The writer gave money to mercenaries in an aborted attempt to topple the leader of Equatorial Guinea more than 30 years before Sir Mark Thatcher, son of the former prime minister, was accused of backing a similar plot.
Forsyth, 67, said last week: “I don’t know whether I thought of it first and the mercenaries thought, ‘Wow, what a great idea’, or we were sitting around a table and they mentioned it first.”
The novelist, who also wrote The Day Of The Jackal, posed as a South African arms dealer to attend a meeting of gunrunners in Germany. He fled when his cover was blown.
Forsyth’s role in the aborted coup was first uncovered by The Sunday Times Insight team in 1978 from the diaries