The English writer Frederick Forsyth who died recently had a close association with the civil war fought in Nigeria between federal and secessionist protagonists. At first, he started off as an observing journalist, covering the conflict as he had done Cold War politics as a Reuters news reporter earlier in the 1960s. His coverage of the famous attempt on the life of French President Charles de Gaulle at Petit-Clamart in 1962 by the renegade O.A.S. inspired his breakthrough novel The Day of the Jackal. It was initially thought that a subsequent novel The Dogs of War, which was published in 1974, was a composite of his observations of European mercenaries he had encountered as a freelance reporter in Biafra. But the suicide of a former mercenary four years later after a siege in London’s East End unearthed an extraordinary story which provided a more accurate source of the book’s inspiration. This was that Forsyth had financed an attempt to overthrow an African dictator through a mercenary force. Moreover, the plot of the novel appeared to insinuate the extraordinary motive of resurrecting the fallen state of Biafra on an island in the Gulf of Guinea and replacing the overthrown dictator with Biafra’s exiled leader Chukwuemeka Ojukwu.
The Siege
The discovery of Frederick Forsyth’s alleged role in masterminding a plot to overthrow the government of Francisco Marcias Nguema, the dictator of the West Central African state of Equatorial Guinea, began on the Saturday afternoon of March 11th, 1978. Two nine-year-old girls had been invited to play a game of “truth or dare” in a small bedsitter in Goldsmith Row in the East End district of Bethnal Green. While inside the girls had been horrified to have seen a gun. They reported this to the police who sent two officers to interview the tenant, 43-year-old Alan Murphy.
Detective Constables Ernie Pawley and Russell Dunlop were walking up Roman Road in the company of the girls when Murphy was spotted in a car. They approached him and told him they wanted to search his flat. Murphy consented and was cooperative until Dunlop began rummaging through a bottom drawer. He placed his left hand on Dunlop’s shoulder and said: “This is far enough.” Dunlop looked up to find Murphy pointing a Mauser pistol at his head.
Both constables immediately sought to reason with Murphy. Dunlop, who was on one knee, asked Murphy of he could sit on the floor, but Murphy chillingly replied: “No, this is it. This is the end. I’m going to kill you and, then him, then I will probably kill myself.”
Thirty seconds elapsed when as Murphy began to pull back the gun catch, Pawley, who was standing three feet away, dived at him. Murphy adjusted himself and at point blank range fired at Pawley, injuring him in the chest. Dunlop scrambled out of the room as Murphy fired several shots which missed. He then turned his attention to Pawley who had crumpled to the floor. He shot once but missed and the heavily bleeding Pawley was able to crawl his way out of the room, tumbling down a set of stairs to make good his escape. Murphy continued firing at them and miraculously missed.
Dunlop reported the incident and within minutes the road was cordoned off and a siege commenced by 50 policemen who were backed by the anti-terrorist squad who brought with them a large quantity of heavy artillery. But there was no further shooting. Nor was the standard tactic of police calling for the surrender of the gunman through a loudhailer. More than an hour passed when a gunshot was heard. The police burst in and found Murphy lying in a pool of blood. He had shot himself in the heart.
The Anatomy of a Coup Plot
In the ensuing investigation the police discovered that Murphy, known locally as a delivery driver and described by one neighbour as “very quiet and softly spoken”, had been a professional mercenary. He had served as a “dog of war” in several theatres which included the Congo and Biafra.
While as was expected, the police found a cache of guns and ammunition in the bedsit, it was the unearthing of a trove of documents which included a diary of Murphy’s mercenary exploits in Africa and many letters, which startled. One of the letters from Forsyth revealed the connection between Forsyth and a coup plot which had germinated in 1972.
But while the plot was centred on engineering the overthrow of the Nguema regime in Equatorial Guinea, its motivation led back to Forsyth’s association with the short-lived secessionist Republic of Biafra.
