly gardener allowed me to keep the Vespa in it, out of sight and out of the rain."

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"Back at Parkside for what I hoped would be my last term, I had no more exams to pass so I was put down for GCE ‘S’ levels. The S stood for state scholarship but it was a forlorn hope. State scholarships were means-tested and my father could now afford university fees without state help, so it would never be awarded. But no one wanted me hanging idly around. Actually I had another exam in mind – my private pilot’s licence. But I would not take that until 26 August, the day after my seventeenth birthday. Still, I had thirty hours of pre-paid flying tuition waiting for me up at Rochester and could certainly not wait for school to break up. So I amazed Parkside by becoming a cross-country runner.

"So, twice a week, I would don white shorts and spotless T-shirt and jog out the gates to the street. It took fifteen minutes to get to the allotment shed where I would put on the canvas flying suit, boots and leather helmet. Thus disguised I could putter past the school gates and out on the highway to Bluebell Hill and its flying club."

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"I never contrived to develop those strange deviances so often attributed to the English, but only two things in their place: the ability to take pain in silence and a contempt for harsh and arbitrary authority."

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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A Long Hike 

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"HITCHHIKING IS RARE nowadays but back in 1955 for a youngster with no money it was common. Middle-aged men, mindful of their own impecunious teenage years, would take pity on the figure by the roadside with right fist extended, thumb erect, and slow down, pull over and ask the face appearing in the passenger window where he was heading. 

"National Servicemen in their uniforms, heading home to Mum and Dad with a weekend pass or struggling back to camp, could usually expect some help. ... "

"We firmly expected to sleep rough in sheds, outbuildings and even ditches and eat the cheapest of foods, probably bread and cheese. We were in tough hiking boots, short khaki drill pants, knee-high socks and canvas shirts. That plus a haversack. I had taken the precaution of tacking a Union Jack on the back of my rucksack. We would march in Indian file with me at the rear so that motorists coming up behind could see it clearly. It turned out to be the game-changer."

Forsyth tells of adventures including a knife where he was saved due to having one, while looking for a truck to ride south next day, after arriving in Paris at the flat of the Princesses and being welcomed. But finally when he found one, he was told it'd be illegal, so they were locked in for the twelve hour ride. They were let out between Avignon and Marseille. 

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"On the following day we discovered as we marched, rigid thumbs erect for a lift, that the Union Jack did not work any more. The Midi had never been occupied. It was part of Vichy France, notorious for its enthusiastic collaboration with the Germans. Even the Allied invasion of August 1944 was seen locally as an assault rather than a liberation. No cars stopped. We turned along the coast at Marseilles and, for three weeks, thousands of cars, vans and trucks sped by without stopping."

" ... We saw the grandeur of Monaco and Monte Carlo where all the cars seemed to be Rolls-Royces and where I would many years later be the guest of Prince Albert. Finally we came to the Italian border at Ventimiglia.

" ... We saw the grandeur of Monaco and Monte Carlo where all the cars seemed to be Rolls-Royces and where I would many years later be the guest of Prince Albert. Finally we came to the Italian border at Ventimiglia. 

"Just to say we had been to Italy, we went across and trudged to San Remo. ... "

They returned on two third class tickets to Marseille and thence on a single ticket to Paris, the journey spent in lavatory. 

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" ... The Fifties were a good, carefree and uncomplicated time to be a teenager, before drugs and worries and political correctness. Materially we had infinitely less than youngsters today but I think we were happier."

Probably true. 

But then again one one feels very similarly about one's own younger years, despise differences of time and space, geographical locations, and much, much more, the same nostalgia about one's own young years bestowing them with a roseate golden glow, despite having not exactly forgotten hardships - or far worse. 

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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A Silly Revenge

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Forsyth talks of his test for licence to fly as a pilot. 

Tiger Moth was the plane used, and navigation was by strapping a folded map to leg, and looking at earth to identify locations by railway lines, rivers, et al. 

"There was one elderly member of the club who was so short-sighted that he used to swoop down to fly alongside railway trains and read the destination board on the side of the front carriage. One imagines commuters might be somewhat surprised to raise their gaze from the crossword to see a biplane outside the window and an old codger peering at them. But no one seemed to mind. It was a rather carefree age.

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"Landing back at Bluebell Hill I was told that I had passed and my licence would be ‘in the bag’. The written test, a two-hour paper exam, I had completed before going to France. But I noticed that of my thirty hours of flying time so generously pre-paid by the RAF, there were still forty-five minutes left. I asked for them as a last solo flight and with a shrug was granted them. There was something else I wanted to do."

He flew at his school, at the moment empty of students due to holidays, and saw one face in the window he couldnt identify, being frightened at the sight, throwing himself on the floor. 

"School would reconvene in a fortnight and to please my father I had agreed to complete the last term of the year and leave at Christmas. At the start of term I half-expected to be summoned to report to the headmaster, but no one said a thing."

" ... have never flown a Tiger Moth since, until I was given a ride and the controls at the age of seventy-six at Lashenden airfield in Kent. And she is still a great little aeroplane."

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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A Gentleman of Clare 

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" ... With great luck I had managed my O levels at fourteen and my A levels at fifteen, about three years earlier than required. In this my fluent French and German, provided by the prescience of my parents, had been invaluable."

Tonbridge didn't approve. 

" ... Strings were pulled in the background and I was secured an interview at Clare College, Cambridge. With the Master, no less. For my schoolmasters this was close to a visit to Parnassus. 

"I was furnished with a rail warrant to London and another from London to Cambridge, return. ... "

After a very short interview, the master escorted him to the door, opening it, and thanked him for the most honest interview. His report arrived at Tonbridge. 

" ... But tenacity is a rather British trait and Tonbridge certainly had it. They sent for my father. 

"I was not in the room but he told me about it later. There were four of them: the headmaster (whose summer repose I had ruined), my housemaster, the head of studies and the chaplain. He said it was like a summons to the High Court. They were all in their scholastic robes, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. The shopkeeper they confronted came from Chatham Dockyard and they knew it. 

"The lecture was not hostile but deeply earnest. His son, they told him, was making a grievous mistake. Brilliant exam results stemming from an expensive education. The sort of background that could one day, after two more years at Tonbridge, result in an exhibition, possibly even an open major, to Oxford or Cambridge. A first-class degree could open the doors to the Civil Service. Why, his son might even be able to return as a junior master at Tonbridge, something they clearly regarded as the pinnacle of achievement. 

"And in the face of all this the lad had some weird dream of becoming little more than a mechanic. It was all very infra dignitatem – beneath one’s dignity, a Latin phrase my dad had never heard. 

"In the raging snobbery of those days it seemed that Dartmouth College (Royal Navy) or RMA Sandhurst (Army, good regiment of course) was just acceptable, but volunteering for boot camp, RAF, was distinctly bizarre. It was his (my father’s) clear duty to do everything in his power to dissuade his son from avoiding those last two years at school and inexplicably declining to go to Cambridge."

His father thanked them, politely, and said his son would be what he wished, and he'd help him. 

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But Forsyth's account is yet another evidence of caste system of British and European social structure, and corroboration of testimony by other authors such as George Eliot and John Galsworthy. 

But even more importantly, it's a fact that's hidden under rug by every non-Indian, non- Hindu, speaker or author on the subject, fraudulently pretending that only Hindu society has a caste system, fraudulently equating caste system with India, instead of admitting that every society has a caste system and that the only difference is that India has a vary different foundation of her caste system, against all other such systems. 

And British dud impose their own caste system in name of disapproval of the Hindu caste system, with additional rungs added below those of British, with all Hindus at bottom thereof, instead of treatment of equality for all, the only seemingly fair alternative as envisioned by left - or a caste system based on merit, as would be fair anywhere. 

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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Learning Spanish 

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Forsyth describes how his scholarship fund, unutilised until then, and with conditions allowing him to study another language at any place, was used to get him to study Spanish at Granada University, but in Malaga instead of Andalusia. 

" ... Before the war (the Spanish civil war, which was the conflict that still consumed Spain), the matador Carlos Arruza had performed in the Malaga ring, while suffering from flu and a raging temperature, a corrida so spectacular that he had been awarded two ears, the tail and one hoof from the dead bull, a feat never matched since."

" ... Pablo Picasso, still alive and painting but in exile in France after bitterly opposing Franco and painting Guernica, had been born there. ... "

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" ... I quickly learned that the fifty or so students on the course were all to be lodged in one communal hostel. It also became rapidly plain that as they were Americans, Canadians, British, Germans, Danes, Swedes and others, they would all have one common language – English. And that was what would be used in the hostel. But that was not what I had come for. I wanted to lodge with a Spanish family who spoke no English, and took my problem to Don Andres."

" ... Twenty-four hours later he told me he had found a family content to take in a paying guest. 

"The lady concerned was Doña Concha Lamotte, Vda de Morales. When deciphered that meant Madame Concepcion (or Conchita or Concha) Lamotte, Viuda (widow) of the late Señor Morales. It transpired she was French by birth but in the Thirties had married Señor Morales. He had been executed by the Communists during the civil war and his widow had raised her two children alone."

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"Malaga was still a sleepy, quaint and intensely traditional community. Each evening the girls of the respectable classes not yet ‘spoken for’ would slowly parade the length of the palm-lined Paseo, duly chaperoned by mother or aunt. From the sidelines they could be observed by the young men not yet engaged. It was a marriage market of great decorum.

"The girls would have high ivory combs in their hair, draped with a black lace shawl, the mantilla. The young men often wore the short jacket, the traje corto, and the wide-brimmed black or dove-grey hat known as the Cordobes. 

"If or when a young man saw a girl he really fancied he would ask around for her name. When he had it, he would go to his father, who would then enquire about the girl’s own father, and if he was also of a respectable family in a good house and with a worthy profession the two fathers would meet to confer over a possible union of their offspring. There was no question of the youngsters meeting for a chat."

Then tea with her family, where she'd see him first. 

Did she have a say? Forsyth doesn't consider the question. 

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" ... The chief of police was not run ragged by overwork because crime was very rare and violent crime just about unheard of. The occasional knife fight might take place among the gypsies or gitanos who lived in a camp out of town and who made a living either tending horses or giving demonstrations of flamenco at private soirées or in cafés with a hat passed round. And that was before the gawping tourists arrived."

"Life was cheap, the prices minimal. One could have two large schooners of fine sherry, attended by enough free tapas to constitute a good dinner, for ten pesetas."

His living with a local family helped. 

" ... The hostel students spoke a grammatically perfect but stilted and awfully accented Spanish. I was rattling away in torrents of street Spanish with an Andalusian accent. Don Andres had to exercise all his self-control not to burst out laughing."

