How i was spying during Nigerian civil war_ writer

Frederick Forsyth, the British author, has revealed how he was converted into a spy during the Nigerian civil war (1967-1970).Forsyth said in an interview with the BBCon his just published autobiography ‘The Outsider: My Life’, that he was first approached by the British spy agency MI6 to give information when he was covering thewar in Nigeria as a journalist.He said that an intelligence officer asked himto “tell us what’s going on” during the war.READ ALSO: Orkar Coup: BabangidaOpens Up“For the last year of the Biafran War, I was sending… both journalistic reports to the media and other reports to my new friend,” Forsyth said.According to him MI6 wanted to check the reports that children were dying inside Biafra.“The Foreign Office was denying that therewere any dying children and they were passionate in supporting the dictatorship in Lagos, and it was oddly enough MI6 that hada different viewpoint,”Forsyth added.He said that at the time he had seen “no harm” in confirming that “children were dyinglike flies in Biafra”.He noted that many British volunteers gave information back home to MI6 at the time that it was not believed out of place.“There was no fee, no reward, you just do it.It was a different attitude back then.”The journalist continued that he gave information to the MI6 over a period of 20 years from other places such as Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe), South Africa and, East Germany during the cold war.READ ALSO: Appointments 2015: Let Us Wait, Buhari Knows What To Do“It was normally a phone call:‘can we meet –why don’t you join us for lunch? We have a little problem – would you mind slipping into East Germany and picking something us for us?’” he said.Forsyth later assisted Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Biafran secessionist leader. He wrote a biography of Ojukwu tilted: “Emeka” (1982).He had also written a book about the war in 1969:“The Biafra Story: The Making of an African Legend”.The Nigerian Civil War broke out on 6 July 1967. The war was the culmination of an uneasy peace and instability that had plagued the nation from independence in 1960.