Smith, Michael. "Old Spies Meet to Swap Trade Secrets."
Electronic Telegraph, 14 Sep. 1999. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
Smith, Michael. "Old Spies Meet to Swap Trade Secrets."
Electronic Telegraph, 14 Sep. 1999. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
At a seminar in Berlin of former intelligence officers from both East and West, "the British media's pre-occupation" with Melita Norwood "was seen as rather parochial. The main focus was on the extent of Soviet Intelligence operations in the West, and particularly in America, that the files smuggled out of the KGB's Yasenovo headquarters provided."
[UK/SpyCases/99/Fever]
Smith, Michael. "The Oxford Chemist in SOE Plot to
Kill Hitler." Electronic Telegraph, 24 Jul. 1998. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
It was Bertie Blount "who suggested using anthrax to kill Hitler." He "was an Intelligence Corps major attached to the Special Operations Executive."
[UK/WWII/SOE]
Smith,
Michael. "Russians Had Third Major Spy Network
in Britain." Electronic Telegraph, 14 Jan. 1998. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
KGB files made available to The Telegraph "show that Soviet intelligence had a third major spy network in Britain, separate from the Cambridge and Oxford rings. The so-called Green ring was run by the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence...
"The Green Ring was built up by Oliver Green, a printer who was recruited by Soviet military intelligence while serving with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. He began recruiting the network after returning to Britain in 1938....
"[Although] Green's network never achieved the spectacular success of its KGB rival, it was well-trained and highly professional.... All the agents recruited by Green were British subjects. They included [a] government official, a number of soldiers, a worker at an aviation plant, a merchant seaman and a pilot."
[UK/SpyCases/Other]
Smith, Michael. "The Spies: Russia Still the Main
Concern for Britain." Electronic Telegraph, 8 May 1996. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
"Britain's intelligence requirements are still dominated by the former Soviet Union.... Although Russia is no longer seen as a direct military threat to Britain, the break-up of the Soviet bloc has produced new, more urgent intelligence priorities."
[UK/PostCW/Gen]
Smith, Michael. "Spy Chiefs in Call to Halt Rimington."
Electronic Telegraph, 20 May 2000. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
"The heads of both security services and the Cabinet Secretary have told the Government that they want a ban on publication of memoirs by Stella Rimington, MI5's former director-general.... The requests for a ban were made in separate approaches by Stephen Lander, Dame Stella's successor at MI5, Richard Dearlove, his counterpart at MI6, and Sir Richard Wilson, the Cabinet Secretary."
[UK/PostCW/00/Rimington]
Smith,
Michael. "Spy Chiefs Face Fight to Save Secrets."
Electronic Telegraph, 15 Jan. 2001. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
"Publication [of Tomlinson's book] could not come at a worse time for the security services, which face a sustained battle in the courts to defend their secrets. Arguing against publication of Tomlinson's memoirs will be made more difficult by the decision of Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, the domestic security service, to publish her memoirs."
[UK/PostCW/Tomlinson]
Smith, Michael. The Spying Game: The Secret History of British Espionage. London: Politico Publishing, 2004. [pb]
claclair, AFIO WIN 6-04 (6 Mar. 2004), notes that this "paperback edition is a completely revised and updated version" of New Cloak, Old Dagger (1996). The reviewer adds that "[t]he one criticism to be made is the lack of notes on sources, an omission the author ascribes to a trade-off insisted upon by the publisher in order to produce the paperback edition."
For Kruh, Cryptologia 28.2, "[t]his is an excellent and fascinating book ... that belongs in your personal library."
[UK/Overviews/00s]
Smith, Michael. "Spy Lesson No 1: Don't Lose Your
Laptop." Electronic Telegraph, 29 Mar. 2000. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
"Details of MI6 techniques -- 'tradecraft' -- stored in a laptop computer that was left in a taxi were not encrypted and could have been read by anyone."
[UK/PostCW]
Smith, Michael. "Spymasters Hit at Czech Ministers
Over MI6 'Outing.'" Electronic Telegraph, 18 Feb. 1999. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
Oldrich Cerny, the former head of the Czech foreign intelligence service (UZSI), and Stanislav Devaty, his former counterpart at the Czech Security and Intelligence Office (BIS), "have hit out at the country's Social Democrat government over the 'outing' of the homosexual head of MI6 in Prague.... Both men pointed to the painstaking way in which they had developed close relationships with their British counterparts in the years since the fall of communism only to see their efforts destroyed by Prague's inability to keep secrets.
