Profile: MI6 spy Gareth Williams
May 8, 2012
The inquest into the death of MI6 employee Gareth Williams, whose body was found in a padlocked sports bag in his central London flat in August 2010, found that he was "on the balance of probabilities" unlawfully killed.
But what is known about the 31-year-old code-breaker - described by his family as "a very private person"?
Mr Williams, originally from Holyhead, north Wales, worked as a communications officer at government listening post GCHQ, in Cheltenham, but was on a three-year secondment to MI6 in London.
Police officers went to his MI6-owned top-floor flat at 36 Alderney Street - in a part of Pimlico described by a neighbour as "a very mixed area of bankers and politicians" - on Monday 23 August.
They went there after colleagues contacted the police earlier that day saying they had not seen Mr Williams for at least 10 days.
They found his naked body, which had been padlocked inside a zipped-up large red North Face sports holdall, in the empty bath of an ensuite bathroom of the master bedroom.
Police, who have repeatedly said the death remains "suspicious and unexplained", now believe he died in the early hours of Tuesday 16 August.
Mr Williams, a keen cyclist who often took part in road races and time trials, was brought up on the island of Anglesey and attended Bodedern High School.
A talented pupil, he graduated from Bangor University with a first class degree in maths aged 17 after beginning his university studies while at secondary school.
His maths teacher at Bodedern, Geraint Williams, has praised Gareth as an "exceptional" pupil who was "the best logician" he had met.
"If you explained something once to Gareth he remembered it, you didn't have to explain it again," he said.
"It didn't surprise me at all that he was very interested in codes and ciphers and it didn't really surprise me that he was recruited by GCHQ.
"He was definitely going to go into something like that, with his brain."
'Loving son'
Mr Williams went on to study for a postgraduate certificate in mathematics at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, in 2000, but dropped out a year later before taking up the job at GCHQ in Cheltenham.
His boss there has spoken of him as a "world-class" intelligence officer and "something of a prodigy".
Stephen Gale said it was "quite remarkable" that Mr Williams - who joined GCHQ aged 21 - had achieved what he had at such a young age.
Mr Gale said: "Colleagues recall a young man who was very close to his father - he spoke about their climbing trips together.
"They remember him as a keen cyclist. One colleague said it was like a red bullet flying around the place."
In the days after his death, his family described Mr Williams in a statement as a "generous, loving son, brother, and friend" whose loss had devastated them.
They remembered him as "a great athlete" who "loved cycling and music", and as "a very private person".
He often returned home to Anglesey to mother Ellen and father Ian, who works at the Wylfa Nuclear Power Station.
Keith Thompson, of Holyhead Cycling Club - joined by Mr Williams at the age of 17 - said he had last seen the "lovely young man" at a club meeting on Boxing Day.
"We were club mates but Gareth wasn't the sort to go to the pub after a race, so he didn't have any close friends in the group," he said.
And a cyclist at Cambridge University's bicycle club described Mr Williams as "a shy chap" with a "peculiarly memorable laugh and smile".
Mr Williams' uncle, Anglesey councillor William Hughes, meanwhile, said his "very talented" nephew "would never talk about his work - and the family knew not to ask, really".
A neighbour in Pimlico said he and others had never seen Mr Williams, adding: "It's not like you'd tell your neighbours if you were a spy."
Police 'did wrong'
In late December 2010, police revealed some "embarrassing, hurtful and distressing" details about Mr Williams which they said was necessary in the search for evidence.
They said he owned £15,000-worth of unworn women's designer clothing, which were kept in six boxes at his flat, and that he had visited a drag cabaret in east London four days before his death and had tickets to two more.
Police said he occasionally spent between 30 minutes and an hour on bondage sites.
They also said a witness had reported seeing him in a gay bar but that they did not know for certain he was gay.
However, in April 2011 Mr Williams' close friend Sian Lloyd-Jones questioned suggestions his death was linked to his private life and called on police to broaden their inquiry.
She told the police "did wrong" by releasing information about women's clothing "but didn't reveal that there was £10,000 of mountaineering equipment as well".
Ms Lloyd-Jones said he was not gay and the women's clothes were too small for him and may have been intended for her or her sister.
Elizabeth Guthrie - the second friend to appear before the coroner - described her friendship with Mr Williams as based on their mutual love of history, art, Japanese Manga cartoons, travel and humorous anecdotes.
Ms Guthrie remembered his "brilliant sense of humour" and "enormous intellect".