Forsyth was sent by the BBC to cover the troubles in Nigeria which led to the secession of the Eastern region of the country under the leadership of the region’s military governor Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu. It is claimed that the BBC found Forsyth’s reporting to be biased towards the secessionist side, and he was recalled to London. Soon after, Forsythe resigned his position and returned to Biafra as a freelance journalist.
While in Biafra Forsyth became close to Ojukwu and also got to know many of the mercenaries who fought for the Biafran’s including Rolf Steiner, the German ex-French Foreign Legionnaire who commanded the Biafran 4th Commando Brigade. Steiner’s observations of Forsyth made him reach the conclusion that Forsyth was working for the British state. He said the following in an interview:
Forsyth was clever and discreet. He kept his distance from visiting colleagues. He went wherever Ojukwu went and was familiar with all of Biafra’s political and military problems.
Steiner proved to be correct. In 2015, Forsyth admitted that he had been an “asset” of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, from 1968 to 1988. While British foreign policy outwardly supported the Federal side, it was keeping a close look at the Biafran side whose initial territory covered much of Nigeria’s oil-rich areas. Forsyth proselytised the Biafra cause through newspaper articles, television interviews and a Penguin book titled The Biafra Story, which was published in June 1969, seven months before the collapse of Biafra.
But Biafra’s capitulation apparently failed to dampen Forsyth’s hope for a revived Biafran state. A few short months after his return from Biafra in 1970, Forsyth was in a small flat in Camden, already plotting the coup which he hoped would provide a new homeland for the Biafrans. Along with Alexander Ramsay Gay, a Scottish bank clerk turned mercenary who he had met in Biafra, he decided that the designated homeland would be the island of Fernando Po, a part of Equatorial Guinea which Nguema based himself.
Fernando Po (now Bioko), which is 100 kilometres off the coast of Nigeria, had functioned as a staging point for flights to and from Biafra. It also had a large population of Igbos, the dominant ethnic group of Biafra, who since the 1920s when it was under Spanish colonial control had come to the island as contract labour on its coffee, cocoa and timber plantations.
The major hurdle which Forsyth and Gay faced, that of finance, was removed when sales of The Day of The Jackal made Forsyth a millionaire. In Spring of 1972, Forsyth requested that Gay embark for Fernando Po on a reconnoitring mission. Gay obtained a visa to Cameroon and flew to the island’s capital Santa Isabel (now Malabo) where he explored possible landing sites and scrutinised the amount of defences around what was often referred to as Nguema’s palace, but which in fact was the old Spanish colonial governor’s mansion.
When he got back to Forsyth, by now a tax exile who divided his residences between Ireland and Spain, Gay informed him that a dozen mercenaries backed by 40 to 50 former Biafran soldiers could take the island. The operation he estimated would cost approximately $80,000. Gay then proceeded to sorting out the preliminaries: acquiring false passports, opening bank accounts, contriving fake end-user’s certificates and searching for arms dealers. Gay had two passports issued in the names of Greaves and Muir. They were based on death certificates in the style that Forsyth had written into the storyline of The Day of the Jackal. He used the name Henry George Greaves to open a bank account number 47009081/93 at the Kreditbank, Ostend.
Gay
then proceeded to Hamburg where an arms dealer agreed to supply arms including
Belgian-made automatic rifles, light machine guns, mortars, bazookas and other
arms which would be released to him in Spain by an official of the Spanish
Ministry of Defence who was bribed. The end-user certificate which indicated
that the arms were destined for Iraq was signed by an Iraqi diplomat who was
also bribed. Gay paid the arms dealer a deposit of 120,000 Deutschmarks
($32,000) as the first of several instalments. He also left a telephone number
for his principal, named as “Mr. Van Cleef” whom the arms dealer could contact
in case of any problem. “Van Cleef” was the pseudonym for Forsyth who was
identified in Murphy’s diary as having been present at meetings with the arms
dealer in Hamburg.
