Best-selling thriller writer Frederick Forsyth died yesterday aged 86. I can now reveal that part of his first novel The Day of the Jackal, published in 1971, was based on a method used by the KGB, which became known to MI5 in about 1960, but which they allowed to continue because it also allowed MI5 to track KGB activity and build files on suspicious characters.
As many readers will remember, Forsyth’s novel (and the 1973 film adaptation starring Edward Fox) features an English assassin hired to kill French President Charles de Gaulle. This assassin, known to his French clients only by the codename Jackal (Chacal) obtains a passport in a false identity.
He does this by finding someone with a similar birthdate to his own, but who died in infancy; then obtaining a copy of this dead infant’s birth certificate and applying for a passport in his name (but of course using his own adult photograph).
Due to computerisation it’s now virtually impossible for such a fraud to work, because the birth and death databases are easily cross-referenced. But for many years similar frauds were used in real life. For example, it’s now known that undercover police officers infiltrating “extremist” groups – including racial nationalist parties such as the NF and BNP – obtained false identities by this method.
In 2021 Forsyth told the Mail on Sunday that he had heard about this passport scam from a mercenary fighting in West Africa, where Forsyth was working as a journalist covering the Biafran war in the 1960s.
However, I can now reveal that Forsyth almost certainly heard about it via his intelligence connections – and that MI5 used their knowledge of such schemes to track down an important KGB agent operating in the UK.
In about 1960 MI5 discovered that the KGB were in the habit of obtaining birth certificates of dead British children at Somerset House (which until the early 1970s housed the central registry of UK births, marriages, and deaths). Moscow’s errand boys also tended to apply for death certificates, presumably for their own records so that they could be sure the children concerned were dead before using their identities to create cover for their agents.
Rather than plug this loophole, MI5 sensibly decided to make secret arrangements “to scrutinise all applications for birth and death certificates received at Somerset House”. They soon discovered that (unsurprisingly) it was very rare for anyone to apply for the birth or death certificate of a child who had died many years ago. They also found that people employed by the KGB quite often made two applications simultaneously, and that it was standard KGB practice to give a false name and address when filling in the forms.
MI5 therefore kept a file of all suspicious applications: two such had been made in December 1960 by a “B. Green”, giving the address 9 Longbrook Terrace, Exeter. No such person existed at this address, so for more than two years it remained an unresolved case – though with the strong assumption that “B. Green” (whoever he/she might be) was working for the KGB.
By coincidence in February 1963 the Longbrook Terrace address was recognised as having been from 1936-44 the home of Paddy Costello, a New Zealand born academic and sometime diplomat of Irish origin, and his wife Bella (known to friends and family as ‘Bil’), daughter of a London Jewish family with Ukrainian/Russian origins.
The Costellos had already come under suspicion for various reasons (some of which will be discussed in a later article at this blog). MI5 called in a handwriting expert, who confirmed that the “B. Green” who had filled in the Somerset House forms was almost certainly Mrs Bella Costello.
As the senior MI5 officer Ronnie Symonds minuted to colleagues:
“We therefore have what practically amounts to written proof that in December 1960 Mrs Bella Costello was a KGB agent employed in an illegal support role. Experience suggests that she was probably already a trusted agent of some years standing to have qualified for such employment.”
MI5 therefore began tapping the Costellos’ phone and monitoring their correspondence. (By this time Paddy Costello was Professor of Russian at Manchester University.) They also took an interest in other members of the Costello and Lerner families, such as Bella’s brother, an eminent economist called Abba Lerner, who taught at many American universities, including as Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
The considerable MI5 investment in monitoring the Costellos struck gold on 1st June 1963, when Paddy Costello was discreetly followed by a team of MI5 ‘watchers’ and observed making a suspicious contact with a Soviet diplomat, Vladimir Yermakov. This was certainly not a ‘normal’ social or academic appointment. Costello had attempted classic anti-surveillance techniques before this rendezvous. He and the Russian ‘diplomat’ were later observed having lunch together at a pub in Ealing, before they carefully travelled back to central London in separate carriages of the same train.
In November 1963 Costello was again discreetly followed on another visit to London. Again he adopted complicated anti-surveillance methods, this time travelling by a circuitous route to the opposite end of London and meeting Yermakov in a Dalston street, where Yermakov seemed to pass him a document case.
The Costello investigation continued until Paddy Costello’s sudden death on 23rd February 1964, three weeks after his 52nd birthday. Many papers on the case remain classified, but there is sufficient now available to demonstrate that Costello and his wife Bella were important KGB operatives, and that attempts by the liberal left and academic friends to defend them posthumously are at best deluded, and at worst part of a continuing Jewish-Communist deception.
Following Frederick Forsyth’s death yesterday, we can report that his use of a plotline involving fraudulent passports and the stolen identities of dead infants almost certainly came from inside knowledge picked up from gossip among MI5 and MI6 officers with whom he was acquainted.
The present author knows of several other examples where Forsyth dropped real characters and events into otherwise fictional accounts. For example in his 1989 novel The Negotiator, which revolves around the fictional kidnapping of an Oxford student who is the son of a US President, Forsyth inserts a real Oxford figure – the Bursar of Jesus College, Air Commodore John De’ath, who was one of the best known members of the Oxford athletics scene and vice-president of the Achilles Club, until his death aged 90 in 2023. Forsyth creates a scene in the real-life Vincent’s Club involving John De’ath and the novel’s principal character.