She also said the women's clothing found by police "certainly would not be for him" - that he had no interest in cross-dressing and she believed he was "straight".
Mr Williams' sister, Ceri Subbe, said she believed the items of women's clothing were possibly intended as gifts.
She also told the inquest her brother's enthusiasm about his job had begun to fade.
"He disliked office culture, post-work drinks, flash car competitions and the rat race. He even spoke of friction in the office," her statement said.
Ms Subbe added that Mr Williams had "encountered more red tape than he was comfortable with" in his role.
The inquest into the death of the MI6 officer later heard he was once found tied to his bed by his former landlady in Cheltenham.
Jennifer Elliot said she once found him tied to his bedstead in his boxer shorts in what she thought was a "sexually motivated" act. She said he had called for help when he could not untie himself.
'Dark arts'
Mr Williams returned to his flat - half a mile from MI6 headquarters on the banks of the River Thames - on Wednesday 11 August 2010 after a fly-drive holiday to the west coast of the US.
Police say he had been shopping in London's West End and Knightsbridge areas a number of times since then.
CCTV images captured on Saturday 14 August showed him entering Holland Park tube station at about 1500 BST.
On Sunday 15 August, he went to Harrods after visiting a cash machine and, at about 1430 BST, CCTV images showed him in Hans Crescent, heading towards Sloane Street, near the Dolce & Gabbana store.
A post-mortem examination and toxicology tests - which found no trace of drugs, alcohol or poison - and the police investigation have all failed to establish a cause of death.
Police believe that Mr Williams, whose family think may have been killed by an agent "specialising in the dark arts of the secret services", was helped into the bag.
Coroner Fiona Wilcox said it was unlikely he got into the bag by himself but doubted his death would ever be explained.
Showing posts with label Geraint Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Geraint Williams. Show all posts
BBC : Profile: MI6 spy Gareth Williams
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Filed under
Ceri Subbe,
dark arts,
Elizabeth Guthrie,
Geraint Williams,
inquest,
Jenny Elliot,
Keith Thompson,
Sian Lloyd-Jones,
Stephen Gale,
William Hughes
by Winter Patriot
on Tuesday, May 08, 2012 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
BBC : Talented MI6 spy Gareth Williams 'never spoke of work'
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Talented MI6 spy Gareth Williams 'never spoke of work'
December 22, 2010
An MI6 spy who was found dead in his central London flat was a talented young man who was close to his family, but would never speak to them about his work.
Gareth Williams, 31, from Holyhead on Anglesey, north Wales, was found dead in a padlocked holdall in his central London flat in August.
The death remains suspicious and unexplained with no conclusive cause found.
Mr Williams regularly went home to north Wales to visit his family.
His parents, Ian and Ellen, live in Valley, Anglesey, while his father works at Wylfa nuclear power station. His grandmother and grandfather lived in Holyhead.
His uncle, William Hughes, said his nephew had never spoken about his work.
"He was very, very talented," he added.
"He would never talk about his work and the family knew not to ask really."
Mr Williams' academic talent was evident at an early age, when he was a pupil at Bodedern Secondary School in Anglesey.
His maths teacher Geraint Williams said he had been an "exceptional" pupil.
'Very modest'
"He was probably not the best mathematician I have seen, but the best logician," he said.
"If you explained something once, he remembered it, you didn't have to explain it again."
While he was a secondary school pupil, Mr Williams was also being coached at Bangor University and graduated with a first class degree in maths at just 17.
In 2000, he took a postgraduate certificate in mathematics at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
He was then offered a job at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.
"It didn't surprise me at all that he was very interested in codes and ciphers," Geraint Williams said.
"It didn't really surprise me that he was recruited by GCHQ."
Mr Williams worked as a communication officer at GCHQ before being sent on secondment to MI6 for a year.
The head of MI6 Sir John Sawers described Mr Williams as a "highly talented person" who was "very modest and generous as well".
He added that Mr Williams had done "really valuable work with us in the cause of national security".
Mr Williams grew up as a keen cyclist and joined Holyhead Cycling Club when he was 17.
Keith Thompson, from the club, said: "He was a really lovely young man.
"We were club mates but Gareth wasn't the sort to go to the pub after a race, so he didn't have any close friends in the group.
"It was his cycling that we knew about. He was known for being very good on hill races but a couple of times he won the club's 'best all-rounder' award."
An inquest will be held at Westminster Coroner's Court on 15 February.
December 22, 2010
An MI6 spy who was found dead in his central London flat was a talented young man who was close to his family, but would never speak to them about his work.
