Michael Smith

Associate Editor

Michael Smith writes on defence and security issues for the Sunday Times and
New Statesman. He left school at 15 to join the British Army and after
service with the Royal Artillery became a member of the army's Intelligence
Corps monitoring terrorist and Soviet Bloc communications. Smith studied
Arabic at the army's own specialised training unit, before working for three
years in the Middle-East collecting intelligence on terrorists operating in
Syria, Iraq and the Lebanon. He also took part in Britain's secret war
against communist rebels in Oman, as part of a small unit providing
intelligence for British special forces. Smith then spent four years in
Europe, becoming a German interpreter and producing reports on the
activities of the East German armed forces.

He left the army in 1982 to join the BBC Monitoring Service, the British
equivalent of the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, where he
began his career in journalism. Smith left the BBC in 1990 to become a
newspaper journalist. He wrote on eastern Europe for the Financial Times and
the Sunday Times before joining the Daily Telegraph, where he was Defence
Correspondent and covered a number of wars and international conflicts.

He reported on the 1991 Gulf War and various conflicts in the Balkans -
twice going into Kosovo under fire to meet up with the Kosovo Liberation
Army during the 1999 war. More recently, he has reported the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. He now writes on defence and security issues for the
Sunday Times and New Statesman.

He is an expert on special forces and intelligence with extremely good
contacts inside Britain's intelligence and special forces community and a
track record of breaking stories that have previously been kept top secret.
This was graphically demonstrated with the so-called Downing Street Memos,
which showed how President George W Bush and Tony Blair agreed to use
military force to bring about regime change in Iraq in April 2002 -
something that was illegal under international law - more than six months
before votes in either Congress or the UN were deemed to have authorised the
allied invasion.

Smith is the author of a number of books on intelligence and special
operations including The Spying Game: The Secret History of British
Espionage, which revealed details of how MI6 and members of the British
Special Boat Service were operating inside Basra throughout the 2003 war in
Iraq. His other books include the UK number one bestseller Station X: The
Codebreakers of Bletchley Park; The Emperor's Codes: Bletchley Park and the
Breaking of Japan's Secret Ciphers; and Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000
Jews, which led to Israeli recognition of the former MI6 officer Frank Foley
as Righteous Among Nations, the same award granted to Oskar Schindler and
Raoul Wallenberg. 

http://www.michaelsmithwriter.com/books_special.html