"The row broke earlier this month when a Czech television station broadcast the name, address and sexual orientation of Mr. Hurran.... Cerny regretted that so much of the press coverage focused on the fact that Mr. Hurran was the [British] service's first openly homosexual head of station.... Hurran is likely to be kept in place for the time being. MI6 insists that his work has not been seriously damaged.... But the former army officer has been in Prague for two years and would in any case be due a posting soon."
[OtherCountries/Czech; UK/PostCW/90s/99]
Smith, Michael. "Spy School Will Take Fee-Paying Foreign
Agents." Electronic Telegraph, 25 Oct. 1996. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
"A new training base for all three [military] Services ... is being set up at Chicksands.... The new military intelligence agency ... [is] known as the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre (DISC)." Units that will be based at Chicksands come from the Army's Intelligence Corps headquarters, including the "Joint Services Intelligence Organisation, which trains interrogators, and those who may need to resist their measures, such as MI6, the SAS and the Special Boat Service"; "the Defence Special Signals School, a combination of the Army, Navy and RAF units which trains servicemen to work with the GCHQ secret listening centre at Cheltenham"; the Joint School of Photographic Interpretation; and the Defence Intelligence and Security School.
[UK/PostCW/Gen]
Smith, Michael. Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park. London: Channel 4 Books/Macmillan, 1998.
According to Kruh, Cryptologia 23.3 & 24.1, Smith "provides an engaging history" of Station X from the summer of 1939 to June 1946. The "work is distinguished by [the author's] widespread use of 'first hand' comments, descriptions, reports, and personal stories from the people who were there."
West, IJI&C 12.4, calls Station X "a highly readable, if short, historiography of life at Bletchley Park."
A Publisher's Weekly, 20 Dec. 1999, reviewer says that "this page-turner is a deeply satisfying parable of the power of humane intellect to defeat evil; it's also a stunning re-creation of one of the most important chapters in the war."
For Steury, I&NS 15.4, "there is little here that will be new to the serious student of intelligence history." The author "seems reasonably sound concerning events in Bletchley Park.... [But he] becomes unreliable when he strays outside the estate." The reviewer concludes that "[a] book this superficial might prove useful for a high-school research paper, but will have little value for more serious study."
[UK/WWII/Ultra]
Smith, Michael. "Tales of Fear and Loathing in the
Service." Electronic Telegraph, 25 Aug. 1997. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
David Shayler's "allegations of MI5 drunkenness and Right-wing paranoia ... will undoubtedly cause immense embarrassment to those charged with giving it a new image. But they are largely the same allegations that led Mrs Thatcher to order a complete shake-out of the organisation in the mid-1980s."
[UK/PostCW/Shayler]
Smith, Michael. "Why MI5 Ignored Small Fish in a Big
Plot." Electronic Telegraph, 13 Sep. 1999. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
"The disclosure that an 87-year-old woman ... was a valuable KGB agent has been accompanied by understandable astonishment at the failure of the authorities to prosecute her. But the suggestions that Melita Norwood was one of the KGB's top spies are very far from the truth and it seems likely that the decision not to prosecute her was made on more sensible grounds than at first seem likely."
[UK/SpyCases/99/Fever]
Smith, Michael, and Christy Campbell. "Real-life Goldfinger
Whose Roubles Paid for MI6 Spies." Electronic Telegraph, 24
May 1998. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
Mandel Goldfinger "smuggled Swiss gold watches in and out of post-war Berlin to fund a crucial British intelligence operation.... The ... operation, codenamed 'Junk', ran smoothly until the mid-1950s when it was blown by George Blake,... according to a retired MI6 officer who has told [the] story of the real-life Goldfinger on the condition of anonymity."
[UK/Postwar/Gen]
Smith, Michael, and John Crossland. "Himmler 'Bartered
Jews' for Safety." Electronic Telegraph, 17 Sep. 1999. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk]
"Heinrich Himmler tried to sell 3,500 Jews to Switzerland in return for five million Swiss francs and a promise of political asylum for 200 top Nazis.... The plot was hatched as the Allies closed in on Germany at the end of the war.... The scheme, orchestrated by Obergruppenfuhrer Walter Schellenberg, Himmler's intelligence chief, is contained in his personal MI5 file released to the Public Record Office."
[UK/WWII/MI5/DocRel]
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