PUBLISHER'S Note: Frederick Forsyth, the British writer covered the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War as a journalist. He apparently reported from the Biafran perspectives, as he reported from inside Biafra. He became very close to the Biafran leader Emeka Odimegwu-Ojukwu, and somehow became his confidante and friend. Forsyth wrote two books on the war: Biafra, 1969 and Emeka, 1982, a biographer of the Biafran leader. Forsyth protrayed himself as a friend of Ojukwu and Biafra, but he was really a spy for M16, the British foreign secret service which was advising the British Govt how to quickly snuff life out of the young Republic. Even when Rolf Steiner, one of the mercenaries on Biafra's side detected him, Ojukwu overruled Steiner! Interesting.....
In His Memoir, Fredrick Forsythe Reveals He Spied for MI6 During Nigerian Civil War
He is known today as the author of peerless spy thrillers, but his expertise was hard won. In extracts from his memoirs, Frederick Forsyth reveals how he worked for the MI6 to spy on the Biafran government during the Nigerian Civil War
Most people have a problem with the various organs of the British intelligence community, typified by a seeming inability to work out which is which.
There are three main organs. The least-mentioned is the biggest: Government Communications Headquarters, (GCHQ) based in a vast doughnut-shaped complex outside Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Its task is mainly signals intelligence.
Alongside GCHQ is the Security Service or MI5. Its task is in-country security against foreign espionage, foreign and domestic terrorism and home-grown treachery.
The one regarded as the more glamorous is the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), usually referred to by a title it renounced years ago as MI6. Those inside the SIS call it the Office; those outside use the phrase the Firm, and the staffers of the Firm are the Friends. Not to be confused with the CIA, which is the Agency or the Company, its staff are the Cousins.
There is often confusion between the Secret Service and the Security Service, but everyone remotely concerned is universally described by those on the outside with another misnomer, that of “spy”. The true spy is almost certainly a foreigner employed deep inside the clandestine fabric of his own country who is prepared to abstract his country’s covert information and hand it over to his real employers.
The go-between is called an “asset” and the full-time employee who runs him is his “handler”. There is the relatively new nomenclature of “spook” but I never heard the word “spy” used within that world. Only newspapers and television use it, usually wrongly.
In late 1968 I was sought out by a member of the Firm called Ronnie. He made no bones about what he was and we hit it off. There are times in your life when you meet someone and in short order decide that he is a thoroughly decent fellow and you can trust him. If you are ever deceived in this later, it is like a hot dagger.
Ronnie was an orientalist with good Mandarin but to his bewilderment had been made head of the Africa desk. He admitted he knew little about Africa and less about what was really going on inside Biafra, the breakaway eastern region of Nigeria that was at war with the central government.
What he did know was that I had reported from Biafra for the BBC — and had resigned after it banned me from going back there for refusing to toe the British Establishment’s dishonest official line on the conflict. Since then I had been reporting on the war as a freelance. Before first going to Biafra, I had been given a minutely detailed briefing by a man from the West African Service of Bush House, the famed BBC World Service, the official voice of Britain.
The east, he said, was the homeland overwhelmingly of the Ibo people, whose collective character was long-term troublesome. On a spurious basis and led by the military governor of the region, a self-serving rogue called Colonel Emeka Ojukwu, they had declared secession from the very fine republic of Nigeria. Its head of state, the marvellous Colonel Yakubu Gowon, had no choice but to use the federal army to reconquer the east, which was styling itself the Republic of Biafra.
When I reached Enugu, the Biafran capital, and recounted this briefing to the British deputy high commissioner, Jim Parker, who was stationed there and was steeped in knowledge of the country, he listened grim-faced and then put his face in his hands.
The reason became clear as he explained to me what was really going on. Every word I had been given was complete and utter garbage, but it was the official view of Harold Wilson’s government. When I subsequently reported the truth back to London, I was accused of bias.
By the time Ronnie approached me, after 15 months of the Nigeria-Biafra conflict, the Nigerian army was being quietly equipped with torrents of British weaponry, shipped out covertly by the Wilson government, which was assuring one and all that it was neutral.
But a debate was beginning and was made more intense by the torrent of hideous pictures showing Biafran babies reduced to barely alive skeletons. Public marches were starting in London; notable figures were protesting.
The debate might be at a very high level and in complete secrecy but the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), which backed the Nigerian government, was fighting a rearguard action for the minds of the vacillating Wilson government.
I think Ronnie and I spent about 20 hours over several days while I explained how bad things were: children were now dying like flies. Had I not trusted his word, I would never have agreed to what came next. 
THE task of SIS is foreign information-gathering and its presence is worldwide, with a “station” somewhere in almost all British embassies and sometimes consulates. Basically, it seeks to discover and forewarn.
Politicians are wont to sneer when in opposition but drool with pleasure when, in office, they are taken to a quiet room to explained to them what is really going on rather than what they thought was going on.
Politicians loathe being taken by surprise, but forewarning depends on knowing what the bad people are planning, are intending or have in mind. As that is rarely given away, it has to be discovered clandestinely. Hence the espionage.
This broadly devolves into three categories: electronic intelligence or Elint, the scouring of the surface of the world with look-down cameras in satellites, drones or warplanes; signals intelligence, Sigint, intercepting everything the bad people say to each other even when they think they have absolute privacy; and Humint, or human intelligence-gathering.