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"A fighting bull suitable for a full-fledged corrida is usually five years old. Until he trots out of the dark pen beneath the stands for his last twenty minutes on earth he has led an idyllic life roaming free on the vast ranches with a herd of lady friends and all the lush grass he can eat. Not for him a miserable abattoir at barely a year old. But he is emphatically not sweet-tempered."

" ... When I made enquiries at Malaga’s famous bullring for the spring programme I discovered something interesting. There was a training school there as well. I signed up at once. 

"Basically, it was under the tutelage of a retired matador with a heavy limp. He had stopped one horn too many and his hip had never healed up. This did not prevent him teaching because the matador is not supposed to run around much anyway."

"There was, of course, no real bull. They are expensive and not to be wasted on apprentices. ... "

" ... After several mornings it became plain I was never going to make a matador. ... "

A neighbour from Ashford seeing him had promptly rung his parents, who immediately arrived to fetch him back after graduation party. 

"My folks spent a week at the Marbella Club, then we all left for Gibraltar and the ferry for Tangier."

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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Tangier and Commandos 

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"Tangier was also a free port into which freight ships would arrive to unload out-of-bond cargo immune from even French or Spanish taxes. The cargoes underpinned the smuggling operation, which was considerable. Lined up at the quay was a line of lean, grey Second World War motor torpedo boats, war surplus bought cheap but easily able to outrun the motor boats of the Spanish customs across the water. 

"Thus each evening as the sun set they would slip mooring and head towards the Spanish coast, loaded with perfume, toilet soap, silk stockings and, above all, cigarettes, mainly Camel and Lucky Strike, which were contraband but highly prized and therefore expensive in Spain. 

"They would cruise through the darkness slowly, lights doused, engines rumbling quietly, until the first flashlight on the shore indicated where the mule trains were waiting. Then it was a fast run to shore, frantic hands discharging the cargo before the arrival of the Guardia Civil, and the mules lumbering away into the olive groves. A fast run back out of Spanish territorial waters and a slow cruise home brought them back to Tangier by dawn.

"The going rate for a deckhand was 50 pounds per trip, which was a lot of money back then, so I went down to see if anyone would take me on, but was rebuffed. No vacancies. The jobs were extremely sought after despite twenty years in a Franco jail if caught, and anyway I had no seamanship."

Difficult to imagine Forsyth's books being written in a French prison, however good - the experience of world evident is only comparable with his research. 

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"There was a British warship moored in the outer harbour on what is called a ‘flying the flag’ mission. The idea was to spread pro-British goodwill along the African coast. It was in a dockside bar that I came across a group of marines who were having terrible trouble making themselves plain to the bar staff, who spoke only Moorish Arabic and Spanish. 

"I tried to help and was promptly pressganged as unit interpreter by the senior sergeant. They were all from Glasgow, from, I believe, Gallowgate or the Gorbals; about five feet tall and the same wide. 

"The problem was not between English and Spanish. That was easy. It was between English and Glaswegian. I could not understand a word they said. Eventually a corporal was discovered whom I could decipher and the three-language enigma was solved. ... "

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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Leopard-skin Solution 

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Humour is back, as Forsyth describes his failure to get in RAF for short stint of two years through National Service, even as most others were inventing health reasons to stay out - he wasn't eighteen yet. 

His father again helped, by donating the much needed Leopard-skin to the drummer, which got a call of gratitude from a patron, a retired air marshal who, after hearing what he could do, did oblige. 

Forsyth received the OHMS envelope inviting him for further proceedings. 

"Since the end of the Second World War, the procedure had been that those getting their wings during National Service would go back to Civvy Street but remain on the roll of the Auxiliary Air Force, flying at weekends with one intensive two-week refresher course per year. 

"But it was becoming very plain that weekend warriors were not going to be any match for the Soviet Union’s MiGs and Sukhois if it came to World War Three. The economists in London were even then pointing out that training someone to fly fighters, which took two years anyway, then losing him a fortnight later was a waste of money. ngly, sustained only by the inertia of all bureaucracies.

"Awarding a boy a flying scholarship was going to cost the Air Ministry only thirty hours in a Tiger Moth at six pounds per hour. From zero to wings on a single-seater jet, even back then, cost over one hundred thousand pounds. The system continued, but unwillingly, sustained only by the inertia of all bureaucracies."

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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‘I’m Jesus Christ’ 

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"CARDINGTON HAD ONCE been the base of the barrage balloons that had floated over British cities to deter the bombers of the Luftwaffe. The gigantic hangars that housed them proved perfect for the masses of stores needed to transform a generation of young men from civilians to aircraftsmen."

"There were several thousand young men on the camp, well over 99 per cent extremely ‘bolshy’, a short form of Bolshevik, meaning seriously truculent. After shearing, everyone passed down the long lines of trestle tables in the hangars, being issued with boots, socks, undershorts, singlets, shirts, trousers, blouses and berets. After changing in the dormitory huts, the civilian clothes were packed in the suitcases and mailed home. There was one exception: a very small group destined for flying training and thus immediate junior officer status. There were eighteen of us in a single hut trying to survive the week. Because of the shirts."

Officer cadets had lawn shirts, unlike others with scratchy ones, so they barricaded themselves in rather than being beaten up. 

"You could tell very quickly who had been to boarding school and who not. The former immediately grabbed the beds furthest from the door, standard dormitory lore. ... "

" ... Two days after kitting out, the ‘soft shirts’ were ordered to assemble with kitbags near Main Gate. We were off to boot camp. Even though we were destined for a flying training base, there was still the ritual of twelve weeks of basic training."

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" ... Our course leader was the oldest at twenty-six with university and a doctorate in chemistry behind him. I was the Benjamin, six months younger than the next youngest."

Finally, next stage - flying training camp. 

" ... pilots across country to RAF Ternhill in Shropshire. With the transfer came elevation from cadet to junior officer, specifically acting pilot officer. ... "

" ... pay went up to a staggering 23 pounds a week; being three pounds basic plus twenty pounds ‘flying pay’. I would not earn that much again for five years."

Forsyth points out how national service brought together young males across geographical distances and castes within UK, to learn to be together and on their own, without parents' - especially mothers' - care. 

"The aeroplane on which we trained was the Provost, made by Hunting Percival, now long gone. It was a bulky, fixed-undercarriage side-by-side seater, powered by a single radial engine. It was stable, docile and without vice. It introduced us to aerobatics and very rarely stalled and fell out of the sky. ... Then we had a fortnight’s home leave with parents before reporting to Advanced Flying Training school at RAF Worksop in north Nottinghamshire. At last, single-seat jets."

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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Vampire 

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" ... Each of us longed for the morning when we would go down to the hangars to be introduced to what we all longed to fly. The de Havilland Vampire."

"For years after 1945 the Vampire, along with her contemporary the Gloster Meteor, had been the principal front-line fighter of the RAF. Although relegated to an advanced flying trainer, she was in essence just the same. The four Aden cannon had been retained for the purposes of balance and only stoppered at the front end. The gunsight had been removed from the cockpit but that was all."

" ... Then one of us made an interesting remark. 

"‘Flight, it’s got no ejector seat.’"

"But fly in it we did, aware that with dinghy pack and parachute strapped to your rear end, like the bulbous home of a spider on its backside, you could stand up in the cockpit but never get out. The front coaming of the windscreen would jab you in the stomach before the parachute could clear the back of the seat. Like a champagne cork, you were stuck and could only sit back down again.

"And that was while stationary on the apron. In the stratosphere, a 300mph slipstream would simply bend you back until your spine snapped."

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"It was all learning, a huge curve of new expertise to be ingested and assimilated. And the ground instruction: classroom lessons on aerodynamics, meteorology, aviation medicine, the stresses and strains of G-forces up to six times gravity in the turns and dives, the effects of anoxia (oxygen starvation) if the breathing apparatus packed up."

" ... In northern England there would be cloud, masses of cloud, and once that great ocean of grey cotton wool closes around you, only the instruments will keep you alive and bring you back to a safe landing. 

"Every emergency procedure was practised over and over again from engine flame-out to loss of radio. 

"Sometimes we would find an American bomber out of Lakenheath, patrolling towards the North Sea, formate alongside and give the ally a cheery wave. Other times we would find a Soviet bomber over the ocean, probing the defences. Another wave, but they never replied."

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Forsyth gives grim account of an accident, when faulty reading of altimeter in Pennines had the pilot and trainer crashed to death. 

"It was on a bleak winter’s day of sheeting rain that eight of us, chosen for equal height, carried Derek’s coffin to the Retford grave and stood in the downpour as the obsequies were completed. Then we went back to Worksop and flew again. 

"I think that in the lives of most young men there comes a moment when the boy simply has to grow up and become a man. For most of us it was the day we buried Derek Brett. We realized this thing, this Vampire, was not just a great-fun sports car loaned by a generous queen for us to amuse ourselves over the north of England. It was ten tons of aluminium and steel that, if you did not treat it with respect, would kill you."

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Having earned his wings, Forsyth learned there wasn't much chance he'd fly, so he decided to be a foreign correspondent. 

"But I still had four weeks of terminal leave and I still had my RAF ID card. There was one more adventure to be attempted. I could use that card to hitchhike to the Middle East, which I yearned to see. I made my way down to the great Transport Command base at Lyneham, Wiltshire. There I mooned about the officers’ mess until I found a friendly pilot who would be flying out to Malta as captain of a Blackburn Beverley the next morning. Could he fit in an extra passenger? Why not, came the response. (Things were much more informal back then.)"

" ... the Beverley was taking a replacement jet engine out to Luqa, the big RAF base on Malta. ... "

"The lumbering freighter took off and waddled its way across France to the French airbase at Salon, outside Marseilles. There we refuelled and set off again. Not for long. Out over the Mediterranean there was a loud bang and the starboard inner engine blew up. It simply disintegrated. Through the portholes of the passenger compartment we watched several cylinders with pistons attached tumbling lazily down the slipstream.

"The skipper, Flight Sergeant Farmer, did brilliantly. ... The right wing was suffused with extinguisher foam, the Beverley dived to the surface of the sea and we limped back to Salon."

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"It took three days for a substitute Beverley to be flown out from Lyneham and eventually we made it to Luqa. But it was not to be my week. That evening a sailor was knifed in the Gut; not his gut, the red-light district known as the Gut. It was the first of the rioting led by local politician Dom Mintoff seeking independence. Everyone was confined to base. I tried my hitch-hiking again and found a skipper prepared to offer me a lift to Cyprus. So I took it. 

"At Nicosia I got short shrift. The island had been consumed by the EOKA, another independence-seeking group, but for the moment there was a ceasefire operating. I was told there was no room for a spare body hanging about the mess, so the education officer noticed a free offer by Middle East Airlines for a cultural weekend in Beirut. I took that too, and was deposited in the Lebanon. Unfortunately there was another revolution brewing there as well. 