Gareth Williams, 31, from Holyhead on Anglesey, north Wales, was found dead in a padlocked holdall in his central London flat in August.
The death remains suspicious and unexplained with no conclusive cause found.
Mr Williams regularly went home to north Wales to visit his family.
His parents, Ian and Ellen, live in Valley, Anglesey, while his father works at Wylfa nuclear power station. His grandmother and grandfather lived in Holyhead.
His uncle, William Hughes, said his nephew had never spoken about his work.
"He was very, very talented," he added.
"He would never talk about his work and the family knew not to ask really."
Mr Williams' academic talent was evident at an early age, when he was a pupil at Bodedern Secondary School in Anglesey.
His maths teacher Geraint Williams said he had been an "exceptional" pupil.
'Very modest'
"He was probably not the best mathematician I have seen, but the best logician," he said.
"If you explained something once, he remembered it, you didn't have to explain it again."
While he was a secondary school pupil, Mr Williams was also being coached at Bangor University and graduated with a first class degree in maths at just 17.
In 2000, he took a postgraduate certificate in mathematics at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
He was then offered a job at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.
"It didn't surprise me at all that he was very interested in codes and ciphers," Geraint Williams said.
"It didn't really surprise me that he was recruited by GCHQ."
Mr Williams worked as a communication officer at GCHQ before being sent on secondment to MI6 for a year.
The head of MI6 Sir John Sawers described Mr Williams as a "highly talented person" who was "very modest and generous as well".
He added that Mr Williams had done "really valuable work with us in the cause of national security".
Mr Williams grew up as a keen cyclist and joined Holyhead Cycling Club when he was 17.
Keith Thompson, from the club, said: "He was a really lovely young man.
"We were club mates but Gareth wasn't the sort to go to the pub after a race, so he didn't have any close friends in the group.
"It was his cycling that we knew about. He was known for being very good on hill races but a couple of times he won the club's 'best all-rounder' award."
An inquest will be held at Westminster Coroner's Court on 15 February.
Filed under
BBC,
Geraint Williams,
Holyhead,
inquest,
Keith Thompson,
padlocked,
Sir John Sawers,
William Hughes
by Winter Patriot
on Wednesday, December 22, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
Guardian : Who was Gareth Williams?
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Who was Gareth Williams?
When the bagged body of an MI6 agent was found in a bathtub, speculation went into overdrive. Was it suicide? Murder? A professional hit, or a sexual game gone wrong?
Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy | November 20, 2010
Three months after his body was found in a holdall in the bath of his Pimlico flat, police still seem no closer to finding out what happened to Gareth Williams.
On Tuesday 24 August, a storm was brewing off the North Wales coast. As gusts reached 50mph in the village of Valley, on Anglesey, two sodden police officers stood at a front door on a close of modern bungalows above the beach. They knocked and knocked. Eventually someone ran out into the rain to tell them that Ellen and Ian Williams were away on holiday in the US. While detectives tried to locate the Williams abroad, someone found Ellen's father, John Hughes, who lived around the corner and broke the news: his 31-year-old grandson Gareth, a boy who had always been fit and healthy, was dead. Grandpa John was so distraught that he tripped, cut his head and had to be taken to hospital.
Then Gareth's uncle, William Hughes, who lived on a farm in nearby Trefor village, got the call. "Gareth couldn't be dead? Surely not?" Uncle William sat numbly with Gareth's 86-year-old great aunt before their open fire, staring at the porcelain figures on the mantelpiece. Gareth had been an exceptional boy, selected to work as some kind of analyst for GCHQ, the government's secret listening station in Cheltenham, but the family never talked about it. And neither did Gareth. He'd been home just three weeks earlier, recalled Hughes, cycling the lanes on his race bike before the whole family had got together. But his life was "now being lived a long way from the family in Anglesey," Hughes said, "so some things we couldn't know."
On 25 August, Ian and Ellen Williams touched down at Manchester airport and were met by police, who officially broke the news that two days earlier in London, a man believed to be their son had been found dead. The body had been found padlocked inside a sports bag in the flat where Gareth was staying. It could have been there for up to a fortnight. As they were escorted to the capital, to join their daughter Ceri, there were news reports everywhere: "British spy murdered." Apparently he had been "stabbed to death". According to stories, Gareth was a brain-box, a techie who "worked with codes", as far as they knew. Was he also a spy, they wondered?
