Novelist of global political thrillers Frederick Forsyth died recently. He was best known for The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, which became popular films in the 1970s. (The Day of the Jackal is also a current television series more loosely based on the book.) As a boy, I read his novels voraciously. They were set in the Cold War, in the aftermath of World War II, a genre that has not to my knowledge been replicated in the post-Cold War world. Why not?
Forsyth was himself a swashbuckling international reporter who lived dramatically just as he wrote about dramatic events. He was a 1950s Royal Air Force pilot drawn to journalism in the 1960s, covering assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle and the Nigerian civil war.
His most popular book, and my favorite, is The Day of the Jackal of 1971 about an assassination attempt on de Gaulle by exiled French Algerians, through their Secret Army Organization (OAS), angry over the French president’s betrayal of their cause. It’s based on an actual 1962 attempt, which is the 1973 film’s opening scene, with gunmen firing directly into De Gaulle’s car on a Paris street. The bullets barely missed the president and his wife, who were largely unflustered and continued with their country weekend.
The OAS then resolves to hire an untraceable non-Frenchman for the next try on de Gaulle, while French intelligence brutally unravels the OAS. Forsyth’s novel, drawing upon his journalistic experiences, forensically tracks the search for the mysterious and cold blooded if charming English assassin known as The Jackal. The hero is a shrewd but unassuming French police investigator who thoroughly follows the fragmentary clues, with help from various international intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
When the police inspector has finally identified The Jackal, wider French law enforcement takes the investigation away from him, confident of their manhunt skills. Of course, they fail and must again seek his help. De Gaulle himself is aloof from the investigation, deeming its details beneath his dignity. And he refuses to amend his schedule.
The Jackal, realizing he is hunted, seduces a married French countess, spending the night in her chateau, leaving her dead. Later, when in Paris, he seduces a homosexual man for access to his apartment, also murdering him. French police now realize that The Jackal is targeting de Gaulle on Paris Liberation Day, when he will be vulnerable during multiple public ceremonies. Crafty as ever, The Jackal disguises himself as a crippled and bemedaled French Resistance veteran, tricking his way into a woman’s apartment, killing her, and aiming his gun at the French president. The police inspector finds and kills him only after he has already fired several shots from his silencer. The final scene is gripping and wonderful. But in the end, it turns out that The Jackal’s identity is unknown. The mystery continues. But the stability of France, a key Cold War Western ally, if a difficult one, was preserved against terrorist plots. De Gaulle, of course, was a key figure of both WWII and the Cold War.
Forsyth’s The Odessa File of 1973, which became a film in 1974, like The Day of the Jackal, is set in the early 1960s. It portrays a young German reporter who in 1963 finds the diary of a Holocaust survivor who has committed suicide. The diary recalls the horrors of a senior SS sadist, loosely based on the real-life Butcher of Riga, who has since become, under a pseudonym, a munitions factory director, protected by the secretive Organization of Former Members of the SS (ODESSA). The factory is covertly providing missile guidance systems to Gamal Nasser’s Egypt. The reporter, with help from Israel’s Mossad, infiltrates ODESSA and tracks down the Butcher, who he knows, from the diary, murdered his father, a German army officer. The movie diverges from the film, with the reporter killing the Butcher in self-defense during their confrontation. In the book, the Butcher escapes to Argentina, as did the real Butcher. The film focused public attention on the real Butcher, forcing his escape from Argentina to Paraguay, where he died in 1977. The book and film portray a post-war Germany still uneasily in denial about its Nazi crimes, with many law enforcement officers as ODESSA members.
A third novel by Forsyth, but not turned into a film, more directly involved the Cold War, The Devil’s Alternative, published in 1979 and set in 1982. The Soviet Union has suffered a serious famine, and Kremlin hawks want to invade Western Europe as the solution, which the Communist Party chairman, an aging Leonid Brezhnev-like figure, opposes as far too dangerous. The plan is leaked to a British intelligence officer by his former Russian lover. Ukrainian nationalists have hijacked a giant oil tanker in the North Sea, threatening ecological catastrophe if their brethren, imprisoned in West Germany for having hijacked an airliner (and also secretly having assassinated the KGB chief), are not released. The Soviets threaten to end negotiations for concessions in return for famine relief, which means pro-war hardliners will prevail. Through terrifying events, the Ukrainian nationalists and the Kremlin hawks both self-destruct, with a “moderate” anointed as the new Soviet party chairman. And it turns out that the British spy’s lover was in fact working for the aging outgoing party chairman, who wanted the West to counter the Kremlin hawks. The status quo returns. Characters in The Devil’s Alternative are loosely based, besides Brezhnev, on Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.
Sadly, The Devil’s Alternative never became a film. Oddly, during the Cold War, films rarely directly addressed the Soviet Union, preferring safer villains, typically Nazis, or the fantasy monsters of James Bond films. It’s notable that The Devil’s Alternative’s “happy” ending entails the death of Ukrainian nationalists and the victory of Kremlin “doves” over hawks as the best possible scenario. Few in 1979 could imagine a plausible happier scenario. The Cold War and the Soviet Union, nearly everybody assumed, were permanent.
Forsyth wrote more novels after the Cold War ended addressing post-Soviet Russia, Afghan-originated terrorism, and international narcotics trafficking. To my mind these and other post-Cold War international thrillers lacked the cosmic drama of Cold War stories, when the world was still under the shadow of WWII, having defeated Nazi totalitarianism, and struggling to avert WWIII while constraining Soviet totalitarianism. The stakes were higher; the villains and heroes were clearer; the personalities were larger. The competing spiritualities were more distinctly Christian-related versus demonic/godless. The current television version of The Day of the Jackal maybe evinces nostalgia for the old paradigm.
In Cold War literature, Forsyth was a sort of Homer of popular but sophisticated thrillers that demonstrated what made and sustained the West as it struggled against its enemies and dealt with the demons of its past. May there be future Forsyths who can demonstrate the West’s even more complex struggles for survival and identity today.