Gay’s next objective was to bring together a group of gunmen, a sea vessel and a workable plan. He hired 13 mercenaries: nine French and Belgian; three Englishmen and a Hungarian. One of the Englishmen was Murphy. A converted 64-foot fishing vessel named the Albatross was found in the Spanish resort of Fuengirola and Gay chartered it for three months at a cost of $3,200 per month. The reason given to the owner was that it was to be used for an oil survey expedition off the coast of Africa.
The chronology of the plan to seize the island would, Gay envisioned, start in the middle of December when the arms would be sent from Madrid to Malaga where they would be loaded onto the Albatross. And after obtaining further supplies and equipment at Gibraltar, it would sail on to the Cape Verde Islands where fresh food and water would be purchased. Then it would journey around West Africa and stop at Cotonou, Dahomey (now Republique de Benin), the embarkation point of the 50 Biafran veterans. From here the vessel would time its arrival at Fernando Po for the dead of night.
The amphibious assault, consisting of all the mercenaries and half of the Biafrans, would proceed to the landing site on motorised dinghies with silent motors. The force would then scale a low cliff before heading to the president’s mansion where the presidential guard would be eliminated. Once inner sanctum of the mansion was penetrated, Nguema was to be assassinated. The communique announcing the overthrow of Don Francisco Marcias would express regret at either his “accidental death” or his “suicide.”
Success would guarantee a bonus payment of $30,000. This would partly compensate for a “no looting” policy, but Gay planned to ransom the contents of the Soviet embassy to the CIA for one million dollars.
But things did not go to plan.
Although advised to keep a low profile, the mercenaries, who had begun to arrive in southern Spain in late October 1972, stood out from the usual crowd of tourists. It was reported that one of the mercenaries was spotted walking around the deck of the Albatross while dressed in military fatigues. Suspicions regarding the true nature of the enterprise were raised by the cargo being loaded which included three landing craft, over 10,000 litres of diesel fuel, and 75 army uniforms. Weaponry such as light machine guns, bazookas and mortars, along with ten tons of ammunition were smuggled from Yugoslavia to the port of Valencia where they were stored in a dockside warehouse before being transferred to Las Palmas in the Canary Island where the cargo would be loaded onto the Albatross.
Then in the second week of December, Gay’s plans began to unravel. The corrupt Spanish official refused to issue the arms export licence because the Albatross was a private, wooden-hulled craft and not a freighter. So when the vessel arrived at Malaga on December 16th, 1972, there were no arms to load. Also, the arms dealer who had bribed the Spaniard refused to refund Forsyth’s down payment.
Not giving up, Gay arranged for the Albatross to sail down to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands while he travelled to Hamburg to arrange for the arms to leave Spain by another route so that the Albatross could be loaded at sea. But this was to no avail. He returned to the Canaries on January 15th, 1973, and informed the mercenaries that the operation would be abandoned for the time being. The next day, orders were sent from Madrid to the Policia Canaria to seize the Albatross and arrest all the mercenaries on board.
The unravelling of the mission had been the handiwork of the British Special Branch, the famed counter-terrorism unit which had been formed in 1883. Its officers had been tracking Gay’s activities because they were fearful that the arms shipment he had been arranging was destined for one of the paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. When they discovered its actual purpose, they tipped off their Spanish counterparts.
The Spanish authorities initially based the arrests on drugs offences which did not stick. Disinterested in mounting an investigation into the coup plot, they decided to put each mercenary on a plane flight back to his homeland. Gay was questioned by Spain’s equivalent of the Special Branch but allowed to leave for Paris.
The operation had ended before it begun.
The Dogs of War and Biafra
In April 1972, Forsyth told the London Evening Standard that he would be flying off to “West Africa and then on to South Africa to research for his new thriller The Dogs of War”. The paper reported that like his two previous novels, it would be “part documentary based on his journalistic experiences, and part fictional.” The reference to his journalistic experiences pointed to a Nigerian subtext, and he reflected this when remarking that “I don’t think that I would be exactly welcome in Lagos.”
