John Simpson has claimed that he engineered Frederick Forsyth’s sacking from the BBC for spreading “propaganda” about the Biafran War.
Forsyth, who died earlier this week, maintained that he quit his job as a BBC foreign correspondent because he was fed up with his bosses, who thought he was biased in favour of the Biafran fight for independence.
But Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, says he was instrumental in Forsyth’s exit, and suggested that Forsyth might never have written The Day of the Jackal were it not for his intervention.
He wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “The Times obit on Freddie Forsyth says he left the BBC in 1967 because he displeased powerful people by his reporting from Biafra. Not quite.
“As a very junior BBC subeditor, I spotted how he was introducing Biafran propaganda into his reports and told my boss. Forsyth was sacked – and went on to write one of the best thrillers ever.”
Writing for The Telegraph more than 20 years ago, Simpson said: “As an extremely lowly subeditor in the BBC radio newsroom, I had to put Mr Forsyth’s Biafran dispatches on the air.
“Even at the age of 23, I could see that he had accepted the Biafran line entirely. He was reporting propaganda as fact.
“Eventually he announced, without any qualification, that Biafra had shot down (as far as I remember) 16 federal Nigerian aircraft.
“The newsroom copy of Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft said that the federal air force possessed only 12.”
Forsyth joined the BBC in 1965, first as a radio reporter then as the assistant diplomatic correspondent for BBC Television.
When war broke out between Nigeria and the secessionist Republic of Biafra, he was dispatched there for three months.
Writing in 2020 to mark the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, Forsyth said he realised within days of arriving in Biafra that the BBC had swallowed British government propaganda. Harold Wilson’s government supported Nigeria in its fight against the Biafran forces.
Forsyth said: “My brief was to report the all-conquering march of the Nigerian army. It did not happen.
“Naively, I filed this. When my report was broadcast our high commission complained to the CRO [Commonwealth Relations Office], who passed it on to the BBC – which accused me of pro-rebel bias and recalled me to London.
“Six months later, in February 1968, fed up with the slavishness of the BBC to Whitehall, I walked out and flew back to West Africa.”
He said that “every reporter, peer or parliamentarian who had visited Biafra and reported on what he had seen was smeared as a stooge”.
Forsyth later wrote a non-fiction book, The Biafra Story (1969), and used some of his experiences there to inform his third novel, The Dogs of War.
The conflict officially ended in 1970. It caused an estimated one million civilian deaths from starvation after the Nigerian federal government cut off food supplies to Biafra.
Forsyth remained “haunted” by what he had seen there, saying: “Sometimes in the wee small hours I see the stick-like children with the dull eyes and lolling heads, and hear their wails of hunger and the low moans as they died.
“What is truly shameful is that this was not done by savages but aided and assisted at every stage by Oxbridge-educated British mandarins… with neutrality and diplomacy from London it could all have been avoided.”
Credit: Telegraph