For Ellen and Ian, Gareth's death was a horror story that "destroyed" them. For the rest of the world, it was a rare glimpse into the clandestine world of espionage. His death was compared to that of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident killed by a poison-tipped umbrella in London 32 years before, and the 2006 murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. Cold war details increased public fervour. The building in which the body was found was owned by a private company, registered offshore, called New Rodina. Rodina was Russian for "motherland". Did real spies read John Le Carré too?
In the midst of lurid speculation, Ian and Ellen Williams reached London. In normal circumstances, they would be required to make a physical identification. However, given the degree of decomposition, police would rely on family photos. Was Gareth murdered, his distraught family asked. Despite launching a major investigation – Operation Finlayson – Scotland Yard were finding it a hard question to answer. One major problem facing investigators was the length of time that the body had lain undiscovered. Another was that they were being blocked by the security services from probing too deeply into Williams's life. Detectives had no idea what Gareth Williams really did or who he was, and had been unable as yet to find anyone close to him. They needed the family's help.
Gareth's sister Ceri, a physiotherapist, and her husband Dr Chris Subbe, a senior registrar at Wrexham Maelor Hospital, told police they had seen Gareth in June, when he had taken them for tea at the Ritz in London to celebrate their second wedding anniversary. He'd been in the capital for more than six months, but couldn't say what he was doing.
The three spent that afternoon "laughing and joking", and afterwards continued to talk frequently by phone. Ceri last spoke to her brother on 11 August, after he returned from a short trip to the US. He now intended to "tidy things up", before returning to GCHQ in Cheltenham on 3 September.
Ceri's dates matched what police learned from Gareth's former landlady, Jenny Elliot, who had rented him a room in her house near Cheltenham for the 10 years he had worked for GCHQ, before transferring to London last year. Gareth had called her in August, asking if he could return. "Like we were going to say no," Elliot says. "He was about the best lodger you could ever have. I mean, you never heard a word from him. He had no TV, record player, or anything."
Ceri had called her brother again about a week later. No answer. She tried repeatedly, becoming worried. Gareth was like a Swiss watch. Now she contacted the police; the security services were already concerned, as Gareth had failed to show for work. On 23 August, at 6.30pm, a uniformed officer was sent to Williams's top-floor flat in a Georgian townhouse in Alderney Street, Pimlico. It was only a few hundred yards from the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall, and was used by the Secret Intelligence Service as a safe house. A lettings agent who held a spare key showed the policeman in. He was asked to wait downstairs as the officer went up and entered the curtained rooms. The place was "spotless": two iPhones, some sim cards and an Apple notebook sat on a table. Then he entered the bathroom, and found a holdall in the bathtub. Red liquid seeped from it. Inside was a body, in such a contorted position that he thought its "legs and arms had been cut off". Radioing for assistance, the policeman noted that there were no signs a struggle. This was not a robbery or home invasion. It was a "neat job", a euphemism for a professional kill.
Given his clearances and access to classified material, Williams's death triggered alarm across Whitehall. MI5 agents swept through the Alderney Street flat, followed by detectives from the Homicide and Serious Crime Command, assisted by SO15, Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorism Command. Alderney Street was cordoned off as Home Office scientists began processing the scene. Once the spooks had departed, it was down to the murder squad to study the evidence. So far, they had a body in an "advanced state of decay". There was no weapon and no sign of forced entry or a struggle.
Concentrating on the holdall and its contents, detectives established that Williams had not been stabbed, shot or hacked to pieces. On August 25, Home Office pathologist Dr Ben Swift carried out a post-mortem that, together with the first batch of toxicological tests, came back "inconclusive". "If we don't know what to look for, and are not guided by what we see or smell on the body, we cannot find it," says a forensic scientist who worked on the Litvinenko case. "We do 50 obvious poisons. Fifty rare. We can do the isotopes. Litvinenko alerted us to that. But in the absence of a specific direction, the possibilities are as limitless as a killer's imagination… and we cannot test for that."
Detectives set out their theories. One reading of the crime scene pointed to a forensically aware hit man. Slender 5ft 7in Gareth had been stuffed inside the near-airtight red North Face sports bag and placed in the bath, containing any spillage and minimising odours, too. The heating was on, increasing the rate of decomposition, which significantly lessened the chances of retrieving evidence from the corpse.
Or perhaps the body in the bag was evidence of a stage-managed "personal event", masterminded by a controlling individual. Was this a suicide (with Williams acting on his own)? Or a sadistic or masochistic sexual act gone wrong (with Williams engaging in some kind of auto-erotic asphyxiation?). "If you can imagine it, then we are investigating it," a detective said in late August. But what would shape police inquiries was the dawning realisation that Gareth Williams had not been alone.