"I was taking a stroll through the soukh, drinking in the local colour, when there was a sound like tearing calico and two bodies, riddled with machine-gun fire, fell through the awning of a fruit stall. Unbeknown to me, the Druze tribesmen had come over the Chouf mountains and launched what turned out to be the civil war against the government of President Chamoun."

" ... Two days later I took the free MEA flight back to Nicosia. And the ceasefire ended. The war resumed. The commanding officer was incensed to see me again and with his impetus I found myself on the ‘rumble’ (spare) seat of a Canberra jet bomber heading back to Luqa. From thence a Hastings freighter took me home to Lyneham without its engines falling off. 

"I had been away three weeks, experiencing one mid-air near-disaster, one civil war and two uprisings. From Lyneham, still in my blue pilot officer’s uniform, I hitchhiked back to my parents’ home in Kent. But before leaving for the Middle East, and after my decision to leave the service, I had applied for a job in journalism.

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August 06, 2022 - August 06, 2022. 

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King’s Lynn 

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"The apprenticeship I was serving was devised by the National Council for the Training of Journalists. It involved three years of on-the-job training and night school to study typing, shorthand, libel law, constitution and theory of journalism, which is a long way from the real thing. At the end there would be a series of written examination papers and a diploma. Never in the past fifty years has anyone ever asked me for it."

" ... The port then played host to a constant stream of small freighters plying their trade between the Norfolk coast and the ports of Western Europe, particularly Germany."

" ... On my first summer vacation, unable to afford a holiday, I managed to be taken on as a deckhand on a German freighter called the Alster. She plied between King’s Lynn and Hamburg. I spent two weeks on her."

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" ... My deckhand wages did not afford much more than a few beers but some of these were taken in the old Zillertal, a beer hall famous for its foaming steins of ale and oompah-oompah brass bands. I went there because my father had told me about it.

"In spring 1939, when I was still a baby, he and a friend from Ashford had treated themselves to a short vacation and picked Hamburg, where they arrived by car. They both went to the Zillertal but on emerging heard a scuffle down a side alley. Peering into the gloom, they observed two Nazi thugs beating up an old Jew. 

"He and Joe Crotnall may have just been shopkeepers from a small market town who knew nothing of the reality of Germany under the Nazis, but it had only taken them twenty-four hours to take a dislike to the strutting young men with their armbands and the sign of the broken cross. Neither was Jewish either, but they just waded in. 

"In his time in Chatham Dockyard School my dad had been a useful middle-weight and his father had once been boxing, wrestling and bayonet-fighting champion of the Nore Command, which then contained 50,000 sailors. Anyway, he and Joe Crotnall (who told me the story ten years later) flattened the two assailants. Then, as a crowd gathered, it was time to get out of there. They ran for their car and sped out of Germany into Holland before getting into any more trouble."

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"Then in 1960 I crashed the MG and was lucky to survive. ... "

Forsyth drove faster than the car could on a 90° right turn, and he describes the horrible accident. His passenger was lucky. 

"There was a triangular hole in the skull on the left side with the bone fragment embedded inside. A junior surgeon on the staff managed to retrieve the triangle of bone and draw it back into the aperture where it was supposed to be. Then he bandaged it and hoped it would knit back. It did.

"A Dr Bannerjee worked on the ear. This was long before micro-surgery. He put it back where it should have been, sutured the meat back into place and hoped the blood vessels and nerves would find each other and reconnect. Miraculously they did. Apart from some puckering, the ear has worked perfectly well ever since.

"A Mr Laing, a dental surgeon roused from his bed, worked on the mouth. All five of the top row front teeth had been smashed out and even the roots were in bits. He plucked out every last fragment and sewed the gums closed, leaving tendrils of thread hanging down like something from a horror movie. But the big problem was the left hand. It was pulp.

"It just happened that two years earlier one of the finest orthopaedic surgeons in England, after a long and prestigious career in the London teaching hospitals, had retired to his native Norfolk and settled in a village a few miles away. He had met Matron and suggested that, although he was fully retired, if she ever had a really bad one she could call him. That night she did. I believe he was called Mr North. He too left his bed and came to the emergency ward.

"He would have been perfectly entitled, I was told afterwards, to amputate at the wrist. Another surgeon told me later, after seeing the X-rays, that he would have done so. That would have been the unchallengeable decision – a clean, thirty-minute removal of what was left of the hand. The alternative was risky. The trauma was so bad that the young driver could easily die on the slab rather than take a six-hour operation. But he took the risk.

"Through the night, as the anaesthetist constantly checked the life-signs, the surgeon plucked out the tiny fragments and chips of bone and rebuilt the knuckles and metacarpals. He finished around sunrise. His patient was still breathing. Then he had a cup of tea and drove home."

" ... Dr Bannerjee was too shy to return to be thanked for his amazing work on the ear. Mr North would accept nothing from my father save a redecoration of the nurses’ hostel, which was accomplished. I remain grateful to them all, though, as I was then twenty-one, I doubt any can still be alive."

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Forsyth tells of a tailor, a palmist, who was next patient in the general ward, who predicted details of his future, after telling those of his life so far. Forsyth admis they've come true, so far. 

"I had just turned twenty-three; it was autumn 1961. I was heading for London and for Fleet Street, the capital of British journalism, and I still intended to become a foreign correspondent and see the world."

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August 06, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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Fleet Street 

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Forsyth had a lucky break at lunch, after a morning of series of rejections on Fleet Street, and was sent to meet a prospective employer. 

"Doon Campbell was news editor of Reuters, a name so prestigious I had not even thought of it. Not just a few foreign correspondents but an entire agency dedicated to foreign news, reported from their myriad bureaux all over the world. He was actually a very kindly man but his first, deliberate, impression was of a no-nonsense sergeant-major. ... "

"I knew I would get no Brownie points for walking out on the EDP without notice, so I told him I would need to work out my month and could join Reuters in December. He nodded dismissively and that was that. I had landed a slot in the world’s best-regarded agency for foreign news by a series of flukes. I left King’s Lynn a month later and moved to a tiny flatlet in Shepherd Market, whence a Number 9 bus would bring me to Fleet Street in twenty minutes."

" ... In May I got my break. 

"The deputy chief of the Paris bureau was diagnosed with a heart murmur and had to be flown home without delay. The British National Health Service was free and the French was not. A head poked round the door of the Home Reporters’ room and asked: ‘Anyone here speak French?’"

Forsyth was taken to meet the French language service, chief Maurice, who was French. 

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"Maurice was bent over his typewriter and without looking up asked in French: ‘What do you reckon to the situation in Paris?’"

Here's genesis of The Day Of The Jackal. 

"It was back then in a state of crisis. It had just been revealed that President de Gaulle had for months been secretly negotiating with the Algerian resistance at Vichy and had fixed 1 July 1963 for a French pull-out from the disastrous Algerian independence war and Algerian independence for the same day. The French extreme-right and elements of the elite of the army had declared war on de Gaulle personally. France stood on the verge of coup d’état or revolution.

"I let Maurice have a torrent of French complete with a brace of slang expressions that a pretend-speaker would never have known. Maurice had served with the Free French in the war, based at first in London with de Gaulle, then fighting his way across his own homeland as it was liberated under Marshal Juin. But he had married an English girl and settled in London. He stopped typing and looked up. 

"‘You’re French-born, right?’"

Forsyth said he was English. 

"‘Better get him over there. I’ve never heard a Rosbif talk like that.’"

" ... I phoned my parents in Kent and was on the morning flight to Paris. A new chapter was opening that would eventually, and totally unforeseeably, lead to a book called The Day of the Jackal."

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August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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Paris Aflame 

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"In 1958 de Gaulle, who had retired in 1947, or so it was presumed, was recalled as prime minister and the following year was elected president. In his campaign he had used the magic words: ‘Algérie Française’. Algeria is French. So the army and the right-wing worshipped him. A few weeks into office as premier he realized the situation was hopeless. France was being bled white in a war it could not win. As president he began secret negotiations to end it. When that news broke it was like a nuclear explosion. 

"In Algeria vital sections of the army mutinied and marched into exile, taking their weapons with them. Five generals went with them. These were not the raw recruits but the Foreign Legion and the Paras (Airborne), the cream of the cream. The numerical bulk, the military service inductees, wanted to come home so they stayed loyal to Paris. But hundreds of French civilians, settled in Algeria, realizing they would be thrown out or at least dispossessed by a new Algerian government, threw in their lot with the rebels, who called themselves the Secret Armed Organization or OAS. Their aim: assassinate de Gaulle, topple his regime and install the hard-right.

"The Paris into which I landed that May 1962 was in turmoil. The biggest communist party in Europe, west of the Iron Curtain, was French, completely loyal to Moscow, which had been arming and funding the Algerians. Hard-left students marched and clashed violently on the streets of Paris with those supporting the right. Plastic bombs exploded in cafés and restaurants.

"Between the warring sides was the newly formed anti-riot police, the CRS, whose methods were not gentle. Almost every street corner featured a couple of them demanding identity papers, as in a city under occupation. Surrounding de Gaulle’s person and keeping him alive were two forces: the Action Service of the counter-intelligence arm, and his personal squad of four bodyguards, backed by the Gendarmerie Nationale. For a young foreign correspondent it was some baptism and the peak of all the possible postings."

................................................................................................

"On arrival I reported to the bureau chief, the formidable Harold King. He was a legend. Born German, he had fought in the First World War, but for the kaiser. He emigrated to Britain and naturalized. In 1940 he was Reuters’ man in Moscow, following the Red Army deep into Poland, before being repatriated to London. Then he followed the Free French into France and became utterly convinced of the claims and policies of Charles de Gaulle. After the liberation he told Reuters he would head up the Paris Bureau or quit. He got Paris. 

"When de Gaulle resigned in disgust in 1947 he was presumed to be gone for ever. Only Harold King, like a Jacobite waiting for the return of the king, insisted de Gaulle would one day return to lead France back to glory, and until it all came true in 1958 King was indulgently regarded as a fantasist. Now in 1962 he was the king (literally) of the Paris foreign press corps. His loyalty to de Gaulle was quietly rewarded with tip-off after tip-off. "

"Back then French lunches lasted nearly three hours. We strolled back into the office at close to four. I did not know it but I had been, in a way, adopted, and the friendship lasted until he died. The mentoring that Frank Keeler had started in King’s Lynn Harold King completed in Paris, upholding Reuters’ house style of rigorous accuracy and complete impartiality – even though he was very partial to Charles de Gaulle and the compliment was constantly repaid. He was the only Britisher the French autocrat had any time for.

