Investigative Journalist and Best-Selling Author
Books by Michael Smith - Bletchley Park and Codebreaking
When I was first asked by a fellow author whether I was interested in writing a book on Bletchley Park I dismissed the idea as a non-starter. I was rather embarrassed a few weeks later to be offered the contract to write the book of a Channel 4 television series on Bletchley Park, entitled simply Station X, the codename given to Bletchley by MI6.
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Bletchley Park

Britain's codebreakers first arrive at Bletchley Park, their wartime home
The producers of Station X carried out a large number of interviews with former codebreakers. While much of this material ended up on the cutting room floor, I was able to use a great deal of it in the book. I also used my own research from the Public Record Office (now known as the National Archive).
Colossus

Colossus, the first electronic computer, built to break German enciphered teleprinter traffic

 Station X was a huge success for Channel 4 and its producers Darlow Smithson and the hunger to know more about the fascinating work carried out at BP, as it was known to insiders, and the effect this had on the war sent the book Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park to the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Some non-starter!
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But there was considerable disappointment among some of those who worked at Bletchley during the war that Station X did not cover the work carried out against the Japanese codes and ciphers. The led to the follow-up book: The Emperor's Codes: Bletchley Park and the Breaking of Japan's Secret Ciphers.

At the time, it was the accepted wisdom that American codebreakers broke the bulk of the Japanese codes and ciphers. But The Emperor's Codes drew on files newly released to the Public Record Office to show that in fact most were originally broken by British codebreakers.

The files also revealed something else. The British codebreakers might have made the first breaks but US technological capabilities ensured that thereafter it was the Americans who stayed ahead of the game, easily leading in the battle to track down changes to the Japanese codes and ciphers.

This led to astonishingly bitter rows as some short-sighted US officials refused to share their achievements with the British, their main ally in the war against both the Germans and the Japanese. The rows over the lack of American cooperation on Japanese ciphers came close to stymieing the closest intelligence exchange arrangement the world has ever known, the UKUSA accord, which even now ensures that GCHQ, Bletchley Park's successor, and its US equivalent the NSA share both their coverage of the world and virtually all the intelligence they produce.
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I owed a great debt of thanks in my research on Bletchley Park to the work and knowledge of Ralph Erskine, a retired lawyer who is one of the leading experts on cryptography during the Second World War. This led to our collaboration in another book Action This Day: Bletchley Park from the Breaking of the Enigma Code to the Birth of the Modern Computer.

Action This Day was a reference to Churchill's famous edict in October 1941, on learning that Bletchley Park did not have the resources they needed to do their work. This was a very apt title, because the book was published in part to raise funds for the attempts to turn Bletchley Park into a fitting memorial to its wartime role. Action This Day is a collection of essays including chapters by a number of former codebreakers and leading British and American historians on the work of the Government Code and Cypher School, as it was originally known. They include the late Hugh Foss describing how he had originally broken the German Enigma machine cipher during the 1920s while testing it to see whether it was suitable for use by the British military and embassies abroad.
 Enigma Machine

A German army three-rotor Enigma machine
Other essays include David Alvarez on the assistance the British gave to the US on breaking diplomatic codes and ciphers and Shaun Wylie on how he and other codebreakers broke German teleprinter ciphers using Colossus, the world's first electronic computer, based on theories developed by Alan Turing, perhaps the most famous of the British codebreakers.
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One of the most controversial aspects of Bletchley Park's wartime role concerns the interception of messages relating to the Holocaust. Professor Richard Breitman argued in his bestselling book Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew that Bletchley Park simply hoarded the intelligence it collected on the German police massacres of Jews, and others, during the 1941 advance into the Soviet Union.

This is simply not true as I showed in a chapter written for the book Understanding Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century: Journeys in the Shadows, edited by Professor Len Scott and Peter Jackson of the University of Wales. Prof Breitman is one of the leading authorities on the Holocaust. Official Secrets is a powerful, compelling and thoroughly depressing narrative of what by any measure must count as one of the most cruel deeds ever committed by man against his fellow man but my chapter, entitled simply Bletchley Park and the Holocaust, shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Prof Breitman's central thesis that both Bletchley Park and Churchill effectively covered up the killings is deeply flawed and in fact just plain wrong.
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Praise for Michael Smith's Bletchley Park books:

Station X

'I'm delighted and astonished by Station X. Michael Smith has caught so well the mixture of nuttiness, angst, hard slog, irritation and euphoria.'
Susan Wenham, former Bletchley codebreaker who worked on Enigma in Hut 6

'Gives a more comprehensive picture of the wartime activities of myself and my colleagues than any other book on Bletchley Park.'
Jimmy Thirsk, former intelligence analyst at Station X

The Emperor's Codes

'Tells the full riveting story of the breaking of the Japanese codes. An enthralling tale, the stuff of John le Carre or Robert Harris, but true.'
Martin Booth, Daily Telegraph

'Smith writes a real-life thriller that unfolds like a classic spy story. An engrossing and exciting recounting of an obscure but important facet of World War II'
Booklist

Action This Day

'This gem offers a pleasing combination of scholarship and memoirs'
Mark E Sout, The CIA's Studies in Intelligence

'Historians of World War II and the SIGINT buffs will be very grateful to the two editors for taking on the great work of compiling this collection of papers which greatly extends our knowledge about the work done at BP.'
Jurgen Rohwer, Journal of Intelligence History

Visit The Bletchley Park Trust

The Emperors Codes
Book cover for Action This Day
Book cover for the bestselling Station C: the codebreakers of Bletchley Park