It was around this time that Gay embarked on his reconnoitring mission to Fernando Po and it is likely that Forsyth was referring to him as much as to himself when speaking of his impending travels. He had delivered the manuscript to his publisher in the first months of 1973, and the plot of the resulting book was identical to that of the planned anti-Nguema mission, apart, that is. from Forsyth turning its failure into a success.
When the book was published, both Forsyth and his publishers stressed that the story was about the world of illegal arms and mercenaries and that his work in Biafra had brought him into contact with the sort of characters portrayed in the book. He had evidently begun work on the book while the operation was being planned, and it is clear that the “Republic of Zangaro” was a representation of Fernando Po and “President Jean Kimba” the incarnation of Marcias Nguema.
But what of the connection to the resurrecting of Biafra?
The beginning of the novel clearly draws upon the fall of Biafra with a group of mercenaries saying their goodbyes to a general who has just lost a war in West Africa and is flying into exile with a number of his acolytes. This mirrored the flight into exile of Ojukwu, a Lieutenant Colonel for most of the war, who was promoted to “General of the People’s Army” in May 1969. On January 9th, 1970, Ojukwu and a few others including his army chief Alexander Madiebo embarked on a plane at Uli Airport destined for the Ivory Coast.
The book ends with the character “Dr. Okoye”, an academic with an Igbo name who happens to be the representative of “The General”, assuming power in “Zangaro”. Whereas the motivation for effecting regime change in this fictional country is for the coup’s sponsors to take control of Zangaro’s valuable platinum reserves, the economic benefits of taking over Fernando Po (and the impoverished Equatorial Guinea) had no discernible long-term benefit. The country was more than a decade away from the discovery of oil deposits.
And while the plan set out by Gay clearly provided for Nguema’s assassination, no mention was explicitly made as to who would succeed him. The Sunday Times which wrote a detailed exposé pressed the issue that Ojukwu was the person whom Forsyth intended to install as the ruler of Fernando Po if the operation had succeeded.
What followed were a series of adamant denials. Charles Clark, the managing director of the book’s publisher Hutchinson’s responded by saying that a source who he could not name assured him that if there had been a plot, Ojukwu had not been involved in it and that he would have “strongly disapproved” of it. Forsyth’s London-based solicitors, Harbottle and Lewis wrote to the Sunday Times -they claimed on Ojukwu’s behalf- to state that Ojukwu strongly denied that he “inspired or was the intended beneficiary” of “the activities of a group of mercenaries” in a certain West African country.
It should ne noted however, that after Gay was given a suspended sentence for the illegal possession of arms and munitions at a November 1973 trial in which Forsyth had given evidence on his behalf as a character witness, he slipped out of the country and reportedly headed to the Ivory Coast where he joined Ojukwu who was running a transportation business.
Would Forsyth have been inspired to have undertaken such a risky endeavour on behalf of Ojukwu and the Biafran cause? There is much evidence to suggest that he carried with him an enormous amount of bitterness at how interests in Britain had, from his point of view, sabotaged the Biafran project, and it would have given him a great deal of personal satisfaction to have resurrected in some measure the dream of Biafra.
When ruminating over whether Ojukwu had been the intended beneficiary of the coup, the Sunday Times referred to the former Biafran leader as “Forsyth’s hero”. This was not an idle description. While being interviewed at his Spanish estate in 1974, Wilfred De’Ath, who was writing for the Australian newspaper The Age, asked Forsyth what he thought were the most important human qualities that a man should possess. Forsyth grabbed De’Ath’s ballpen and wrote the following on a piece of note paper:
Strength without brutality, Honesty without priggishness, Courage without recklessness, Humour without frivolity, Humanity without sentimentality, Intelligence without deviousness, Scepticism without cynicism.
Then Forsyth added:
The only man I have ever known to possess all these qualities in full measure was Emeka Ojukwu.
But if Forsyth as the mastermind of an endeavour with the objective of establishing an Igbo homeland just a hundred kilometres from the Nigerian coastline, he and Gay had not reckoned on the backlash that would have inevitably flowed from the deposing of Nguema. The threat posed to Nigerian security of a hostile government led by the leader of the Biafran secession would almost certainly have led to a political and military campaign to bring down such a government.