"Because I was the youngest and the most junior, and a single man with no family to hurry home to, Harold King gave me a rather unusual assignment. It was to shadow Charles de Gaulle every time he left the Elysée Palace. I was not the only one."

" ... He knew exactly what we were there for. It was not to cover his visit to the Senate or whatever. It was for that cataclysmic moment when he was assassinated. He knew and he did not give a damn. He despised his enemies and he despised danger. He just shoved his beak of a nose even higher and stalked through."

................................................................................................

"OAS sympathizers also frequented the bars of the 9th, and so did I. This was largely because the second day-shift at the office ended at 10 p.m. and I did not need or wish to sleep until well after midnight. So I nursed a beer, stared vacantly at the wall and listened. That gave me some knowledge of de Gaulle’s deadly enemies.

"I also developed my ‘Bertie Wooster mode’, an adopted persona based on P.G. Wodehouse’s witless hero: helpless, well-meaning, affable but dim as a five-watt bulb. Affecting to speak little French and with the usual appalling British accent, I was assumed by both bar staff and customers not to understand what they were talking about. The reverse was the case. In the years to come Bertie would get me out of a lot of trouble. This is because the harmless fool with a British passport is what Europeans want to see and believe."

................................................................................................

Forsyth describes the real life attempt by OAS on life of de Gaulle, on 22nd August,  1962. 

"A pretty shattered Mme Yvonne was helped into the ’copter. De Gaulle emerged, shook shards of glass from the lapel of his Savile Row suit (the only British thing he would have about him) and gave his verdict. 

"‘Ils ne savant pas tirer,’ he sniffed. They can’t shoot straight."

"That October saw the Cuba missile crisis, a hyper-tense four days when it really looked as if the world might come to thermo-nuclear war and be wiped out. To be fair to de Gaulle, rightly described as no admirer of the USA since his blazing rows in the war with General Eisenhower, he was the first in Europe to ring Washington and pledge his total support for John F. Kennedy."

Forsyth describes three attempts against life of de Gaulle, of which second one seems to be the one in his work is modelled on, involving a sniper. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth was informed that Reuters wanted to send him to East Berlin. 

"At the Ostbahnhof station I disembarked and the man I was replacing, Jack Altman, was there to greet me. He had had a year of it and was yearning to get the hell out. 

"He had a car, which I would take over, and a spacious flat-cum-office in the Schönhauser Allee, which I would also inhabit. After lunch he took me to meet the hatchet-faced officials with whom I would have to deal. I noticed that he spoke good German but would never pass for one. In front of officialdom I made heavy weather of vocabulary and grammar, and affected a clumsy accent. I noticed the officials relaxed at that. This one would be no problem. 

"He introduced me to the office secretary, Fräulein Erdmute Behrendt, an East German lady who clearly would also be under constant surveillance by the police and the SSD, the formidable Stasi. Two days later he was gone."

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August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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Big Brother 

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Foster discovered the planted bugs and watchers of his apartment soon enough. 

"One of the nastiest pieces of work in the regime was the press secretary to the Politburo, a certain Kurt Blecha. He had perhaps the falsest smile on earth. But I knew a few things about Master Blecha. One was his birthday and another was that in the Thirties he had been a red-hot member of the Nazi Party."

He'd pretended to be converted as soon as Russian forces found him, and returned to be part of regime. 

................................................................................................

"I also learned how to shake the Stasi tail. As the Reuters correspondent I was allowed through Checkpoint Charlie into West Berlin but the secret police tail was not. They always pulled over to the kerb as I approached the barrier. Once through, I could race down the Kurfürstendamm, from there to the Heerstraße and on to the border leading back into the republic of East Germany at DreiLinden.

"It was sometimes thought in the West that Berlin was a border city between East and West. Not so; it was buried eighty miles inside East Germany, with West Berlin surrounded on all sides. Head west out of West Berlin through the Drei Linden crossing point and you were on the autobahn to West Germany, which was also allowed. Once on it I could leave the autobahn at the first off-ramp and disappear into the countryside. With a set of shabby local clothes and an East Berlin-registered Wartburg car, eating at roadside halts and sleeping in the car, I could stay off radar for a couple of days.

"There were good stories to be had once outside the cage. In theory everyone was so happy in the workers’ paradise that there could not be any dissent to report. The truth was that resentment among workers and students seethed under the surface, occasionally breaking out in strikes and student marches – always short-lived and punished as the Volkspolizei, the People’s Police, known as VoPos, struck back."

................................................................................................

Blecha interviewed him every time he reappeared, pretending worry, asking him to let them know next time so they could could make introductions. 

Forsyth claimed he'd gone looking at old churches, and had a book at home on architecture that they could see. 

................................................................................................

"I arrived in East Berlin in early October. In late November the world was hit by a thunderbolt."

Wonder why he never wrote about that one huge crime, committed right on world stage. 

It took a Jim Garrison to unravel and bring it out to people, and an Oliver Stone to immortalise the story in his unforgettable film, JFK. 

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August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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The Death of Kennedy 

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"I happened to be dining in West Berlin with a stunning German girl called Annette. We were at the Paris Bar, just round the corner from the Reuters office. It was full and behind the clatter and chatter there was muzak playing. Out of nowhere it stopped and an urgent-sounding voice barked: 

"‘Wir unterbrechen unser Programm für eine wichtige Meldung: auf den Präsidenten Kennedy wurde geschossen.’"

Music resumed. They thought it had been a joke, or a glitch. Then it repeated. 

"Then the world went crazy. 

"Men stood up and swore repeatedly, women screamed. Tables were overturned. Kennedy had been there in June, speaking at the Wall. It is hard to describe to those who came later how he was hero-worshipped, and in this city of all cities. ... "

................................................................................................

Forsyth rushed to get to his office in East Berlin,  crossing Checkpoint Charlie. 

"The checkpoint was in the American sector of the four-power-divided city and in their glass booth the GIs were bowed over their radio. You could have driven a herd of buffalo past them and they would not have noticed. The American barrier was up as always. I drove past it and swerved to the East German control sheds. They too had heard."

"The story was still recent of Peter Fechter, an eighteen-year-old student who had got through the minefield and was halfway up the Wall when the searchlights found him. He was hit by a burst of fire from a watch tower. No one wanted to go through the mines to get him down. In sight of the West Berliners, he hung there on the barbed wire, screaming until he bled out and died.

"The only good news about that awful night in 1963 was to see these brutes bleating with panic. They surrounded my car asking: ‘Herr Forsyth, wird das Krieg bedeuten?’ Will this mean war?"

................................................................................................

"The media concentration was on a panicking America, but that fear was as nothing to the situation on the Iron Curtain. I rang the East German Foreign Ministry for a comment. They were fully awake with desks staffed but not knowing what to say until told by Moscow. So terrified voices were asking me, rather than the way it should have been.

"The point about a communist state, or any dictatorship, is that independent media are out of the question. So despite denial after denial the authorities persisted in the myth that the Reuters man in their midst had some kind of a direct line to the British Government. On each of the two occasions I flew back to the UK during my year in East Berlin I was given earnest messages for the British Foreign Secretary, whom I had not the slightest intention of visiting, nor he me. When I said I was only going to visit my mum and dad, they tapped the sides of their noses and said: Ja, ja, we are men of the world. Wink, wink."

................................................................................................

"By mid-morning word was coming through that the assassin of Dallas was in handcuffs and an American Communist. The panic deepened. On the streets terrified passers-by glanced at the skies expecting to see the bombers of the Strategic Air Command heading east with their nukes. Then Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald right in the heart of a police station. If anything was possible to fuel the fires of conspiracy theory, it was that. And indeed the incompetence was pretty hard to believe. 

Did Forsyth never did suspect the truth? 

Or see that there were just too many discrepancies in the official story? 

................................................................................................

"But the USA kept its nerve. The vice-president took over and was sworn in. The bombers remained grounded. The panic slowly subsided to be replaced by grief as the TV pictures flashed up of the funeral with the riderless horse. When another shot showed a small boy saluting his father’s catafalque, all Berlin, East and West, was in tears. Extraordinary times."

Did he not realise, or even suspect, even after Jim Garrison proceeded with his case, that the lone shooter made no sense? 

Did he not realise, or even suspect, that Garrison was right? 

................................................................................................

"West Berlin lived in a slightly hysterical mood all those years while the Wall stood, aware it could be snuffed out within a night if the order was given in Moscow, like a partygoer drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. That Christmas it let rip. The East Berliners did their best, but the contrast in prosperity of the two political and economic systems was stark."

This was desperation, not joy. 

One is reminded of the explanation given by someone, decades ago, of how West Berlin survived. 

When you see a wolf approach, you are frightened. When it's close, you panic. But when you're inside it's jaws, you settle down between the teeth and enjoy life - while you can. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth talks of the currency restrictions then in East Europe - one had to convert 80% to Eastern currency, which couldn't be brought out. 

There was little worth buying. So Reuters had huge balance, which he'd been informally asked, before going to East Berlin, to reduce. 

There were some superb things, such as Czech records and Hungarian leather bags. Each country of east Europe maintained a loss making prestige shop in East Berlin. 

East German guards ignored his trunk when he crossed to West, and he ignored some oranges missing when he entered East Berlin. 

"Each Soviet satellite country maintained a prestige restaurant in East Berlin. There was a Haus Budapest with Hungarian cuisine, a Haus Sofia for Bulgaria and so on. The Haus Moskau served borscht, Stolichnaya vodka … and caviar. That first Christmas I really helped Reuters reduce its surplus Marks-pile with a mountain of Beluga and enough Stolly to ensure that all the bugs in my bedroom could record were the snores."

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August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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Helping Out the Cousins 

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Forsyth recounts a true story of adventure tailor made for his thrillers - a telex alert in small hours, his rushing across Checkpoint Charlie and out towards Magdeburg to find the plane shot down by Soviets, his being ignored by locals until he said he was from London and showed his British passport, and then helped readily and copiously, finding an old farmer who knew exactly where the wreck was and finding the wreck, hearing the story of the three ejected crew seen being taken and driven by Soviets towards Magdeburg. 

"Then the luck ran out. I was stumbling back to where I left the car when I heard voices among the pine trees. I dropped to my knees in the undergrowth. Too late. 

"I heard a barked Stoi and saw a pair of serge combat trousers ahead of my face. An angry Mongoloid face was staring down at me. These Mongol regiments came from the Russian Far East and have always been used as cannon fodder. I stood up. He was shorter than me but the tommy gun pointing at my face created its own very persuasive argument.

