Smith, Michael 1952-

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Smith, Michael 1952-

PERSONAL:

Born May 1, 1952, in England; married; wife's name Hayley; children.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England. Agent—Robert Kirby, PFD, Drury House, 34-43 Russell St., London WC2B 5HA, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Journalist and military intelligence expert. Previously worked for British Broadcasting Corporation monitoring service, 1982-90; Financial Times and Daily Telegraph, London, England, defense correspondent covering intelligence and espionage matters, 1990-2005; Sunday Times, London, England, journalist, 2005—. Bletchley Park Trust, member of editorial board. Military service: British Army, Intelligence Corps; worked as a code breaker, c. 1967-82.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Specialist writer of the year, UK Press Awards, 2006.

WRITINGS:

(With Peter Elphick) Odd Man Out: The Story of the Singapore Traitor, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1993.

New Cloak, Old Dagger: How Britain's Spies Came in from the Cold, Victor Gollancz (London, England), 1996, revised edition published as The Spying Game: The Secret History of British Espionage, Politico's (London, England), 2003.

Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park, Channel Four Books (London, England), 1998, published as Station X: Decoding Nazi Secrets, TV Books (New York, NY), 1999.

Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 1999.

The Emperor's Codes: The Breaking of Japan's Secret Ciphers, Bantam (London, England), 2000, Arcade (New York, NY), 2001.

(Editor, with Ralph Erskine) Action This Day, Bantam (New York, NY), 2001.

Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America's Most Secret Special Operations Team, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 2006, St. Martin's Press, 2008.

Contributor to newspapers, including London Times, Sunday Times, and Daily Telegraph.

SIDELIGHTS:

Formerly a member of the British Army Intelligence Corps, Michael Smith has turned his intelligence and ciphers background to journalistic use, writing on military and defense matters for several London newspapers. In addition, he has authored numerous popular books on espionage, including the 1998 volume Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (published in the United States as Station X: Decoding Nazi Secrets). Michael Alexander, writing in the RUSI Journal, stated: "Michael Smith is one of the most professional of the authors who have made a career of rescuing the work of the intelligence services from the Scylla of romance and the Charybdis of obscurity."

Smith's first book, written in collaboration with Peter Elphick, was Odd Man Out: The Story of the Singapore Traitor, which tells the story of the British officer Patrick Heenan, who was a spy for the Japanese for many years, supplying them with vital information that led to the 1942 Japanese invasion of Malaya during World War II. Involved in Royal Air Force intelligence, Heenan was uniquely placed to supply the Japanese with essential information on the location of British planes. Convicted of treason, Heenan was executed shortly before Singapore surrendered to Japanese forces. Reviewing the book in the New Statesman & Society, Robert Carver called it a "murky tale worthy of Eric Ambler, reflecting no credit on anyone."

In the 1996 title, New Cloak, Old Dagger: How Britain's Spies Came in from the Cold, Smith analyzes once-classified documents acknowledging the existence of the British intelligence forces, including the domestic service branch, known as MI5, the signals intelligence branch, GCHQ, and the overseas intelligence service, SIS, also known as MI6. Nicholas Hiley, writing in the London Review of Books, noted that Smith's book is an attempt to "distil into one volume all the information in the public domain about [the intelligence service's] history and development." Hiley found Smith's account to be "clear and concise," yet lacking in an analysis regarding the role of intelligence forces "as advisors of government." Hayden Peake, reviewing the same title in History, called it an "interesting book" and one that is "well told and documented by primary sources." In this work, Smith focuses on the Cold War and post-Cold War era, examining, among other topics, antiterrorism and economic espionage, and the battles that were waged between rival intelligence agencies.

In Station X, Smith examines the work of the British code breakers stationed at Bletchley Park who decoded the Nazis' Enigma encryption machine. Smith relied on a combination of previously classified information and interviews with the men and women who had worked as code breakers during World War II in order to present a work "packed with revelations and the voices of these largely unsung heroes," according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. The people who worked at Bletchley—numbering in the thousands—included academic mathematicians, amateur code breakers, German-language experts, spies, and an assortment of British academics who collectively cracked the German code and were able to provide invaluable information for the D-Day landings at Normandy, France, in 1944. Linked to a television documentary broadcast by both the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Public Broadcasting Service, Smith's book might, as Booklist reviewer Gilbert Taylor noted, "instill curiosity in the weightier histories of British codebreaking." Also reviewing the American edition, William D. Bushnell, writing in the Library Journal, found it a "useful addition for World War II buffs."

Smith presents another code-breaking story in The Emperor's Codes: The Breaking of Japan's Secret Ciphers. Focusing on British, American, and Australian code breakers' efforts to crack Japan's wartime codes, Smith presents a "great story and one of importance," according to Library Journal contributor Ed Goedeken. The code breakers' efforts resulted in what some historians have theorized was a shortening of the war by as much as two years. Writing in History Today, John Crossland remarked that in his book Smith presents "a credible solution" to the long battle over whether the Americans or the British should take principal credit for code breaking in the Pacific theater of the war. As Crossland noted, Smith concludes that "the British can claim credit for pioneering a path into the … codes prewar, and the Americans for exploiting those leads." Booklist reviewer Jay Freeman wrote that the book is a "real-life thriller that unfolds like a classic spy story." Freeman further called the work "engrossing and exciting." More praise came from Alexander, who dubbed Smith's book an "excellent read."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, December 15, 1999, Gilbert Taylor, review of Station X: Decoding Nazi Secrets, p. 755; June 1-15, 2001, Jay Freeman, review of The Emperor's Codes: The Breaking of Japan's Secret Ciphers, p. 1833.

Guardian (London, England), January 18, 1999, Richard Norton-Taylor and Peter Lennon, "How We Won the War," p. T2.

History, spring, 1998, Hayden Peake, review of New Cloak, Old Dagger: How Britain's Spies Came in from the Cold, p. 160.

History Today, June, 2001, John Crossland, review of The Emperor's Codes, pp. 56-57.

Library Journal, December, 1999, William D. Bushnell, review of Station X, p. 160; June 15, 2001, Ed Goedeken, review of The Emperor's Codes, p. 88.

London Review of Books, December 11, 1997, Nicholas Hiley, review of New Cloak, Old Dagger, pp. 35-36.

New Statesman & Society, July 23, 1993, Robert Carver, review of Odd Man Out: The Story of the Singapore Traitor, pp. 39-40.

Political Quarterly, July-September, 1997, Donald Cameron Watt, review of New Cloak, Old Dagger, pp. 297-298.

Publishers Weekly, December 20, 1999, review of Station X, p. 71.

RUSI Journal, April, 2001, Michael Alexander, review of The Emperor's Codes, pp. 88-89.