Returning to the holdall, studying the zips and lock, police became certain that he could not have locked himself inside. And there was further proof that someone else must have been in the flat with him: his front door had been locked from the outside.
Criminal psychologists studied the case. One, who spoke anonymously, thought his death might have been a masochistic ritual that had gone wrong: "For a retentive individual with an ever-green mind like Gareth Williams, always on duty and in control, the bag could have been a furtive release."
The Williams family was adamant that the Gareth they knew would not have behaved this way. And, for now, the family was all the police had, since they had found no close friends or lovers. Another pressing problem with their theories was that detectives had failed to turn up any other suspects or accomplices.
Police, pathologists and forensic investigators agreed on one thing only. They would have to focus on the 12 days between the last call Gareth made to Ceri and the discovery of his body on 23 August. Pulling mobile phone records and credit card transactions, scouring hours of CCTV footage, the Operation Finlayson team dug deep, as ever more lurid stories circulated.
"Murdered MI6 worker Gareth Williams was a secret transvestite who may have been killed by a gay lover, detectives said yesterday… Cops found women's clothing that would fit him at his Pimlico flat in central London." The Sun ran with this version of events, while other newspapers, quoting similar unnamed sources, reported that cocaine had been found, a cache of gay pornography, a small armoury of S&M paraphernalia. Williams was also said to have frequently paid for male escorts.
Senior detectives angrily rebutted the stories. Uncle William in Anglesey thought they read like a concerted smear, and wondered why anyone would want to destroy Gareth's reputation after he was dead.
Like most well-constructed character assassinations, however, this one was founded on a grain of fact that made it that much harder to quash. Detectives had been quietly investigating whether Gareth Williams was gay. They had canvassed witnesses in the Vauxhall Cross village of gay clubs and bars, a short walk from Alderney Street. They had also studied Williams's computers and reading matter, his journals, magazines and computer cache. Despite outright denials from his family, detectives were privately certain that Gareth was gay, although they had been unable to find trace of any sexual encounters. They had also come to believe that his sexual orientation was not central to the inquiry (although his sexual preferences might be). There was no evidence of Williams paying for escorts, buying S&M equipment, using porn or drugs of any kind. "This man didn't really even drink," one frustrated detective said.
The police felt they were being hurried along by other parties, keen for the scandal to go away. "Someone, somewhere, who has access to case material, is saying, 'He's queer and asked for it', rather than waiting for the outcome of the case," one veteran detective said.
In North Wales, the family lit their fires, closed their curtains and privately pondered if anyone had ever understood the real Gareth.
At Ysgol Gynradd Morswyn, Gareth's primary school, a short hop between Valley and Holyhead, head teacher Islwyn Williams remembers him as an exceptional pupil. At five, Gareth made a beeline for the school computer and never left it. While most of his classmates were still playing with Lego, Gareth had a GCSE in maths. At the age of 10, he went to secondary school, gaining A grades in A-level maths and computer science at 13. The school contacted Bangor University, which accepted him as a part-time student on a maths degree course. "He was the best logician… with the fastest brain I have ever met," said Geraint Williams, his maths teacher.
Fellow pupils remember Gareth as a loner. Dylan Parry, 34, thought him "isolated" by his intellect. His abilities shut him off from everyone else. He was naive. Parry believed someone "could easily take advantage of him". He recalled Gareth travelling by train each week to university, while still living at home with Ian and Ellen. Too clever for school. Too young for university.
The family downplay his isolation. They point to their closeness and his sporting prowess. By the time he was 17, Gareth had followed his father into competitive cycling. Keith Thompson, of Holyhead Cycling Club, with whom Ian and Gareth rode, says: "He was a really lovely young man, but wasn't a great conversationalist. Gareth wasn't the sort to go to the pub after a race."
In 1997, aged 18, Gareth left home to begin a PhD at Manchester University, acquiring an advanced level of learning that sat uneasily with his elementary life skills, although his academic mentor, professor Terry Hewitt, believed he could take it: "He was very private and worked well on his own. He was certainly not a 'geek' even if he was reserved." His dissertation focused on computer games. They had always been a private passion, with him achieving an online reputation as unbeatable. Three years on, aged 21, Gareth was approached by the British security services, who the university believes had spotted his precocious online gaming abilities. Hewitt recalled: "In 2000, Gareth came into my office and said, 'I'm going to GCHQ'. He had to tell me, as I was his referee for his vetting." Gareth left Manchester and Anglesey behind to sign the Official Secrets Act.