"Surrounded by his mates I was marched out of the forest to a meadow where a group of officers was standing round a colonel seated at a trestle table studying a map. One of them looked up, frowned and came over. He spoke to the soldier in a tongue I could not understand. Certainly not Russian. So, a White Russian officer from a Mongoloid regiment recruited somewhere way out along the river Ussuri. Or maybe the Amur. A long way away."

................................................................................................

Forsyth refers to the officer as 'White Russian', amongst what he terms Mongoloid soldiers. 

It's completely unclear whether he means White, as in not Red - or as in of European descent. 

Or both. 

Presumably, or at least possibly, he's indicating or implying that someone speaking a language he didn't understand was, judging by his conversation with the Mongoloid soldiers, accustomed to Asian parts of Russia, and this amounts to his having lived there, possibly as a White Russian hiding post revolution in East, unable to leave. 

................................................................................................

"He asked for an explanation. I dropped into Bertie Wooster mode – hapless, harmless and very dim. I told him my car had been run off the road and was stuck in a sand drift. I had been told there was a farmer in the woods with a tractor who might pull me out. Then I dropped my car keys and was scrambling around trying to find them when his kindly soldiers guided me out of the forest. 

"He took my press card and went to show it to the colonel. There was a jabber of Russian. The colonel shrugged and gave him back my card. He clearly had problems more serious than idiot East Germans getting stuck. The captain came back and handed me my press card, and told me to get the hell out of there. I must have been a bit punch drunk because I said in halting German: 

"‘Herr Captain, it was your trucks that ran me into the sand drift. Your lads couldn’t push me out, could they?’"

Forsyth's car wasn't stuck, but he braked while they pushed, and then released it so it shot forward, with friendly waves by the soldiers. 

................................................................................................

He needed to get his story through to West Berlin. He found an old gasthof. 

"Presenting my German ID and speaking like a German, I took a room, pleading car trouble for the lack of reservation, went upstairs and placed a call to my East Berlin office. Fräulein Behrendt had checked in at nine that morning, read my scrawled message, and was still there. With headphones on, she took down my fifteen-page despatch."

He told her to run it through on telex at maximum speed. She managed fourteen pages before the line messaged technical problems, the usual trick. It took that long for them to stop it because they needed to check with bosses. 

................................................................................................

"I learned later that it had ‘gone viral’ before that phrase was invented. Client newspapers used it across the globe. Wiesbaden was very happy and a staff car was despatched to Magdeburg to demand the three crewmen back. (They came home pretty quickly. The nervousness caused by Lee Harvey Oswald was apparently still alive in Moscow.) 

"I should have driven back to East Berlin that night but I was bone-tired and hungry. I ate a hearty supper, went back to my room and slept until morning. After breakfast I paid up and emerged. 

"Outside the main door I was reminded of those society weddings where the bridegroom’s mates all line up in two columns forming a walkway between them."

................................................................................................

He was escorted to Magdeburg by the complete collection of various security forces, and interviewed strenuously. He did his Bertie Wooster bit, arguing that he had to do his job, asking if they wouldn't do exactly that if they were reporters in London. 

"The senior goon facing me would probably not have had a clue what to do with a hot news story. As he was well over forty I suspected he had been serving the Nazis twenty years earlier and had switched seamlessly to the Communists. Secret policemen are like that; they’ll serve anyone.

"Years after Berlin the pretty vicious DINA, the secret police of the not-so-saintly Salvador Allende of Chile, transferred without a blip to the service of General Pinochet. They even used the same torture chambers. Only the victims changed. 

"As he had never lived in a free country at all, asking him to agree with what a free journalist would do was simply embarrassing. I just had to hope my façade of a lucky but gormless fool, and thus too dim to be a spy, would hold up. It did."

He was, after a day and night of questioning, escorted to East Berlin, but at a border crossing Checkpoint between East Germany South of East Berlin, avoiding West Berlin. 

"Someone in Berlin had decided they wanted this whole (for them) miserable affair quashed. We drove fast back to East Berlin but not via West Berlin. As East German drivers swerved off the highway as the blaring sirens came up behind them, we made record time, driving round West Berlin to enter East Berlin from the south. Many never knew that there was a second border separating East Berlin from East Germany proper. It was to prevent Western tourists who were allowed through Checkpoint Charlie from driving straight on into East Germany unmonitored."

Someone tapped on his window, and told him not to come back to Magdeburg, ever. 

Forsyth says he never has, so far. 

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August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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Outbreak of War 

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"It was 24 April 1964, and it was two o’clock in the morning. I was in my car, twisting and turning my way through the coffin-dark streets of East Berlin back to my flat ... "

He was stopped by a soldier posted at an intersection, who turned back to face the main road Forsyth was attempting to cross, and Forsyth heard a rumble. 

"As I watched, the first vehicles appeared, coming from the right, meaning the east, and heading across the junction towards the west. They were lorries packed with soldiers and it was obviously a very large convoy. It just went on and on. I got out of the car and watched for a few minutes. The trucks were then replaced by low-loaders carrying tanks. Nothing else moved. Apart from the Russians the streets were abandoned."

Forsyth did a u-turn, wanting to get back to home and office sooner, but same thing happened at another crossing of a different main road. This repeated at least three times. 

"The third time, the slowly rumbling traffic on the crossing involved more low-loaders but carrying mobile bridges. Then more mechanized infantry with motorcycle outriders. Though no expert, I calculated what I had seen as between four and five divisions of the Soviet army, in full battle order, moving through the darkness towards the Wall."

................................................................................................

"The West Berliners lived with the daily fear of the moment the twenty-two divisions of Soviet-based military in East Germany got their marching orders. That was why their mood was always slightly hysterical and their partygoing and sexual mores entertainingly louche. 

"And finally, with Kennedy dead and Khrushchev locked in a power struggle with rivals in the Kremlin, the spring of 1964 was as tense a time as had ever been. Not long after, the Russian tanks of General Abrassimov and the US tanks of General Lucius Clay would be parked barrel-to-barrel at Checkpoint Charlie with the Reuters man dodging between them.

"What I had seen was not merely rolling, it was rolling towards the Wall. In silence, apart from the low rumbling, at 2 a.m. In rising anguish I made it back to the Reuters office-cum-apartment and rushed upstairs. ... "

................................................................................................

"There was no question of calling anyone to consult. Telephonically West Berlin and West Germany were cut off. All the East German ministries were closed."

Forsyth decided to communicate exactly what he'd seen, without comment. Then he waited. He heard later of subsequent events, partly guessed by him. 

Reuters office, instead of forwarding the message worldwide, did so only to London, where superiors were woken up, and contacted Moscow. Kremlin was bewildered, and eventually contacted East Germany. 

"A puzzled Soviet commander-in-chief of Warsaw Pact forces in East Germany explained that it was only a rehearsal for the May Day parade due in exactly one week. 

"In a rare extension of consideration for the citizens of East Berlin, the Soviets had decided to hold their multi-division military party in the middle of the night when the streets were empty, and being Communists it never occurred to them to tell anybody."

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Forsyth was ridiculed until he pointed out that if he didn't know, nor had they, so a truce was agreed upon, yo not refer to it. 

And it's been relatively unknown, so far. The few in the know never publicised it, although it may have been talked of in intelligence circles. 

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August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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Headlights 

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Forsyth was Reuters man for East Germany, and responsible for Hungary and Czechoslovakia, with mandatory routine visits. 

He recounts meeting an attractive local young woman in a disco on one such visit and being surprised at her acceptance of a drive after midnight. After spending time at and in a lake, relaxing, he realised there had been no headlights in the mirror. 

"I must have moved in my surprise for a sleepy voice in the crook of my left arm asked: ‘What’s the matter?’ I explained, adding: ‘Whatever happened to the StB?’ 

"And the sleepy voice replied: ‘You just made love to it.’ ... "

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August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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Beer with a Camp Guard 

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Forsyth describes an unpleasant encounter, after visiting Buchenwald, at a local pub with a sneering middle aged ex-guard of a different concentration camp, 

"‘Were you there? In the old days?’ I did not mean as an inmate, I meant on the staff. He shook his head, then confirmed my suspicion. 

"‘Not that one.’"

and wondering how children grow up to turn into such monsters. 

He need not have looked far. 

Racism is half the cause - slavery in US, British treatment of locals in India and elsewhere, are all testimony thereof - and then there are the later abrahmic creeds that are all equally fanatic about converting the world, as much as they are assured constantly by their respective priests that, regardless of individual virtues, all followers of any other creed are going to hell. In case of an atheist Abrahamic-IV, read that demons from hell, since they wouldn't preach a future heaven away from earth. 

Memoirs of survivors of those camp, and others, attest to local churches having preached antisemitism, definitely every Easter, if not roitinely weekly - and consequently being attacked every Easter Sunday after mass, with stone peltings. 

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August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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A Very Unwise Choice 

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Forsyth hadn't much to do in evenings. East Berlin television sets were modified to not receive the forbidden West Berlin transmission. Reading, he did a lot that year. 

"One of the few civilized things about the East German government that was not an affectation was their love of music, theatre and opera. ... State Opera was famous enough to attract international singers and conductors and the Politburo spent enough foreign currency to indulge it lavishly. Of course, there was the occasional slip-up."

At Opera Cafe he met someone attractive, who'd spend evenings with him but insisted on him ordering taxi, seemed dressed far beyond the income and rank of her husband. After investigating, he realised why. 

" ... Further discreet enquiries with some of my contacts in West Berlin revealed whose address it was. 

"I recall driving back into East Berlin through ‘Charlie’ that night with the words of a popular song running through my head. The opening line was: the party’s over, it’s time to call it a day.fn1 I had been sleeping with the mistress of the East German defence minister, General Karl-Heinz Hoffmann.

"General Hoffmann was not renowned for his sense of humour. I had just turned twenty-six in October 1964 and hoped for a few more birthdays yet to come. Outside of a prison cell if possible."

Forsyth asked Reuters to transfer him, and he'd finished a year, so they agreed - no one lasted over a year in East Berlin. He flew out. 

" ... I looked down at the divided city convinced I would never return to East Germany. As it turned out, I was wrong about that."................................................................................................

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August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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A Mistake with Auntie 

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Forsyth was sent back to Paris, and watched funeral of Churchill on television in a Cafe in Paris, remarking that everyone was silent, despite being no admirers of all things British. He'd decided that future was with radio and television, and applied to BBC, ending up in home radio division. 

But BBC was more bureaucracy and establishment than news, he discovered. 

Is BBC 'auntie'? Of the chapter title? 

"Then it got worse. ... "

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Forsyth writes about Sir Hugh Carleton-Greene, brother of Graham Greene, who'd set up North German radio after WWII, but was disgusted with BBC and resigned. 

" ... Only later did I learn about office politics, just as they effectively destroyed me."

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After he'd been shifted to television, one day he covered an air show. 

