Frederick Forsyth, Bestselling Author Of "The Day Of The Jackal" And "War Dogs," Has Died

• 9.06.2025, 21:08

The former MI6 agent has passed away at the age of 86.

British author Frederick Forsyth, best-selling thriller writer and former MI6 agent, has died, writes The Guardian.

He died at the age of 86 after a brief illness.

Forsyth was the author of such novels as "The Day of the Jackal," "The Odessa Files" and "War Dogs." All three have been screened.

The series of novels has sold more than 75 million copies worldwide, and he was awarded an Order of the British Empire in 1997, winner of the Diamond Dagger Award by the British Crime Writers' Association.

Forsyth was born in 1938 in Ashford, Kent. He was a Reuters reporter and was working in Paris in 1961 during the attempted assassination of General Charles de Gaulle, president of the French Republic, after he advocated Algerian independence. The attempted assassination of de Gaulle formed the basis of the novel The Day of the Jackal. It is ranked

in the "100 best detective novels of all time" by the British Crime Writers Association.

Forsyth spent some time in East Germany, then joined the BBC. In 1967 he was sent to Nigeria to cover the civil war. Because of the reporting, the BBC accused Forsyth of bias because of his support for the rebels and recalled him to London, the writer recalled. In 1968, he quit and returned to Nigeria as a freelance reporter. Then he began working for MI6. Although Forsyth always denied he was a spy, in his 2015 autobiography, The Outsider, he admitted to being an intelligence "asset" for more than 20 years.