Williams began an advanced maths course at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, but withdrew the following year, torn between academia and the demands of his new employer. At GCHQ, he was seen as stable, reliable and potentially brilliant, according to a contractor who worked there at the time. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he recalled that GCHQ was a world in which Gareth fitted, working alone, or in small teams, waist-deep in mathematical problems, challenged by cutting-edge technology and real-time problems. Possibly for the first time, he was part of a community of similarly focused individuals who were taken on for their discretion as well as for their brains, intercepting, monitoring and analysing email and telephone calls from around the world. He did feel the pressure, constantly, according to the contractor, who noted that at GCHQ many technicians were as clever or cleverer than Williams.
Work became his life. There was little time for much outside it, something evidenced by how he chose to live, renting a modest room in the Prestbury area of the town. Inside was a single, child-sized bed, a small chest of drawers, three upright wooden chairs and a gas heater – all furnished by Jenny Elliot. Over the decade he spent there, Williams introduced no luxuries, accumulated no clutter. He brought no one back. He rarely even went out after work, excepting an occasional "drink with colleagues". He worked late into the night and rose early. There was something oppressively austere about him, those colleagues thought, something they used to call his "GDR sensibility". So serious and quiet was he that when he did become animated, he "alarmed people with his unusual laugh".
Due to the nature of his work, it is hard for those who met Gareth to describe what he did, and those who talked to us did so having already left GCHQ. But all agreed that, although very capable, Williams was "a middle-ranking" technician "asserting himself in a number of sensitive areas, any one of which could theoretically have brought him into contact with enemies of our state". While GCHQ gathers intelligence from Europe, Africa and Russia, its partners in the US National Security Agency (NSA) also had access to British and European signals traffic at Menwith Hill, a top-secret RAF base near Harrogate, in Yorkshire.
When Williams arrived at Menwith, shortly after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, GCHQ and the NSA were increasingly focused on the threat of Islamist violence at home and abroad. "Between the UK and the US, we were deluged by the chatter from radicals here and over the Atlantic as they talked on landlines, satellite or mobile phones – with contacts in hot countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as with Saudi, and hubs like Dubai," one former GCHQ security consultant said. "A group around Williams worked on software to assemble, search and analyse the data, drawing out patterns and meanings."
Williams's elevation within GCHQ came with the "Liquid Bomb" plot, where a group of British radicals of Asian origin were found to be planning to detonate home-made explosives on board seven flights to major north American cities. Intercepting emails and phone calls between these plotters and their contacts abroad, Williams flew between the UK and the US, working at Fort Meade (the NSA HQ, in Baltimore).
Williams was brought into close proximity to US intelligence, Islamic radicals and Middle Eastern agents. He would rub shoulders with the Russians, too, according to a foreign intelligence analyst based in the UK, who described how technology and software honed by GCHQ was deployed in tracking a Moscow-backed sleeper cell to which Britain had been alerted as early as 2003. The case blew up in June 2010 when 10 people were arrested in the US and accused of being part of an espionage ring. One of them, a glamorous 28-year-old called Anna Chapman, had lived for five years in the UK. According to the former GCHQ contractor, "Williams had been obsessed by the case, its methodology and characters."
He was now on secondment to MI6, with its focus on foreign targets and intelligence-gathering, becoming more of a spy than a desk-bound technician, although Williams would shortly be called back to GCHQ to work on a new and ambitious project.
He had been liaising again with counterparts at the NSA, who were part of an effort to create an American cyber defence policy, to prevent the siphoning off of secret or commercially sensitive data or a military style assault on defence or civil systems. Its importance was alluded to last month in a speech by home secretary Theresa May, in which she identified cyber crime as among the pre-eminent future threats facing the UK. A cyber crimes specialist who knew Williams revealed that at the time of his death he was researching British vulnerability to Russian, Turkish and Chinese gangs: "He was already on top of it."
Rogue individuals and nation states, Islamist terror groups and radical loners, extortionists and organised criminals – these were just some of those Williams had observed, investigated, disrupted and provoked. Any one of them was capable of reciprocating, lethally.
Back at the Yard, Operation Finlayson detectives were looking at a vast range of potential threats, but still had few clues, no accomplices or even a plausible denouement for a man whose personal and professional inclinations were to camouflage everything he did.