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August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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A Day with the Arrows 

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Forsyth was comfortable, but his cameraman was hefty, a tight fit in the small cockpit, and the Ariflex was 10 pounds, which at 6g would be a 60 pounds drag on his shoulders. There were emergency procedures, but no provisions for throwing up, and no medical tests certifying fitness to fly. 

" ... Our role was clearly to be strapped in, then sit tight and shut up. ... "

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Forsyth describes the display in air from participant's perspective. 

"The rushes were superb and the editors were pretty open mouthed ... "

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Forsyth applied for foreign correspondent job and got it. He writes ruing it in hindsight, having then not known about Commonwealth Relations Office and Foreign Office, or about "slavishness of BBC" to them.  

" ... But awareness came late, too late."

Next chapter title involves Africa, so presumably this had to do with what eventually he wrote up in his book on Biafra. 

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August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

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A Taste of Africa 

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Forsyth's boss had wanted to bring in a protégé of his own. 

His job involved attending briefings at Commonwealth Relations Office and Foreign Office,  and he remarks that other correspondents had gone native, copying attitudes and postures of the bureaucrats there who briefed them 

" ... I never recall a penetrating question or a hint of a disagreement ... by mid-morning a single issue was dominating all others : the Middle East. Gamal Abdal Nasser of Egypt was steadily preparing for war with Israel." 

" ... Nasser was no friend of Britain nor vice-versa.  ... "

"Yet in the Foreign Office the anti-Semitism was unmissable. ... pn most issues ... lofty disdainof foreigners, yet a preferencefor Arabs and Islam.  This was mirrored in the left-wing media."

Strange concoction, and copied ditto in India (until 2014), by all congress related regimes. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth went on leave, frustrated about nit being sent to Middle East, and watched the Six DAY War via media. 

"In Britain the left had been practically salivating at the imminent destruction of the Jewish state and could only watch in slack-jawed amazement. Most of the Britishpeoplejust cheered. The heto of the hour across two continents, Europe and America, was ... Moshe Dayan."

Forsyth returned to work from leave, a minority opinion on the topic in media and Foreign Office.  He plunges into his nobody was paying attention to crisis in Nigeria.  

Hereon it's familiar territory if one has read his work on Biafra. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth was called by Hutchinson's deputy to go to Nigeria. He protested that he knew nothing about it, cared less and didn't want to go. He had to give in. His briefing was by someone ignorant and prejudiced, as evident from reading his own book on the subject. 

"The Rebel army was a rabble of cooks and bottle-washers who would be no match for the very fine British trained Nigerian army ... "

Events in capital Lagos were covered by someone else. Forsyth was to go to Biafra via Cameron. He was to meet up Jim Parker, British deputy High Comissioner, stuck to him and evacuate after Nigeria occupied Biafra, returning to file 'upsummer'. 

He met Jim Parker who knew the region, and asked what Forsyth had been told. He knew where it had come from, the British High Comissioner David Hunt, whom Forsyth describes as someone racist who'd missed every plum diplomatic post to end up in Nigeria. They met years later. 

................................................................................................

"Every word I had been given was complete and utter garbage. ... " 

And Hunt was the source. 

After meeting Ojukwu, who was very well educated son of a millionaire and nothing like portrayed by those who'd briefed Forsyth, he went to the hotel where expatriates, mostly British, stayed. They were as knowledgeable as Jim Parker about local affairs and would confirm all he said. 

Forsyth went back for tea with Jim Parker who explained why his briefing had been what it was. 

"It was a chastening seminar to confirm the old adage. Never mind what the embassy says, go and ask the old sweats who have been there for years."

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................................................................................................

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................................................

August 07, 2022 - August 07, 2022. 

................................................

................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

End of Career 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

This chapter has Forsyth give here, briefly, what he expounds on in his work on Biafra at more length, focusing here a tad more on British mistakes, prejudices and arbitrary nature of decisions. 

Over and over, it reminds one of 1971, as it did when readingthe book - except that Biafra had no saviour, as East Bengal did in Mother India. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth was ordered home for reporting facts, and reduced again to home reporter. He "wandered around the corridors" until he'd "found Tom Maltby". 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

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................................................

August 07, 2022 - August 08, 2022. 

................................................

................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Farewell, Auntie 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

"Tom Maltby was a very decent man and kindly. ... "

Tom Maltby explained to him that his crime had been to contradict the version by establishment, however truthfully. Moreover, if the war golden as per their predictions, he'd be held forever as wrong; but if not, they'd have to reconsider. Maltby suggested he shouldn't resign in a hurry. 

He was transferred to the Parliamentary Desk at the House of Commons, rather than moping around the reporters' room. Forsyth writes that he thereby learned how the British government actually functions. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth was able to avoid politics of coterie at BBC while stationed at House of Commons, and get disillusioned regarding virtues of MPs and peers, he writes. 

"In the interim, the Nigerian civil war had not ended or improved. It had gotten worse. ..."

Wilson's British Government was quietly arming Nigerian army while claiming to be neutral, Forsyth writes. 

................................................................................................

But Biafra, headed by the educated and intelligent General Ojukwu, fought back, on several fronts, including economic and financial security,  arms and military bases, and foreign connections, chieflywith Spain and Portugal. He also established an office in London to tell of the Biafra side. 

Forsyth sought to join the all media group travelling at invitation of General Ojukwu, but he was told that BBC was not covering the war and he wasn't going anywhere. He decided to go without telling while on a week's leave.

................................................................................................

Forsyth flew to Lisbon, met Hank Wharton who was shipping arms and got a ride, with adventure of bring shot at - most African regimes bring military dictatorships, they had to gly out over Atlantic and approach via South. He was assigned an army jeep, driver, and free access by General Ojukwu. 

"Within three days it was clear the war wasn't going to end anytime soon. ... "

General Ojukwu negotiated about oil fields with Shell BP, and France, never slow to exploit something to British disadvantage as Forsyth terms, was helping Biafra with weapons. 

Forsyth found his flat broken into on his return, by two BBC guys, everything pilfered, and he paid the landlord and spent two nights on a friend's sofa, and wrote a long letter, of his resignation, to Tom Maltby. He flew back to Lisbon and hitched another ride from Hank Wharton to Biafra. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth joined as a freelance journalist to report on what he saw, travelling with Biafra military. 

His first two months were almost completely idle in Biafra, so he recalled a standing invitation from a friend to visit Israel and flew thence. 

................................................................................................

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................................................

August 08, 2022 - August 08, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Living History 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Israel was still in a spirit of euphoria due to six day war, Forsyth writes; its territory had doubled. Diggers were revealing Wailing Wall. 

" ... Seen from forty-five years later, it was the product not of gloating but of a slightly touching naivete."

................................................................................................

Forsyth met David Ben-Gurion. 

Forsyth, recalling that older people recall younger days far more clearly and that everyone must have asked him about the Six-Day War, asked instead how he'd felt when first looking on the shore of Israel. 

"He stared for several seconds and then came alive as if jolted by an electric charge. ... "

................................................................................................

"Over the years he'd seen it all: both world wars, the Mandate betweenthem, the rise of Zionism, ...  He'd met the generals and giants, Roosevelt and Churchill."

" ... He had fought all his life for his dream yet seemed to hate no one, not even Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who so admired Adolf Hitler and wanted every Jew on earth dead. ... "

................................................................................................

Forsyth says he just sat and listened, although he could have filled ten notebooks. 

" ... David Ben-Gurion died six years later at the age of eighty-seven. He was one of the greatest men I ever met." 

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................................................

August 08, 2022 - August 08, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Eilat 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

The three day conquest of a war fought along north Sinai had brought all of dinar under Israel, including the Sinai Bedouin,  who had been treated by Egyptians with contempt and never accorded them a doctor, as Israel did. 

Sinai is virtually an island, Forsyth explains, and Bedouin seldom cross water, he tells. They have seen various armies march, fight, retreat, and never interfered, merely withdrawing into the desert while battles went on usually in North Sinai, and watching without taking sides. 

" ... After July 1967, Israeli were the first people to treat them decently. "

................................................................................................

Israel built a pipe from Eilat to Suez canal, free drinking water available every few miles with a tap and a trough. And a medical clinic. 

"The Bedouin replied in kind. You fo mot see the Bedouin unless they allow you to, but they see everything.... "

Israel always got information about Egypt raids, were ahead to capture them before sending them back disarmed. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth travelled on a two day tour of Sinai with an Israeli army group. 

" ... we took coffee with the Bedouin while the women crouched out of sight inside the camel-hair tents."

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August 08, 2022 - August 08, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Jerusalem 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth, after he saw Jerusalem wandering around as a tourist, was invited by Moshe Dayan to talk, when he was taking tea at King David Hotel. 

................................................................................................

Next day he met Ezer Weizmann. He was invited by the latter to co-pilot a Cessna/Piper variety of a high-wing monoplane. So Forsyth asked him, after they were over 5,000 feet, about how he'd established IAF. 

Marshall Tito had provided them four planes abandoned by Germans, still in their original crates - Tito needed money for Yugoslavia, and Israel was anti-imperialist. An Israeli team had gone to Yugoslavia to assemble them. Weizmann and three pilots had followed, to fly home the planes with nazi insignia! 

They flew south, on the day of independence, and were told Egyptian planes were coming to attack. They had turned south instead of refuelling and engaged the Egyptian force flying British Hurricanes. Thus the first airfight was between Egyptians in Hurricanes and Jews in Messerschmitts. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth flew the plane when Weizmann took his hands off to gesticulate, after it went into a dive; he took control back to land, before speeding off. 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

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................................................

August 08, 2022 - August 08, 2022. 

................................................

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Confession 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth spent his last evening in Tel Aviv in a pub, talking to a crowd that was reminiscing about pre-independence days. 

British soldiers were all right, they said, having grown up with Jews and having fought in WWII, and seen concentration camp horrors. They were sympathetic, and let the melons covering weapons go by undisturbed. 

"The anti-Semitic attitude came hot and strong from the foreign office, the senior servants and senior officer corps, who rarely disguised their preference for the Arabs. ... "

................................................................................................

The confession mentioned in the title of the chapter was by a guy who took him apart and said he was the one who'd driven the truck with ammunition that killed people in King David Hotel. But he had called, immediately after parking the truck. 

A British officer had heard him, and told him it was impossible. 

"Then he put the phone down. Twenty minutes later it went off. But I tried. Please believe me, I really tried." 

................................................................................................

Forsyth said he did believe him, and asked why he wouldn't tell the crowd in the pub (who were all Israeli). 

Because they'd kill him, he said. 

................................................................................................

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................

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................................................

August 08, 2022 - August 08, 2022. 

................................................

