Sydney Morning Herald : Police try to unlock secrets of murdered British spy

Police try to unlock secrets of murdered British spy

Paola Totaro | August 27, 2010

IT BEARS all the hallmarks of a Cold War thriller - an athletic recluse living in a chic London flat, a mystery job working with codes and a violent death at the hands of strangers.

The murder of Gareth Williams, 30, a communications officer seconded to the British intelligence service from GCHQ, the UK's leviathan eavesdropping centre, has thrust a very private life into the glare of the public spotlight.

The man was found in his top-floor Pimlico apartment on Tuesday night. His body, probably decomposing for up to two weeks, was stuffed into a large sports holdall that had been placed in the bath. Reports that he had been stabbed and dismembered have been denied, but police appear to have confirmed that his mobile telephone was found carefully laid out alongside several SIM cards.

Speculation that he had been murdered because of his work erupted immediately. For the past few years, the man had worked with GCHQ, a 5000-strong organisation in Cheltenham that eavesdrops on global communications and monitors the terrorist threat.

But during the past year he had moved to London and it was colleagues at MI6, just across the Thames from his flat, that reported the man missing.

It is not clear what he was working on, but the apartment has been described as a far cry from the granny flat he had lived in at Cheltenham and to which he was to return on September 3.

His imminent return to the little flat near GCHQ has now been linked to the possibility that Mr Williams's death may have been rather more banal and the result of a jealous lover.

And yet the spy connection continues amid revelations that the Pimlico apartment - rented to a succession of people with Cheltenham GCHQ links - was owned by a company registered in the British Virgin Islands called New Rodina, the term for motherland in Russia.

Neighbours include former Conservative home secretaries Sir Leon Brittan and Michael Howard.

The man's long-time Cheltenham landlady, Jenny Elliott, 71, has spent the past 48 hours talking to the press, describing the perfect tenant: quiet, reclusive and seemingly without friends. ''All I heard was a tape recorder being rewound or listened to over and over,'' she told The Independent.

''He was an extremely intelligent person but would not talk about his job, as it was a secret. All he told me was it was something to do with codes,'' she told The Daily Telegraph.

Mr Williams was a maths graduate who began a master's in advanced mathematics at St Catherine's College, Cambridge. His family described him as brilliant.

In 2001, during his master's, he failed an exam and left the course, and immediately began working at GCHQ, apparently seconded to MI6 a year ago.

His parents, from Anglesey, flew back from a foreign holiday to identify their son's body. A post mortem, including toxicology tests, is under way.

Police will only described the man's death as ''suspicious and unexplained''. Inquiries are focusing not only on his work but his lifestyle. It is believed he was on annual leave during the period he was missing, perhaps explaining the long time for his disappearance to be reported.

His landlady said he had told her he wanted to come back to Cheltenham because he ''missed the countryside''.