Mediocre Thrills from Master of Espionage

Nishi Malhotra

Recent news that terrorists were planning to destroy ten transatlantic flights has found an eerie echo in spy thriller writer Frederick Forsyth’s latest bestseller, The Afghan. The story is indeed, as one reviewer puts it, “ripped from the headlines”. The writing, however, is not as gripping as one is accustomed to from the master of this genre.

The plot revolves around a daring operation mounted by the British and American secret services to infiltrate Al-Qaeda and foil a large scale terrorist plot code-named Al-Isra. Colonel Mike Martin of the British Special Air Services (who was also the principal character in Forsyth’s last bestseller based in the Middle East, The Fist of God) is the man chosen to impersonate Izmat Khan, an ex-Taliban commander languishing in Guantanamo Bay jail. Martin has Indian blood in his genes to account for his swarthy appearance, a childhood spent in Iraq that gives him familiarity with Arabic, and is veteran of two special military missions to Afghanistan (one during the occupation by the Soviets and another during the battle of Qala-i-Jang between the Taliban and US Marines) for added measure. He now enters Afghanistan under cover and from there on travels to the Middle East to become one of Osama’s chosen few who will be given the ‘honour’ of carrying out the latest attack against the West.

Writers often combine fact with fiction to make a plot line more plausible. None do so as convincingly as Frederick Forsyth. This ex-employee of some of the best brand name media masters in the business – BBC, Reuters, Time – uses well-honed journalistic techniques to research for information that he can weave with dexterity into his novels; critics have often dubbed his genre of writing ‘faction’ (as opposed to ‘fiction).

The author eschews psychological complexity in favour of technical details and his books are full of long asides on weapons and weapon systems, money laundering operations, lock picking, satellite photography, etc. True to style, The Afghan too is peppered with quick tutorials on the Wahhabi sect of Islam and the merchant marine fleets of the world.

Forsyth’s other habit, of incorporating the closed door secrets of intelligence agencies such as MI6, CIA and Mossad into his novels, is often a source of headache and embarrassment to governments around the world. In The Day of the Jackal, he described how a would-be assassin visited a gravesite and then applied for a passport in the name of someone who had died in infancy. The government in the story did not cross check for names against the death registry, an omission that was true in actual practice at the time and was revealed by Forsyth in his thriller.

In The Deceiver, British agents used a microphone to bug the coffin of a dead IRA member and listen in on the conversation of other IRA members who were using the occasion of the burial to confer with each other. When journalists pressed British higher-ups to reveal if this was true, the government had no choice but to reluctantly admit to the practice.

The Afghan is faithful to Forsyth’s tradition of bringing hitherto unknown or unshared information to the attention of the larger world. In describing the surrender of the Taliban forces to the Northern Alliance in November 2001, for instance, the author reveals that the number that actually surrendered was 14,000. What happened to these POWs? “Among Afghans,” Forsyth writes, “there is nothing dishonourable in a negotiated surrender and, once agreed, its terms are always honoured.” What the Allies did however was anything but honourable.