Former Daily Mail executive Brian Freemantle – who went on to become a best-selling author – has died aged 88.
During a distinguished career on the newspaper as foreign editor, he masterminded the Mail’s dramatic airlift to rescue Vietnamese children from Saigon just days before the ravaged city fell to the Viet Cong in 1975.
In an operation as daring as the compulsive thrillers he went on to write, Mr Freemantle had makeshift cots strung from the ceiling of the specially chartered Boeing 707, staffed by nurses and medics, which brought 99 orphaned and sick children to start a new life in Britain.
One of the infants rescued, known then simply as ‘baby No 10’, later named her son Harry after Mr Freemantle’s middle name.
Earlier, the newsman had played a key role in the Mail’s transformation from a broadsheet to a compact newspaper under editor Sir David English in 1971.
Soon after Operation Mercy Airlift, however, Mr Freemantle left Fleet Street to become a full-time writer. He was prolific, and by the time of his death he had written some 85 books, among them the hugely popular Charlie Muffin spy stories, one of which was made into a film starring David Hemmings as the eponymous hero.
He also wrote histories of the CIA and KGB, the latter of which saw him banned from Russia.
A freeman of the City of London, he leaves a wife Maureen, three daughters, four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.