For many years, public concern in Nigeria over the treatment of Nigerian labourers on the island had even led to calls for the country to annexe Fernando Po. A pro-Igbo coup would also have likely led to inter-ethnic conflict between Igbos and the indigenous Bubi people and even among other Nigerian-origin peoples from Calabar and Ogoja who as minorities within the breakaway former Eastern region had been hostile to perceived Igbo domination of that region and were consequently largely resistant to Biafra. The taking of Fernando Po would also have provoked hostility in Rio Muni, the mainland enclave of Equatorial Guinea.
In 1975, thousands of Nigerian contract works were subjected to continual harassment and beatings. A New York Times article in January 1976 pointed to the root cause as anti-Igbo sentiment. It noted that Nguema belonged to the Fang tribe, “which doesn't get along with Nigeria's Ibos (sic), who traditionally make up the bulk of the contract labourers.” The Nigerian government acted to evacuate 45,000 workers between 1975 and 1976.
A mercenary takeover two years earlier, which would likely have increased anti-Igbo and anti-Nigerian feelings, would have been a recipe for disaster.
Forsyth consistently denied any knowledge of a coup being planned and that he had attended the meetings in Hamburg as part of his research into what he described as “the weapons (procurement) side” of the mercenary business. He repeated his denials to Adam Roberts, the author of The Wonga Coup, which was about the failed attempt in 2004 to overthrow President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, Nguema’s nephew and successor. He admitted to Roberts that aerial photographs of Fernado Po had been brought to his flat but that the money he had handed to the plotters was for information which he required to write the book.
But Forsyth became more equivocal as the interview progressed, saying that a “still-born attempt” at a coup had occurred and that he had spoken to several participants including Alexander Gay. He was also unsure about whether the plot of his novel inspired the coup or vice versa: “It was a chicken and egg situation.”
In the end, Forsyth admitted
that Scotland Yard contacted him at his Ireland residence and told him never to
try it again.
He did not. But while his involvement has for long been beyond dispute, questions still linger as to his motive. For instance, while Equatorial Guinea was not at that time an oil-rich state, prospecting for oil deposits had begun under Spanish colonial rule in the mid-1960s. It is possible that a seizure of power would have placed the coup’s orchestrators in a position to profit from future oil discoveries. This is of course speculative. It leads back to the audacious motive of resuscitating the dream of Biafra, which was clearly hinted at in The Dogs of War.
And if one word defined the life of Frederick Forsyth, it was his audacity.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2025).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
Select sources:
Roberts, Adam. The Wonga Coup: A Tale of Guns, Germs and the Steely Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-rich Corner of Africa. Public Affairs, 2006.
Lashmar, Paul. “Mercenaries Aimed To Topple Oil-Rich Despot,” The Independent, March 14th, 2004.
Mitchell, Paulene. “Guns For Hire,” The Hamilton Spectator, May 23rd, 1981.
Sunday Times Special Report. “Bungled Coup With a Novel Twist,” The Age, April 17th, 1978.
House, Christopher and Roe,
Nicholas. “Gun Siege Man Kills Himself,” Sunday Telegraph, March 12th,
1978.
Sunday Mirror Reporters. “PC Hero,” Sunday Mirror, March 12th, 1978.
Reporter. “My Gun Ordeal, By Police Hero,” Liverpool Daily Post, March 14th, 1978.
Associated Press. “Nigeria, Citing Cruelty, Recalls 45,000 from Equatorial Guinea,” The New York Times, January 27th, 1976.
De’Ath, Wilfred. “All A Book Can Buy,” The Age, October 5th, 1974.
“Frederick Forsyth ITN
Interview | Allegations of Federal Massacres of Biafran Civilians | May 1968,”
Adeyinka Makinde YouTube Channel, uploaded February 19th, 2022.
No comments:
Post a Comment