Michael Smith (newspaper reporter)
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Michael Smith (born 1952) is a British author who specializes in spies and
espionage Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangibl ...
. He is also a former member of the board of the Bletchley Park Trust. Smith is a former soldier and
journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...
best known for obtaining and publishing the documents collectively known as The Downing Street Memos. The
Downing Street memo The Downing Street memo (or the Downing Street Minutes), sometimes described by critics of the Iraq War as the smoking gun memo, is the note of a 23 July 2002 secret meeting of senior British government, defence and intelligence figures discussin ...
itself was an official record of a meeting of the British war cabinet held in July 2002. It revealed the disclosure by Sir
Richard Dearlove Sir Richard Billing Dearlove (born 23 January 1945) was head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), a role known informally as "C", from 1999 until 6 May 2004. He was in his role as head of MI6 during the invasion of Iraq. He was bl ...
, then the head of the British
Secret Intelligence Service The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...
(
MI6 The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...
), that the intelligence to justify an invasion was being "fixed around the policy". The
Downing Street memo The Downing Street memo (or the Downing Street Minutes), sometimes described by critics of the Iraq War as the smoking gun memo, is the note of a 23 July 2002 secret meeting of senior British government, defence and intelligence figures discussin ...
was in fact just one of eight documents obtained by Smith which showed that President
George W. Bush George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, Bush family, and son of the 41st president George H. W. Bush, he ...
and Prime Minister
Tony Blair Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British former politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He previously served as Leader of th ...
agreed in April 2002 to invade
Iraq Iraq,; ku, عێراق, translit=Êraq officially the Republic of Iraq, '; ku, کۆماری عێراق, translit=Komarî Êraq is a country in Western Asia. It is bordered by Turkey to Iraq–Turkey border, the north, Iran to Iran–Iraq ...
; that they planned to "wrongfoot"
Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein ( ; ar, صدام حسين, Ṣaddām Ḥusayn; 28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was an Iraqi politician who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolution ...
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 Iraq,; ku, عێراق, translit=Êraq officially the Republic of Iraq, '; ku, کۆماری عێراق, translit=Komarî Êraq is a country in Western Asia. It is bordered by Turkey to Iraq–Turkey border, the north, Iran to Iran–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. Smith won a
British Press Award British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...
in 2006 for Specialist Writer of the Year. The award was for his work in revealing the
Downing Street memo The Downing Street memo (or the Downing Street Minutes), sometimes described by critics of the Iraq War as the smoking gun memo, is the note of a 23 July 2002 secret meeting of senior British government, defence and intelligence figures discussin ...
. Smith obtained the first six of the eight Downing Street Memos while working for the ''
Daily Telegraph Daily or The Daily may refer to: Journalism * Daily newspaper, newspaper issued on five to seven day of most weeks * ''The Daily'' (podcast), a podcast by ''The New York Times'' * ''The Daily'' (News Corporation), a defunct US-based iPad new ...
''. The second set of two documents, including the
Downing Street memo The Downing Street memo (or the Downing Street Minutes), sometimes described by critics of the Iraq War as the smoking gun memo, is the note of a 23 July 2002 secret meeting of senior British government, defence and intelligence figures discussin ...
itself, were obtained while he was working for the ''
Sunday Times ''The Sunday Times'' is a British newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as ''The New Observer''. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK, whi ...
''. He has also worked for the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
and contributed to
The Raw Story ''Raw Story'' (also stylized as ''RawStory'') is an American progressive news website. It was founded in 2004 by John K. Byrne and is owned by Byrne and Michael Rogers. History Byrne, the former editor-in-chief of ''The Oberlin Review'', ...
and ''
New Statesman The ''New Statesman'' is a British political and cultural magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first connected with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other leading members ...
''. 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 Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (10 March 1957 – 2 May 2011) was a Saudi-born extremist militant who founded al-Qaeda and served as its leader from 1988 until Killing of Osama bin Laden, his death in 2011. Ideologically a Pan-Islamism ...
. Smith's book ''Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews'' (1999) led to
Frank Foley Major Francis "Frank" Edward Foley CMG (24 November 1884  – 8 May 1958) 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 ...
, the
MI6 The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...
head of station in
Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
during the 1930s being made
Righteous Among the Nations Righteous Among the Nations ( he, חֲסִידֵי אֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם, ; "righteous (plural) of the world's nations") is an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to sav ...
, the highest award the Jewish state can award to a
gentile Gentile () is a word that usually means "someone who is not a Jew". Other groups that claim Israelite heritage, notably Mormons, sometimes use the term ''gentile'' to describe outsiders. More rarely, the term is generally used as a synonym for ...
. According to Jewish aid workers, Foley saved "tens of thousands" of Jews from the
Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
, 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 () or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (german: Novemberpogrome, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) paramilitary and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from ...
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 The British Army is the principal land warfare force of the United Kingdom, a part of the British Armed Forces along with the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. , the British Army comprises 79,380 regular full-time personnel, 4,090 Gurk ...
, serving for nine years in the Intelligence Corps. After leaving the Army, he worked as a journalist, initially for
BBC Monitoring BBC Monitoring (BBCM) is a division of the British Broadcasting Corporation which monitors, and reports on, mass media worldwide using open-source intelligence. Based at New Broadcasting House, the BBC's headquarters in central London, it has o ...
. 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.About Michael Smith. Retrieved 21 November 2016.
Smith's most recent book is ''No Man Dies Twice'', a detective/spy thriller set in
Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
during the
Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
.


Books by Michael Smith

*Elphick, Peter and Smith, Michael : ''Odd Man Out: The Story of the Singapore Traitor'' (1993, Hodder and Stoughton) *Smith, Michael : ''New Cloak, Old Dagger: How Britain’s Spies Came in from the Cold'' (1996, Gollancz) *Smith, Michael : ''Station X'' (1998, Boxtree) *Smith, Michael : ''Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews'' (1999, Hodder and Stoughton) *Smith, Michael and Erskine, Ralph (editors): ''Action This Day'' (2001, Bantam) *Smith, Michael : ''The Spying Game'' (2003, Politicos) *Smith, Michael : ''Killer Elite: The Inside Story of America’s Most Secret Special Operations Team'' (2007, St Martin's Press) *Smith, Michael : ''Six: A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service'' (2010, Biteback) *Smith, Michael : ''The Emperor's Codes'' (2010, Biteback) *Smith, Michael : ''Britain’s Secret War'' (2011, Andre Deutsch) *Smith, Michael : ''The Secrets of Station X'' (2011, Biteback) *Smith, Michael : ''Bletchley Park: The Codebreakers of Station X'' (2013, Shire) *Smith, Michael (editor): ''The Secret Agent’s Bedside Reader'' (2014, Biteback) *Smith, Michael : ''The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories'' (2015, Aurum) *Smith, Michael : ''The Anatomy of a Traitor'' (2017, Aurum) *Smith, Michael : ''No Man Dies Twice'' (2018, Diversion)


Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Michael 1952 births Living people British male journalists British military writers The Sunday Times people 20th-century British writers 21st-century British writers 20th-century British male writers