How The Day of the Jackal inspired criminals

It was a method of identity theft used by the KGB, the IRA, a disgraced MP and even the very man who showed ordinary people how to do it. 

So-called Day of the Jackal Fraud had long been an open secret amongst the criminal underworld and members of the Soviet Union's feared secret service.

But in 1971, Frederick Forsyth's debut about an expert assassin's bid to kill French president Charles de Gaulle hit the shelves, and then the film version starring Edward Fox was released in 1973.

And so millions of people were shown how to steal a dead child's identity and use it to get a new birth certificate and passport - a method which Forsyth admitted he had tested out himself. 

He scoured a graveyard to find the name of a child who died around the year of his own birth and then successfully applied for a passport using the identity.

Rogue Labour MP John Stonehouse used a similar technique when he faked his own death in 1974 and then fled to Australia under a false name.

And undercover officers in the Metropolitan Police scandalously used the identities of dead children dozens of times to infiltrate protest groups, with the practice becoming known as the 'Jackal run'. 

Eddie Redmayne is currently starring as the Jackal in Sky's loose TV adaptation of Forsyth's novel.  

In the original work, the assassin takes on the identity of dead child Alexander James Quentin Duggan to get a false passport so he can flit undetected between countries. 

It was reminiscent of the name of the boy who Forsyth found when he was carrying out his own version of the fraud. 

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'I did exactly what the Jackal did,' the 86-year-old told the Mail in 2021. 

'I found the grave of this little boy – James Oliver Duggan – in a churchyard in the Home Counties.' 

Forsyth also gave a fake witness to support his application. He said: 'I just invented a church minister in North Wales – somewhere where I thought the Passport Office wouldn't bother to check.

'All of it went into the package, along with the fee and the birth certificate for a person who no longer existed because he'd died as a child.

'I used a local newsagent as a poste restante, asking him if he'd be so kind, for a very small fee, to take in my mail while I was away abroad.'

Then Forsyth waited. 'About two weeks later, there it was. A fat package with a passport in it in the name of James Oliver Duggan,' he said. 

'I never used it internationally. I just tested the system and it worked.'

Forsyth was told about the method while reporting on the Biafran War in West Africa as a journalist. 

He said he was told about it by a 'white mercenary who was there on false papers.' 

The method became so prevalent among criminals that it was given its famous name.

Shortly after his book's release, the author had warned that fraudsters might attempt copycat crimes, but it was not until the film came out that officials started to take heed.

However, the loophole was still exploited by dozens of criminals for decades afterwards. 

In February 1974, the Daily Mail told how a private detective's secretary got three passports in the names of people who had died by using the method outlined in Forsyth's book. 

Marilyn Harrison first obtained birth certificates in the names of people of her age who had died, and then went to get passports in their names. 

In 1986, the Mail's front page the 'Jackal trick of spy pair' when it emerged that husband and wife spies Reinhard and Sonja Schulze had taken on false identities to get to Britain and carry out espionage. They were jailed for ten years. 

And the Met scandalously carried out operations using dead children's names for more than 30 years, with at least 42 officers using the identities to go undercover.

They would spend hours trawling through birth and death certificates to find the right people to impersonate.

Officers would receive fake driving licences and passports with the name of the dead children, and even visited their graves and home towns.

To make their identity convincing, the police spies even researched the family members of the dead children.

The undercover cops would typically use the identity of the children for around four years in what MPs labelled a 'ghoulish and disrespectful' tactic in 2013.

In 2009, former clinical psychologist David Pinnell was jailed for two years for stealing a dead baby's identity in a manner likened to the Day of the Jackal. 

Pinnell, from Southport, stole the identity of baby David Robertson, who died when he was just six months old in the 1950s, Liverpool Crown Court heard. 

He then used the baby's identity to obtain a passport, driving licence and open a bank account, where he stashed more than £60,000 he had swindled from the benefits system.

It was not until 2012 that officials fully cracked down on Day of the Jackal fraud.

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) set up a system to snare phoney applicants and quickly uncovered 1,200 cases involving the use of dead people's identities. 

There is now an electronic database of infant and child deaths up to the age of 18 and it is kept up to date.