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Of Mice and Moles 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth talks of intelligence agencies, particularly of GCHQ, and the product sharing between them and NSA of US,  explaining that the 'special relationship' refers to that, not to politicians. 

He tells of how British intelligence has an unusual asset, of willing volunteers. 

................................................................................................

Ronnie from intelligence had approached Forsyth about information regarding Biafra. 

"But there was a debate beginning after fifteen months of the Nigeria-Biafra war, and made mire intense by the torrent of hideous pictures showing Biafran babies reduced to barely alive skeletons."

" ... But the argument for a ceasefire lost because of two reasons - the vanity factor and the cowardice factor." 

Ronnie needed a man on ground in Biafra. Forsyth was to be his asset. He was supposed to report via various journals etc, especially on humanitarian crisis. 

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August 08, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

................................................

................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

A Media Explosion 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth gives succinct description of the Nigeria-Biafra war and the background details, of British mendacity in claiming neutral status while arming Nigerian side. 

But for India helping, and Russia protecting India, that'd be repeated in 1971, except butchering in East Bengal had been reported by US top man in Dhaka long before India stepped in - which, also, was because pakis had first attacked India, after months of butchering East Bengal! 

................................................................................................

Forsyth writes about the 'most extraordinary mercy mission world has ever seen', after photographs of babies were published. 

Ordinary people protested, and donated. A Scandinavian priest convinced pilots of all Scandinavian airlines to fly relief planes with baby food and milk powder to Biafra. Nigeria had taken Enugu, so there was a new airstrip, out of a road, and planes flew in from two islands, one Spanish and one Portuguese. 

" ... It was called the Nord Church Air. ... "

Nigerian military junta acquired military planes and weapons to shoot them down, so relief planes had to come in strictly at night. 

................................................................................................

British continued lying. 

One official, Leonard Cheshire VC, a celebrity, sent expressly to confirm them, refused to not go to Biafra, and shocked and disgusted, returned to denounce the official lies. 

" ... He was immediately smeared as a gullible fool. 

"The smearing of every journalist who expressed disgust at what was going on as either a mercenary arms dealer or Ojukwu propagandist was pretty standard, even though a million pictures are hard to dispute."

................................................................................................

" ... what happened could not have happened without the wholesale and covert contribution of the British government. "

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................................................

August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

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................................................................................................

A Useful Certificate 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth tells of accompanying a bunch of mercenaries and Biafrans going behind Nigerian lines to blow up a bridge, with the South African man, Taffy, saying he was the only one who could prove he was sane. 

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................................................................................................

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................................................

August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

Mr Sissons, I Presume 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth recounts accompanying a Biafran party to ambush Nigerians, and hearing a British voice, stopping a Biafran from shooting him dead. 

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................................................

August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Worth a Large One 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

When Forsyth was informed by an SAS operative that he'd had Forsyth in his cross-hairs, but didn't pull the trigger, thus exposing the official lie. 

................................................................................................

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................................................

August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

Bits of Metal 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth describes being under mortar fire. He tells of why he came to loathe them. 

Nigerians emptied the automatic weapons in seconds, he says, and always used automatic settings, aiming high, so trees were hit. 

" ... That apart, ... recruits had trouble hitting a barn door at ten paces. ... " 

Forsyth recounts bring strafed by a MiG, and ends with a time when he outwitted a series of mortar aimed at him. 

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................................................

August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

Of More Mice – and Mercs 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth expounds on 'white' mercenaries hired by Biafra, under the impression - due to their use in Congo - of their bring invincible, which proved a costly mistake. 

Forsyth speaks of individual mercenaries who stayed after the first rout, after most had fled. 

................................................................................................

Armand from Paris had arrived there because the chief of police had, in friendliest way, advised him to leave Paris for a while to avoid arrest. 

Once there, he stayed despite everything, and in fact sought out Irish missionaries and gave his monthly pay to them, for explicitly mentioned purpose of feeding the children. 

When Forsyth discovered it, Armand told him it'd displease him if word got out. 

" ... One did not lightly displease Armand so I kept quiet."

................................................................................................

Forsyth was designated 'Major Atkinson', by General Ojukwu, personally. He'd insisted Forsyth dress appropriately when accompanying Biafran troops, for safety of everyone Biafran, and himself. He carried a small gun in case of capture, to avoid Nigerian atrocities. They hated whites. 

But on return from a sortie, he was recognised by a member of British press, and story was published in UK. 

His protestations about not carrying the weapon, except for self defense on a sortie, were ignored. 

"As for the real mercenaries, I think they are mostly dead now, though when this book comes out I might be in for a couple of surprises."

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................................................

August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Memories 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth speaks of his estimation of war, asserting that there's nothing noble about it except when in a cause of national defense, and by itself it's cruel, coarsening. Worst of all is civil war, he asserts. 

In this, he's agreed with by Margaret Mitchell, who didn't write explicitly of horrors of battles, only of effect on society back home, and in the lasting effect it had, on the gallant, laughing youth who had been Scarlett O'Hara's neighbour's, friends, beaux. 

................................................................................................

Of his memories of when he was reporting from Biafra as a freelance journalist, published in Britain, Europe and US, while he was trying to convey the realities of Biafra to them, he says - 

" ... the most abiding is that of dying children."

................................................................................................

Forsyth describes a lasting memory of a little girl, holding hand of a little brother, who asked him for food, silently. He had none. His memory is of the dignity with which, having understood, she walked away. 

He sat down and wept. 

He remarks on his no one has discussed why this happened. 

" ... For the Whitehall establishment the subject is closed. It is taboo." 

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................................................

August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Flight Out 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth was co-pilot of a plane offered for Ojukwu as he left for exile, by a South African Van Der Merwe, who had arrived volunteering for the purpose but refused politely - 

Ojukwu had had a plane sent by another African nation offering refuge. So the plane was used by the Irish nuns for extraction of children. 

Forsyth had a price put on his head by Nigeria, he states, dead or alive. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth returned to London and had no job, no savings and no residence. He'd been smeared thoroughly, as had been Winston Churchill, the grandson of the 'war leader' as Forsyth terms him - he'd gone out as Times correspondent and written of the horror he saw. 

So Forsyth wrote a novel. (Dogs of War?) 

................................................................................................

No, he began with memories of his Paris years. 

He was later told of how unprecedented his work was. Charles de Gaulle was still alive as Forsyth wrote, and no one else had written about an assassination attempt on a living leader except - or since - Geoffrey Householdt whose gunman didn't go through with it. 

Also unusual, no one else had written an entire novel with an anonymous hero, or with real politicians and police officials in a fictional manhunt. And that Forsyth had an obsession for technical accuracy. 

" ... Still, when you have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, you might as well get on with it."

He finished it in thirty-five days, wrote the title - The Jackal sounded like a documentary on African jungle, so he added The Day Of - and hasn't changed a word since. 

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................................................

August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

An Unwanted Manuscript 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth recalls the routine rejections and the normal practices of publishing houses, travails of both sides and horror stories or rejections. 

He had, after a few rejections, a lucky break in meeting someone socially, whom he cornered next morning in office, and the publisher asked for a three book deal. 

................................................................................................

" ... While in East Berlin I had heard about ... ODESSA but I had thought it was part of the relentless East German propaganda against the Bonn government." 

Funny, was it only a couple of years ago that one finally finished an extremely badly written thesis published and sold as a book - about rat-lines used by and available to nazis, including Vatican and red cross and CIA - which asserted, rather too strenuously, that ODESSA  was a fictional invention, that it never existed, that there was no such organisation, not by that name anyway? 

That was by someone Austrian, or at least graduating from Austria, anyway. It was difficult to read, and postponed several times while one read other books. 

One had to wonder why he denied existence of something, usually impossible to prove, a folly in logic which atheists - and others, such as flat-earthers, creation theorists strenuously denying evolution, monotheists, et al - commit routinely. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth wrote down sketches of The ODESSA File and Dogs Of War, and Howard Harris okayed them, asking for ODESSA first. 

Forsyth didn't know at the time that Howard Harris was Jewish, had been in British intelligence, and had been asked to interrogate a prisoner who had bit on his cynide pill just before Harris arrived - Heinrich Himmler.

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................................................

August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

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................................................................................................

The ODESSA 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth was referred to Simon Wiesenthal for current information on pro-nazi elements, and went to Austria with a letter of introduction. 

Wiesenthal was enthused when he'd heard Forsyth's proposal for the book; they spent days pouring over his research. 

But the key was, Forsyth wanted a character who'd disappeared right there in Germany, not a fugitive across South Atlantic. 

" ... The response of Herr Wiesenthal was that the right choice might be difficult, not because there were so few but because there were thousands of them." 

................................................................................................

Forsyth asserts here, presumably from information provided by Wiesenthal, that there were two organisation's, Kameradenschaft or Comradeship, and ODESSA, which, Forsyth asserts emphatically, very much did exist - at least, it did then! 

So why the lie by the Austrian doctoral student stressed so repeatedly in his dissertation, and why did he get a doctorate in Austria for it? 

Or was that claim, about the Book being a doctoral dissertation, a lie? 

................................................................................................

Forsyth explained the character he had in mind, and Simon Wiesenthal said he had a dozen real ones that fit the description. They poured over the files, and settled on Edouard Roschmann, The Butcher Of Riga. 

Forsyth learned of a single US army jeep in spring of 1945 discovering the entire SS files in process of bring burnt by a bunch of them, and had saved it; only 2 to 3 percent had been consumed until then by flames, the rest was saved and - Forsyth states - rest was in US custody in West Berlin, at least until this book was published, or at least until he discovered the fact while with Simon Wiesenthal. 

This saved collection in care of US contained the entire files on Edouard Roschmann. 

"The real irony was that I could say anything I wanted about this monster. Wherever he was, he was hardly likely to come out of hiding to sue." 

................................................................................................

Forsyth thought that Simon Wiesenthal's 

" ... conviction  that German officialdom was comprehensively penetrated by a generation steeped in either participation in, or sympathy for, what had happened between 1933 and 1945 might be just paranoia, but it was nothing of the sort. It all came down to the issue of which generation. 

"A fanatical Nazi aged twenty-five at the end of the war would have been born around 1920. He would have been steeped in Nazi education from age thirteen onwards and almostcertainlya memberof Hitler Youth fromthat age. He could well have been mass murderer by twenty-five."

By the time of his research, Forsyth saw, such a man would be fifty-one or two; that is, at the prime of life and a high ranking official in any one of a hundred positions. 

"Nor would I receive obstruction s only from wanted criminals. ... "

Behind them was a guilty army of bureaucrats, without whose co-operation - organizational flair, as Forsyth terms the specific skill necessary, and accorded when asked - holocaust couldn't have happened. 