By September, an exhaustive trawl had come up with some CCTV footage. In the frames released to the public, Gareth Williams saunters by Holland Park tube station in west London at 3pm on 14 August, three days after he had last spoken to his sister.
Staff at the nearby Valerie's Patisserie said that in the week before, a man fitting Gareth's description had spent several hours in the cafe on consecutive days, sitting at the rear with a laptop, receiving occasional visitors. One security source said that he believed Williams was "working" in west London – monitoring one of the many foreign embassies in the area – just as he had been "working" while on his recent "holiday" to the US.
Police released footage of Williams on 15 August, too. At 2pm, he was filmed at a cash machine, visiting Harrods, walking at 2.30pm via Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge towards Sloane Street. Soon after he vanished.
By the end of September, after a second barrage of toxicology tests proved inconclusive, Gareth Williams's body was released and laid to rest in North Wales. On 26 September, the extended Williams clan gathered outside the Bethel chapel in Holyhead to bid farewell. Given the florid rumours that had circulated around his death, they were surprised by the appearance there of Sir John Sawers, head of MI6. Williams had been with his service for less than a year, yet Sawyers told reporters, "I wanted to be here today as the only public face of the Secret Intelligence Service. My deepest sympathies go to the family. Gareth was a hugely talented person, and he was very modest and generous as well. He did really valuable work with us in the cause of national security."
What a difference 30 days make. After an investigation that had failed to turn up the smallest vice, Williams was no longer lampooned but celebrated as a very British spy: modest, capable and known well by no one.
As they buried Gareth, Dr Chris Subbe, speaking for his wife Ceri and the family, recalled how they had laughed and chatted with him at the Ritz, celebrating their marriage and his brilliant career. "The world was ours for the taking," he said. "Yet here I am three months later to the day, trying to describe your rich life with my poor words."
When the bagged body of an MI6 agent was found in a bathtub, speculation went into overdrive. Was it suicide? Murder? A professional hit, or a sexual game gone wrong?
Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy | November 20, 2010
Three months after his body was found in a holdall in the bath of his Pimlico flat, police still seem no closer to finding out what happened to Gareth Williams.
On Tuesday 24 August, a storm was brewing off the North Wales coast. As gusts reached 50mph in the village of Valley, on Anglesey, two sodden police officers stood at a front door on a close of modern bungalows above the beach. They knocked and knocked. Eventually someone ran out into the rain to tell them that Ellen and Ian Williams were away on holiday in the US. While detectives tried to locate the Williams abroad, someone found Ellen's father, John Hughes, who lived around the corner and broke the news: his 31-year-old grandson Gareth, a boy who had always been fit and healthy, was dead. Grandpa John was so distraught that he tripped, cut his head and had to be taken to hospital.
Then Gareth's uncle, William Hughes, who lived on a farm in nearby Trefor village, got the call. "Gareth couldn't be dead? Surely not?" Uncle William sat numbly with Gareth's 86-year-old great aunt before their open fire, staring at the porcelain figures on the mantelpiece. Gareth had been an exceptional boy, selected to work as some kind of analyst for GCHQ, the government's secret listening station in Cheltenham, but the family never talked about it. And neither did Gareth. He'd been home just three weeks earlier, recalled Hughes, cycling the lanes on his race bike before the whole family had got together. But his life was "now being lived a long way from the family in Anglesey," Hughes said, "so some things we couldn't know."
On 25 August, Ian and Ellen Williams touched down at Manchester airport and were met by police, who officially broke the news that two days earlier in London, a man believed to be their son had been found dead. The body had been found padlocked inside a sports bag in the flat where Gareth was staying. It could have been there for up to a fortnight. As they were escorted to the capital, to join their daughter Ceri, there were news reports everywhere: "British spy murdered." Apparently he had been "stabbed to death". According to stories, Gareth was a brain-box, a techie who "worked with codes", as far as they knew. Was he also a spy, they wondered?
For Ellen and Ian, Gareth's death was a horror story that "destroyed" them. For the rest of the world, it was a rare glimpse into the clandestine world of espionage. His death was compared to that of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident killed by a poison-tipped umbrella in London 32 years before, and the 2006 murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. Cold war details increased public fervour. The building in which the body was found was owned by a private company, registered offshore, called New Rodina. Rodina was Russian for "motherland". Did real spies read John Le Carré too?
