Michael Smith (1)Reseñas

The Spying Game Smith (defense correspondent, Daily Telegraph ) presents a survey of the history and activities of the British intelligence services. He describes their early roots, their modern foundations in World War II, and their Cold War activities. Also of interest are discussions of their activities in Afghanistan over the past three decades and some treatment of the "dodgy dossiers" used to justify the A... Full description

Not much new here as I have already read quite a few books on this topic. The newest parts to me had to do with the personal relationships amongst the workers and the introduction of the Americans late into the decrypting activities of Bletchley Park.

really interesting. The coolest of the cool stuff. at least there are units out there like this getting it done. Gives some hope for the Army as a whole

I found this to be a decently informative overview of the Allied code breaking effort on the Japanese codes, but I could not help feeling like something was missing. The book never came alive for me in the way that creative non-fiction books by writers such as Erik Larson, Steven Johnson, or Simon Winchester do. I felt like I was reading a school paper that went through everything that happened in order. Everything was there but it was inert. I also felt like the author's stated opinion that the Americans get too much credit for breaking these codes and the British too little informed his writing a little too much. There were points where it seemed like he had just told us the Americans had done all this great work and he would then say that the British really deserve credit for it. Odd. It was very interesting to read about these efforts, clearly much more ink has been spilled over the breaking of the ENIGMA machine code, and I think it is important to remember this story also. I'm just not sure this is the best book to do so.

Good book about one of the best British spies in WWII. A little dull and dry but good history.½

A very interesting book. Interesting and fascinating, but still lacking something. The book describes people and events and methods at Bletchley Park during the second world war. Bletchley Park was where German, Italian and Japanese codes were broken, where messages were deciphered and interpreted and employed up to 10000 people at the end of the war. It was also where the first computer (Colossus) was built.

As you can guess, there is no lack of stories to tell, or is there? It seems the British security was so successful that few knows what was going on and by now most of the people that worked there has died. The British let the Americans take the credit for most of the accomplishments while they returned to their post-war jobs.

There are people here that could probably fill books but are just sidenotes. There are inter-country and inter-department disputes. There are love stories and love children. There are brilliant minds in crazy people's bodies. All this are touched but never studied in depth. Because of lack of materials or because of lack of space I don't know.

Still, this is the best book I've read about what was going on at Station X (where X is the roman numeral 10 I now know), i.e. Bletchley Park.

One thing that struck me because it's still true is that all the theoretically safe cryptos were broken because they were used the wrong way. Because the text in them could be predicted or because the operator leaked information. For instance the German operator that sent a message of just LLLLLLLL....LLL. This is still true with todays online crypto. In theory they are safe but sometimes there is that one bug in the implementation that means that an implementation has 65000 different keys instead of billions of them.

The successful secrecy is another thing to remember. When you have broken a crypto that everyone uses, the last thing you want is for anyone to know about it. So if cryptos today are broken, they will not use it to charge someone that has killed 2 people in a shootout. It will be used for the big things. War. Diplomacy.

A who's who of the codebeakers of WWII who were based at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, about 50 miles North of London. A collection of the brightest brains gathered to pit themselves against ingenious cyphers of the enemy, especially the German Enigma machine. They started with a few hundred people and pencils to a peak of 8995 in 1945 utilising electro mechanical bombes and Colossus computers. Amazing commitment and dedication shaving years off the war.

Bletchley Park has been credited with shortening the length of World War 2 by around two years. Much has been written about the brilliance of the code breakers like Turing, who used a combination of cunning, sheer mental ability and cutting-edge technology to break the secret codes of the Nazi Enigma machines, as well as the Italians and the Japanese armies cyphers. The museum has recently secured monies to revamp the visitor centres and is aiming to renovate and revamp the place to raise visitor numbers to 250,000 a year.

One aspect of the twelve thousand people that worked there has been overlooked somewhat, was that nine thousand of them were women. Originally these were debutantes from the aristocracy, hence the title, who were bought in because they could be trusted; but as the sheer amount of work grew exponentially they then drew women from all walks of life to help with the work load. They were not there just to fulfil administrative roles, but played a significant part in the running of the place, from the mathematical geniuses who worked as code breakers and who worked at the same level as Turing and Dilly, there are those that wrote strings of numbers down all day every day, to the essential positions of drivers and indexers.

Smith has brought together all these stories into one volume, weaving personal anecdotes and tales of their specific roles there with a wider narrative of how the war was progressing and their significant successes against the Nazis as the war progressed. He has written other books on the subject too, and occasionally this did feel like I was reading one of his earlier books. It is still a fascinating story though, and a fitting tribute to the essential work that these women did.

56 pages and you know all there is to know about Enigma with laughs and tongue in cheek thrown in for free.

Born in 1884 to a Catholic couple in Highbridge, a town in Somerset, Smith early on decided he wanted to study to be a priest. His rail worker father thought it was a waste of a bright mind. Fighting in the Great War made him question his faith.

After the war, he joined the secret service and eventually ended up in Berlin disguised as a Passport Control Officer while he real task was to set up a spy ring that gathered intelligence on the Nazis. As a man with a kind heart, he could not ignore the plight of Jews and other dissidents and used his power to grant visas to whisk both out of the country to safety often against British Government policy. Sending Jews to Palestine was one of these polices he broke regularly.

