In 1972, Forsyth's bestseller "The Day of the Jackal" made a splash in Britain. The book was about a planned attack on French President Charles de Gaulle. A hired killer nicknamed the Jackal used the birth certificate of a deceased child to obtain a British passport under a false surname. The Jackal found the grave of a child who had died long ago on one of the cemeteries, approximately
of the same year of birth as himself. He then asked the registry office of marriages and deaths to issue him a certificate sufficient to obtain a passport from the Home Office.
The writer says that someone involved in document forgery told him about this procedure. According to the writer, there are three ways to obtain a fake passport: you can steal a passport and replace the photograph, you can bribe the passport office and get a pristine document, or you can use the Jackal's strategy.
"When the book came out, I thought they would close this loophole within a week. That was almost 32 years ago," says Forsyth. In the writer's opinion, this process took so long because bureaucrats are lazy and inactive.
The government urges not to dramatize the situation. Lord Bassam, a member of the Labour Party, said last year that the authorities take seriously the possible heirs of the Jackal, but figures indicate that there are no more than three hundredths of a percent of fake passports in Britain from the total number. In reality, however, 0.03% is 1,500 fake passports. It turns out that every year the British Home Office helps one and a half thousand people whose intentions, in all likelihood, are far from noble.
Identity substitution crimes cost the country £1.3 billion each year. Previously, foreign spies and IRA members used the Jackal strategy; now illegal immigrants have adopted it. It is the Ministry of Statistics that keeps data on all newborn and deceased citizens. A paper card index was maintained by ministry clerks since 1837. However, with the ministry's transition to an electronic database, this loophole should substantially narrow.
If consultations at the ministry go well, the entire card index will soon be transferred to a computer database. This means that if a person comes to ask for a birth certificate or passport, the computer will not miss the fact that it concerns a person who died long ago.
Frederick Forsyth, for his part, believes that he offered the authorities a cheap and effective way to close off the possibility of spreading illegal passports as far back as thirty years ago. "When someone comes and asks for a birth certificate, you ask him: 'Is it for you?' If it is for himself, then the applicant must provide four different forms of identification; if for another person, then a duplicate stamp is placed on the certificate. An original certificate is required to apply for a passport. The total cost of this procedure would not exceed two pounds, but bureaucrats always look for more expensive ways to solve a problem," Forsyth laments.