Michael Smith (born 1952) is a British author who specializes in spies and espionage. [1] He is also a former member of the board of the Bletchley Park Trust. [2]
Smith is a former soldier and journalist best known for obtaining and publishing the documents collectively known as The Downing Street Memos. The Downing Street memo itself was an official record of a meeting of the British war cabinet held in July 2002. [3] It revealed the disclosure by Sir Richard Dearlove, then the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), that the intelligence to justify an invasion was being "fixed around the policy". The Downing Street memo was in fact just one of eight documents obtained by Smith which showed that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in April 2002 to invade Iraq; that they planned to "wrongfoot" Saddam Hussein to give them the excuse to do so; and that they used flights over the southern no-fly zone of Iraq to begin the air war against Iraq in May 2002, with "spikes of activity" which they hoped might provoke Iraq into reacting and giving them the excuse to go to war. [4]
Smith won a British Press Award in 2006 for Specialist Writer of the Year. [5] The award was for his work in revealing the Downing Street memo.
Smith obtained the first six of the eight Downing Street Memos while working for the Daily Telegraph . The second set of two documents, including the Downing Street memo itself, were obtained while he was working for the Sunday Times . He has also worked for the BBC and contributed to The Raw Story and New Statesman .
He is the author of a number of books, including the UK Number 1 bestseller Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (1998). This was subsequently televised and updated in 2011 as The Secrets of Station X: How the Bletchley Park Codebreakers Helped Win the War. Other books by Smith include Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America's Most Secret Special Operations Team (2006), which was updated in May 2011 to include the first accurate account of the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Smith's book Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews (1999) led to Frank Foley, the MI6 head of station in Berlin during the 1930s being made Righteous Among the Nations, the highest award the Jewish state can award to a gentile. According to Jewish aid workers, Foley saved "tens of thousands" of Jews from the Holocaust, giving them visas and passports to which they were not entitled, going into the concentration camps to get Jews out, and in the period after Kristallnacht in November 1938, hiding five or six Jews in his home every night. Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews was republished by Biteback as a Dialogue Espionage Classic in 2016.
Before becoming a journalist, Smith was a member of the British Army, serving for nine years in the Intelligence Corps. [6] After leaving the Army, he worked as a journalist, initially for BBC Monitoring. He then joined the Daily Telegraph where he worked as an assistant foreign editor, then a news reporter and finally Defence Correspondent. In 2005, he joined the Sunday Times where he specialised in defence and intelligence issues. Smith left the Sunday Times in 2012 to become a full-time author. [7]
Smith has written 16 works of non-fiction. His first novel Ritter: No Man Dies Twice, a detective/spy thriller set in Nazi Germany during the Second World War was published in February 2022.
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Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Sir Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name.
Ultra was the designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Ultra eventually became the standard designation among the western Allies for all such intelligence. The name arose because the intelligence obtained was considered more important than that designated by the highest British security classification then used and so was regarded as being Ultra Secret. Several other cryptonyms had been used for such intelligence.
John Cairncross was a British civil servant who became an intelligence officer and spy during the Second World War. As a Soviet double agent, he passed to the Soviet Union the raw Tunny decryptions that influenced the Battle of Kursk. He was alleged to be the fifth member of the Cambridge Five. He was also notable as a translator, literary scholar and writer of non-fiction.
Fish was the UK's GC&CS Bletchley Park codename for any of several German teleprinter stream ciphers used during World War II. Enciphered teleprinter traffic was used between German High Command and Army Group commanders in the field, so its intelligence value (Ultra) was of the highest strategic value to the Allies. This traffic normally passed over landlines, but as German forces extended their geographic reach beyond western Europe, they had to resort to wireless transmission.
Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, CMG was a British classics scholar and papyrologist at King's College, Cambridge and a codebreaker. As a member of the Room 40 codebreaking unit he helped decrypt the Zimmermann Telegram which brought the USA into the First World War. He then joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS).
Major Francis "Frank" Edward Foley CMG was a British Secret Intelligence Service officer. As a passport control officer for the British embassy in Berlin, Foley "bent the rules" and helped thousands of Jewish families escape from Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht and before the outbreak of the Second World War. He is officially recognised as a British Hero of the Holocaust and as a Righteous Among the Nations.
Hut 8 was a section in the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park tasked with solving German naval (Kriegsmarine) Enigma messages. The section was led initially by Alan Turing. He was succeeded in November 1942 by his deputy, Hugh Alexander. Patrick Mahon succeeded Alexander in September 1944.
Sir Francis Harry Hinsley, was an English historian and intelligence officer. He worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and wrote widely on the history of international relations and British Intelligence during the Second World War. He was known as Harry Hinsley.
MI1 or British Military Intelligence, Section 1 was a department of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, part of the War Office. It was set up during World War I. It contained "C&C", which was responsible for code breaking.
John Robert Fisher Jeffreys was a British mathematician and World War II codebreaker.
Shaun Wylie was a British mathematician and World War II codebreaker.
Rolf Noskwith was a British businessman who during the Second World War worked under Alan Turing as a cryptographer at the Bletchley Park British military base.
The Far East Combined Bureau, an outstation of the British Government Code and Cypher School, was set up in Hong Kong in March 1935, to monitor Japanese, and also Chinese and Russian (Soviet) intelligence and radio traffic. Later it moved to Singapore, Colombo (Ceylon), Kilindini (Kenya), then returned to Colombo.
Mavis Lilian Batey, MBE, was a British code-breaker during World War II. She was one of the leading female codebreakers at Bletchley Park.
Hut 3 was a section of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park during World War II. It retained the name for its functions when it moved into Block D. It produced military intelligence codenamed ULTRA from the decrypts of Enigma, Tunny and multiple other sources. Hut 3 thus became an intelligence agency in its own right, providing information of great strategic value, but rarely of operational use. Group Captain Eric Malcolm Jones led this activity from 1943 and after the war became deputy director, and in 1952 director of GCHQ. In July 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower Supreme Commander of Allied forces wrote to Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) saying inter alia:
"The intelligence that has emanated from you before and during this campaign has been of priceless value to me. It has simplified my task as commander enormously. It has saved thousands of British and American lives and, in no small way, has contributed to the speed with which the enemy was routed and eventually forced to surrender."
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6, is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligence in support of the UK's national security. SIS is one of the British intelligence agencies and the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ("C") is directly accountable to the Foreign Secretary.
Mair Russell-Jones, born Mair Eluned Thomas, was a graduate in Music and German from Cardiff University who during the Second World War worked as a civilian codebreaker for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. She worked in Hut 6, decrypting messages in Enigma machine cipher.
About 8,000 women worked in Bletchley Park, the central site for British cryptanalysts during World War II. Women constituted roughly 75% of the workforce there. While women were overwhelmingly under-represented in high-level work, such as cryptanalysis, they were employed in large numbers in other important work, such as operating cryptographic machinery and communications machinery; translating of Axis documents; traffic analysis; clerical duties, and many more besides. Women made up the majority of Bletchley Park’s workforce, most enlisted in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, WRNS, nicknamed the Wrens.
Action This Day was a 1941 memorandum sent to Winston Churchill personally, as the Bletchley Park (BP) codebreaking establishment was short of staff in some critical areas. Their requirements were small, but as a small organisation their management did not have priority. Four senior heads of sections ("Huts") and their deputies wrote to Churchill, who had visited "BP" on 6 September 1941, where he made a speech saying he appreciated their work.