Once the war started, he went to Norway to set up a similar spy system and used Norway's proximity to Germany to obtain info from his German sources which was often ignored by his government & military leaders. Once Norway fell to Germany, he went home to England where one of his first duties was monitor the Nazi Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolph Hess. Once he realize Hess was insane, he found that job a bore. After the war he ended up in Germany tracking down war criminals.

A nice man which apparently was rare in the intelligence service, he retired into a quiet life. He never receive the accolades he deserved from Israel partly because many of the Jews he rescued did not know he had organized it.

I am always fascinated by books that describe what it was like to live in Germany during the reign of the Nazis This book clearly paints that picture.

An interesting account of both life at Bletchley Park as well as techniques used to break some non - Enigma codes and cyphers. The emphasis here is not on famous people, such as Turing, but rather on those working "in the trenches." Also included is a history of British code breaking between the two world wars as well as during the Cold War.

Really enjoyed this. Very well researched with a good sense of narrative despite the huge amount of first-hand accounts and general historical detail. At first I struggled to keep track of all of the people but then I realised it didn't really matter if you remembered who was who! Hugely interesting and well executed.½

Between 1939 and 1945, the work done in extreme secrecy at Bletchley Park made a massive contribution to the Allied war effort. During the peak of the work, almost thee-quarters of the people working at Bletchley were women. In this book, Michael Smith shares the stories and realities of the women who worked tirelessly to help break encryptions, translate messages, and pass along intelligence. Using interviews with the women themselves, Smith provides an insightful picture into the highly varied work these women did and the important contribution they made to the war. Filled with historical context as well as the anecdotes from the women who spent years at Bletchley, the book is a fascinating read filled with moments of humour and pathos as the women share their experiences in their own words.

The story of a low-profile intelligence organization known variously as the Activity and the Army of Northern Virginia, starting with the debacle involving the hostage rescue operation in Iran and taking it up to the death of Osama bin Laden. The Activity is the point of the sword...operatives who gather the intelligence that is needed for planning special operations missions. This is done through radio detection, electronic tracking, satellite surveillance, and other means, not the least of which is actually infiltrating agents into the area to check on things first-hand. The multi-star brass, as has ever been the case, had little or no use for special operations and it wasn't until Donald Rumsfeld and the war in Iraq that they came fully into their own. You can't argue with success...Osama bin Laden was pinpointed and killed. Along the way, the Activity gathered intelligence that led to the death of cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar, provided ignored security analysis that could've helped save the Marines killed in the Beirut barracks bombing, and assisted in numerous other ways. The bin Laden story is played up big but is a couple chapters, however succinct and descriptive. Good book.

When you hear of Bletchly Park you hear about the great men - Turing., Welchman, Dilly Knox, Tommy Flowers. This book brings to the fore some of th emany women who worked there - and despite its title they weren't all of privileged backgrounds. The work they did was very varied, from typex operators, to Bombe machine operators, to linguists, to intelligence analysts, to codebreakers, but the thing they had in common was they all worked extremely hard and were very proud of their contributions. It's great to see the women of Bletchly Park having threir roles fully acknowleged in this book.½

The Americans, English, Australians, and the Canadian codebreakers helped turn the tide in WWII in the Pacific against the Japanese.

Sadly out of print, but the fascinating story of Patrick Heenan, a British Captain in the British Indian Army who spied for Japan in Malaya in 1941.

He radioed information on aircraft movements. Unclear as to his motives, but he did spend 6 months in Japan in the late 30s as a "long leave" (an Indian Army tradition).

A gripping but very readable introduction to the rarefied secret world of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park and their incredibly important work. Go there if at all possible and read this book on the way!

A good overview of the struggle to gain information behind the Japanese Empire approaching and during World War II. The book is filled with personal accounts which make it very personal. Thinking the Pacific War was mostly an American endeavor I learned more about the front in southeast Asia than I had ever been taught. The book does seem to follow a repetitive pattern which can be tedious; move, gather intelligence, crack a code (or almost), codes change, move or start all over. O, and bicker with the Americans.

The repetitive nature of the story is probably has more to do with the nature of the material; code cracking is a boring and repetitive task with lots of work for, what is often, very little. And cryptography uses abstract mathematical concepts most are quite without the background to understand. So those who know cryptography will probably be disappointed in the lack of detail, what detail does exists frustrates the rest. For the difficulty of the material I probably dock a star.

All in all I enjoyed the overview of the Pacific theater of the war and learning more about all the effort which was put into intelligence to bring it to a close.½

I've read over a dozen books about Bletchley Park, the peculiar place and collection of people who helped defeat the Nazis by codebreaking the unbreakable Enigma machine. What a story. And this very personal narrative of the people and events of that amazing operation was a great look at both the scale of the challenge and the powerful role that literally thousands of people made in this critical operation that may well have affected the outcome of the war. At the very least, Bletchley shorted the war hugely, and the team and the organization -- oh so terribly British!

This book is not about a group of highly skilled group of commandos that go to bad places and do bad things,as the name might indicate. It is about a small group that gathers intelligence for Delta force and SEAL Team Six. This group was reportedly involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the hunt for Saddam's sons and tracking down al-Zarqawi.

If you enjoy the television show, "The Unit," then this book will introduce you to the background and history of military units of that type. While The Killer Elite contains very little in the way of in-depth information on specific actions, this broad overview is extremely informative. Reading it provided me with answers to many of the questions I had regarding the intel gathering aspects of the Special Forces.½

Contains an error on page 47: the year mentioned should be 1944, nót 1945.