"This was the generation that now ran Germany ... "

................................................................................................

Forsyth expounds on the difficulty that Konrad Adenauer, the anti-nazi German Chancellor had had in 1949. If he'd banned all Myers of nazi organisation's, he couldn't have run the country. So he cut a 'Faustian pact' as Forsyth terms it, and - as Simon Wiesenthal told Forsyth - 

" ... every branch of public function was impregnated with the bureaucrats who had not pulled the trigger but helped those who did. Research, he said, was not a question of open hostility but of closed doors. ... "

Simon Wiesenthal also pointed him towards groups who believed in fourth Reich arriving in future, whose meetings Forsyth could attend with his German language proficiency. 

Forsyth did. 

................................................................................................

" ... Communists of the East, behind the Iron Curtain, offered no help whatsoever. ..."

Forsyth found most of lawyers in Hamburg were unwilling to talk, but began to find some, either younger or those who'd been anti-nazi and lived through it; they were willing to talk, but furtively, in dark corners of pubs, once convinced that Forsyth was a British investigative reporter. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth found a Jew in Vienna who had lived in Riga, and been on the death March west when Russia advanced. His wife said he never talked of it, and wouldn't, but he did, for twenty hours, Forsyth writes - he began to correct as Forsyth told him the story as he'd sketched it. Salomon Tauber was only shifted to Hamburg from Vienna by Forsyth, as he puts it; the testimony in the book is what he heard in Vienna, detail by detail, as Forsyth terms it. 

The investigative trail of Peter Miller of The ODESSA File matches his own, Forsyth writes. 

................................................................................................

Forsyth recounts the quixotic twist as he terms it, of the ODESSA File story. 

When the film came, a viewer in a hall on coast south of Buenos Aires, realised that the real Edouard Roschmann, thinking he was safe, had reverted to his own name and was living down the street. He denounced him. 

Argentina arrested him, and West Germany wanted him extradited. Roschmann, out on bail, ran to Paraguay to escape. He waited at border for the ferry across river. 

Witnesses said he had a heart attack in middle of the river and was dead before he hit the deck. 

................................................................................................

On Paraguay bank, the official refused to take charge of the body on ground that it belonged to Argentina. 

The cadaver went back and forth four times, before detectives arrived from Vienna to identify it, which was possible due to dental records and fingerprints courtesy a US jeep in Bavaria. Proof positive was established, courtesy two missing toes, amputated when he'd fled through the border snows from British custody. 

Ferry refused to take the body back, so Paraguay buried it in an unmarked grave by the river. 

................................................................................................

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................................................

August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

Dogs of War 

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

Forsyth talks about the research and genesis of this book, and the weird fact that subsequently, Bob Denard's mercenaries who took Comoros Island in Mozambique Channel, imitating the action were carrying copies if the book in French 

" ... so that they could find out what they were supposed to do next. Bob Denard succeeded because he came by sea.

"In 1981 South African mercenary Mike Hoare tried the same trick on the Seychelles, but he failed because he came by air."

................................................................................................

Forsyth tells the story of his research into technical details, such as weapons and acquisition thereof. He was referred to Otto X in Hamburg, and used the name of the South African pilot Merwe, with forged papers for evidence. He learned about details such as end user certificates and how to get false ones. 

But then, Forsyth tells, one morning Otto happened to glance at his face on the back cover of a German copy of The Day Of The Jackal, which had fallen inside the display window of a bookshop. 

Forsyth was warned by a telephone call to his hotel room by an unidentified voice with a British accent that they were coming for him; he left without luggage, using back stairs and ran to the station and into a train, jumping in at the window as it was moving. It was to Amsterdam, and he stayed with his uncle in Scheveningen  who got him onto a merchant ship to Flushing. 

Subsequently he wrote the book, finishing his three book deal. 

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August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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................................................................................................

An Unusual Dinner 

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Forsyth tells about taking Edward Fox to meet Armand, and being mobbed by streetwalkers, who were offering freebies to the filmstar. He didn't speak French more than minimal, and Forsyth didn't translate then, until they were in their seventies. 

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August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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Perfect Joy 

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Forsyth was asked, in a meeting at a safe house, to go into Germany as himself, as a tourist, and bring something out. 

It was to be a package swap, meeting a Russian colonel in Dresden, by car so the package out would be safe from prying eyes and hands. 

Perfect Joy is re-entering the west, after having gone into East Germany to swap the packages, to sum up Forsyth. 

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August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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Friends and Opponents 

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Forsyth describes his promotion tour for his fourth book, The Devil's Alternative. 

He liked Mauritius, diving and fishing, apart from 'being taken care of' in Hong Kong, where he learned of facts behind the stories told to general public regarding British relations with China and Kuomintang. 

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August 09, 2022 - August 09, 2022. 

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Five Years in Ireland 

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Forsyth lived in Ireland after a year in Spain, avoiding 80% tax in UK, and returned because his Irish wife feared for the babies. 

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August 09, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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A Neat Trick 

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Forsyth learned to parachute because he was bored. 

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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The Amazing Mister Moon 

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About deserts - of sand and of snow - and mountains, sky, and ocean. He talks of fishing off Mauritius coast. 

" ... Indian Ocean cyclones take no prisoners."

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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Back to Zero – Start Again 

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Forsyth was among those swindled by Roger Levitt, as he learned in 1990. 

" ... there was only one thing for it. That was, at the age of fifty, to write a series of more novels and make it all back. So I did."

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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The Passing of Humpy 

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About a finch from Africa, blown off course and lost. 

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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A Very Burning Question 

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About his 'patrolling' South Africa and Rhodesia; about racists, Dutch Reformed Church and apartheid. 

About Forsyth sent by British intelligence to see Botha. 

Forsyth was supposed to find out about the six atom bombs that South Africa had. 

Botha knew Forsyth was a cover for British intelligence. 

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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From Maiko to Monks 

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About the world of geisha in Kyoto, about sake, and about monastery at Koyasan in Osaka. 

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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A Very Untidy Coup 

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Forsyth went for research for The Cobra, to Guinea-Bissau amongst other places. 

It so happened that, as his plane took off in Lisbon, there was a coup in Guinea-Bissau. 

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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Peace Hotel and Tracers 

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Forsyth tells about research for The Kill List. 

Forsyth wrote of this visit before 2013, at any rate after 2000, which was certainly after the Somalia fracas of attacking US facilities; one assumes so, because The Kill List was published in 2013, and presumably Forsyth didn't write it before and sit on it for over a decade. 

Google maps show locations of the latter a bit different from Forsyth's description, which, one infers, might be due to a renovation of the airport, or a newly built airport, at least a new runway.  

Couldn't be that the US embassy, shown now in Google maps as closed, moved after he wrote, could it? 

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Forsyth speaks of various parts of the city, inner city around the airport being 'white', who he says are hated by Somali. 

" ... But many jihadidts fanatics are also inside the cordon. That apart, there are the gangs. There are no police - their lifespan would be too short. ... "

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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Dream Come True 

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Forsyth finally flew a Spitfire. 

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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Picture Section 

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Toddler of three, cute, sets the tone. That's only the beginning. 

Pictures then on continue amazing one with reminders from what one just finished reading, like meeting unexpected characters from one's past. 

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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Picture Acknowledgements 

About the Author 

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A tad anti-climactic, this bit, after reading his own account at length!

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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Also by Frederick Forsyth 

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THE DAY OF THE JACKAL 

THE ODESSA FILE 

THE DOGS OF WAR 

THE SHEPHERD 

THE DEVIL’S ALTERNATIVE 

NO COMEBACKS 

THE FOURTH PROTOCOL 

THE NEGOTIATOR 

THE DECEIVER 

THE FIST OF GOD 

ICON 

THE PHANTOM OF MANHATTAN 

THE VETERAN 

AVENGER 

THE AFGHAN 

THE COBRA 

THE KILL LIST 

Non-fiction 

THE BIAFRA STORY 

EMEKA

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August 10, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

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Copyright

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January 07, 2022 - August 05, 2022

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January 09, 2022 - April 11, 2022 - 

April 19, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

Purchased April 19, 2022. 

Kindle Edition, 368 pages

Published September 10th 2015 

by Transworld Digital 

(first published September 8th 2015)

ASIN:- B00Y78X92C

................................................

................................................

The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue Kindle Edition

by Frederick Forsyth (Author)  

Format: Kindle Edition

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00Y78X92C

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Transworld Digital; 1st edition (10 September 2015)

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4897521306

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Contents 

Cover 

About the Book 

Title Page 

Dedication 

Preface 

Whispered Words 

A Large Jar of Talc 

A Little Boy’s Dream 

Learning French 

Learning German 

Back to Germany 

Languages 

A Step Nearer to the Stars 

A Long Hike 

A Silly Revenge 

A Gentleman of Clare 

Learning Spanish 

Tangier and Commandos 

Leopard-skin Solution 

‘I’m Jesus Christ’ 

Vampire 

King’s Lynn 

Fleet Street 

Paris Aflame 

Big Brother 

The Death of Kennedy 

Helping Out the Cousins 

Outbreak of War 

Headlights 

Beer with a Camp Guard 

A Very Unwise Choice 

A Mistake with Auntie 

A Day with the Arrows 

A Taste of Africa 

End of Career 

Farewell, Auntie 

Living History 

Eilat 

Jerusalem 

Confession 

Of Mice and Moles 

A Media Explosion 

A Useful Certificate 

Mr Sissons, I Presume 

Worth a Large One 

Bits of Metal 

Of More Mice – and Mercs 

Memories 

Flight Out 

An Unwanted Manuscript 

The ODESSA 

Dogs of War 

An Unusual Dinner 

Perfect Joy 

Friends and Opponents 

Five Years in Ireland 

A Neat Trick 

The Amazing Mister Moon 

Back to Zero – Start Again 

The Passing of Humpy 

A Very Burning Question 

From Maiko to Monks 

A Very Untidy Coup 

Peace Hotel and Tracers 

Dream Come True 

Picture Section 

Picture Acknowledgements 

About the Author 

Also by Frederick Forsyth 

Copyright

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................................................

................................................

January 09, 2022 - April 11, 2022 - April 19, 2022 - 

August 05, 2022 - 08/08/2022 - 

August 08, 2022 - August 10, 2022. 

Purchased April 19, 2022. 

Kindle Edition, 368 pages

Published September 10th 2015 

by Transworld Digital 

(first published September 8th 2015)

ASIN:- B00Y78X92C

................................................

................................................

The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue Kindle Edition

by Frederick Forsyth (Author)  

Format: Kindle Edition

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00Y78X92C

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Transworld Digital; 1st edition (10 September 2015)

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

................................................................................................

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4897521306

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................................................................................................

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