Britain has never been able to compete with the vast budgets of the United States and has no space programme, but it brings to the table a worthwhile contribution in Humint. Infiltrating an agent into the heart of a tricky situation can produce more product than all the gizmos could ever see or hear. It is the speciality of the SIS.
Considering the 60 million-plus population of the UK and the size of its gross national product, it has always had a smaller SIS than almost any other developed nation in the world — and thus cheaper. The British taxpayer is far from shortchanged. There is a quixotic reason for this. Unlike all other agencies, the Firm has always been able to rely on an ad hoc army of volunteers prepared to help out if asked nicely.
They come from a vast array of professions that cause them to travel a bit. They may agree while on a foreign visit for business purposes to pick up a package, deliver a letter to a hole in a tree, make a payment or just keep their eyes and ears open and undergo a cheerful debriefing when they get home. It appears a bit weird but it seems to work.
This is because the best “cover” in the world is no cover at all but the truth. Thus if Mr Farnsbarns really is going to a trade fair to sell his paper clips, he might just slip into a phone booth, remove a letter from the pages of the telephone directory and bring it home in an invisible slit in a specially prepared briefcase.
That is where the economics comes in: it is not done for money but just to help “the old country”. Few nations can match that.
Technically the SIS comes under the FCO but is entitled to disagree in certain circumstances, specifically if it has factual information rather than mere opinion. Ronnie’s problem was that he had no specific eyes-on information from the heart of Biafra to offset the assurances coming through from Lagos to the effect that the horrors were grossly exaggerated and the war would in any case be over in a very short time.
I did what I did to try to influence the Whitehall argument that continued intermittently for the next 15 months until the final crushing of Biafra with 1 million dead children. The argument was between: “Prime minister, this cannot be allowed to go on. The human cost is simply too high. We should reconsider our policy. We should use all our influence to urge a ceasefire, a peace conference and a political solution.”
And: “Prime minister, I can assure you the media reports are as usual sensationalist and grossly exaggerated. We have information that the rebel regime is very close to collapse. The sooner it does, the sooner we can get columns of relief food into the rebel territory. Meanwhile we urge you to stick with the hitherto agreed policy and even increase the support for the federal government.”
Neither Ronnie nor I could know in October 1968 how long there was to go nor how many more were to die. But the argument for a ceasefire lost for two reasons: the vanity factor and the cowardice factor.
It is said that if a tigress sees her cubs endangered she will fight with deranged passion to defend them. But her dedication pales into submission compared with the fury with which senior civil servants, and most notably those of the FCO, will defend the fiction that they cauld not have made a mistake.
The cowardice applied as usual to the politicians, Wilson and his foreign secretary, Michael Stewart. Basically it was: “Prime minister, if you concede to the ‘reconsidered’ argument, you would have to admit that for 15 months, your government has made a mistake. How then do you reply to the media question, ‘How can you explain to the public the quarter-million children dead so far?’ ” At that point, the response from Wilson and Stewart was: “Very well, do what you feel you must. But be hurry.”
So the military, advisory, diplomatic and propaganda help to the Lagos dictatorship quietly increased. Ronnie convinced me that the Firm might be able to win the argument if it could rebut the charge of media exaggeration with eyes-on evidence that the situation was as reported or worse.
But to do that, he needed an asset deep inside the, Biafran enclave, what he termed ‘someone in on the ground’. When I left for the return to the rainforest, he had one.
The job was threefold. To report, through the various newspapers and magazines that had accepted me as a “stringer” (a local correspondent on a non-staff basis) the military war as it crawled on its way.
To use the same outlets to portray the humanitarian situation, the disaster among the children dying of kwashiorkor (protein deficiency) and the church-based efforts to keep them alive with an air bridge of illicit mercy flights bringing in relief food donated by the rest of the world.
The third task was to keep Ronnie informed of things that could not, for various reasons, emerge in the media.
Just once, things became sticky when a rumour spread that I was working for London. Had the suspicion developed, my situation might have become thoroughly tiresome.
I discovered the source was a German mercenary, Rolf Steiner, with whom I had never been on the best of terms. He was ex-Deutsches Jungvolk (a sort of Hitler youth), ex-Foreign Legion and was the leader of a small group of white mercenaries working for the Biafrans. He postured and paraded around in his confiscated American limousine, but I never recall him going into combat. There was nothing for it but to have a word in the right ear. Two nights later, yelling and screaming, not a happy camper, with his hands roped behind him, Steiner was bundled onto a plane and never returned.
A DOZEN years after the Biafra war I found myself in a London bar with a long-term veteran of the SAS regiment. Out of the blue he remarked: “You owe me a large one.” If someone like that tells you he is owed a drink, do not argue. Just go to the bar and buy him a double. So I did. When he had taken a deep draught I asked him why.
“Because,” he said, “I once had your head in the cross-hairs of my scope sight and I didn’t pull the trigger.”
I reckoned that merited an entire bottle. It also confirmed something I had long suspected. The Special Air Service specialises (among many other things) in deep penetration into target territory, information-gathering and withdrawal unseen.
Rumours had long persisted that part of London’s extensive help to Lagos had been the presence of our special forces. Political denial had always been a bit too shrill. The only time my contentedly sipping bar friend could have seen me was deep inside Biafra.
0 Comments