‘The Day of the Jackal’ author on real life spy thriller

Michael Furlong, a Defense Department official, set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants. Mark Mazetti, who broke The New York Times, said Furlong used around 20 million dollars to hire private contractors to do intelligence gathering around Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This is a spy novelist’s dream. So we turned to one. Frederick Forsyth is the author of such acclaimed books as “The Day of the Jackal,” “The Odessa File,” “and “The Dogs of War.”

He says that Michael Furlong took a book out of John Gotti’s mafia wars, and that he has never seen anything like this – a government official hiring private contractors to assassinate.