In the midst of lurid speculation, Ian and Ellen Williams reached London. In normal circumstances, they would be required to make a physical identification. However, given the degree of decomposition, police would rely on family photos. Was Gareth murdered, his distraught family asked. Despite launching a major investigation – Operation Finlayson – Scotland Yard were finding it a hard question to answer. One major problem facing investigators was the length of time that the body had lain undiscovered. Another was that they were being blocked by the security services from probing too deeply into Williams's life. Detectives had no idea what Gareth Williams really did or who he was, and had been unable as yet to find anyone close to him. They needed the family's help.
Gareth's sister Ceri, a physiotherapist, and her husband Dr Chris Subbe, a senior registrar at Wrexham Maelor Hospital, told police they had seen Gareth in June, when he had taken them for tea at the Ritz in London to celebrate their second wedding anniversary. He'd been in the capital for more than six months, but couldn't say what he was doing.
The three spent that afternoon "laughing and joking", and afterwards continued to talk frequently by phone. Ceri last spoke to her brother on 11 August, after he returned from a short trip to the US. He now intended to "tidy things up", before returning to GCHQ in Cheltenham on 3 September.
Ceri's dates matched what police learned from Gareth's former landlady, Jenny Elliot, who had rented him a room in her house near Cheltenham for the 10 years he had worked for GCHQ, before transferring to London last year. Gareth had called her in August, asking if he could return. "Like we were going to say no," Elliot says. "He was about the best lodger you could ever have. I mean, you never heard a word from him. He had no TV, record player, or anything."
Ceri had called her brother again about a week later. No answer. She tried repeatedly, becoming worried. Gareth was like a Swiss watch. Now she contacted the police; the security services were already concerned, as Gareth had failed to show for work. On 23 August, at 6.30pm, a uniformed officer was sent to Williams's top-floor flat in a Georgian townhouse in Alderney Street, Pimlico. It was only a few hundred yards from the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall, and was used by the Secret Intelligence Service as a safe house. A lettings agent who held a spare key showed the policeman in. He was asked to wait downstairs as the officer went up and entered the curtained rooms. The place was "spotless": two iPhones, some sim cards and an Apple notebook sat on a table. Then he entered the bathroom, and found a holdall in the bathtub. Red liquid seeped from it. Inside was a body, in such a contorted position that he thought its "legs and arms had been cut off". Radioing for assistance, the policeman noted that there were no signs a struggle. This was not a robbery or home invasion. It was a "neat job", a euphemism for a professional kill.
Given his clearances and access to classified material, Williams's death triggered alarm across Whitehall. MI5 agents swept through the Alderney Street flat, followed by detectives from the Homicide and Serious Crime Command, assisted by SO15, Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorism Command. Alderney Street was cordoned off as Home Office scientists began processing the scene. Once the spooks had departed, it was down to the murder squad to study the evidence. So far, they had a body in an "advanced state of decay". There was no weapon and no sign of forced entry or a struggle.
Concentrating on the holdall and its contents, detectives established that Williams had not been stabbed, shot or hacked to pieces. On August 25, Home Office pathologist Dr Ben Swift carried out a post-mortem that, together with the first batch of toxicological tests, came back "inconclusive". "If we don't know what to look for, and are not guided by what we see or smell on the body, we cannot find it," says a forensic scientist who worked on the Litvinenko case. "We do 50 obvious poisons. Fifty rare. We can do the isotopes. Litvinenko alerted us to that. But in the absence of a specific direction, the possibilities are as limitless as a killer's imagination… and we cannot test for that."
Detectives set out their theories. One reading of the crime scene pointed to a forensically aware hit man. Slender 5ft 7in Gareth had been stuffed inside the near-airtight red North Face sports bag and placed in the bath, containing any spillage and minimising odours, too. The heating was on, increasing the rate of decomposition, which significantly lessened the chances of retrieving evidence from the corpse.
Or perhaps the body in the bag was evidence of a stage-managed "personal event", masterminded by a controlling individual. Was this a suicide (with Williams acting on his own)? Or a sadistic or masochistic sexual act gone wrong (with Williams engaging in some kind of auto-erotic asphyxiation?). "If you can imagine it, then we are investigating it," a detective said in late August. But what would shape police inquiries was the dawning realisation that Gareth Williams had not been alone.
Returning to the holdall, studying the zips and lock, police became certain that he could not have locked himself inside. And there was further proof that someone else must have been in the flat with him: his front door had been locked from the outside.
Criminal psychologists studied the case. One, who spoke anonymously, thought his death might have been a masochistic ritual that had gone wrong: "For a retentive individual with an ever-green mind like Gareth Williams, always on duty and in control, the bag could have been a furtive release."
The Williams family was adamant that the Gareth they knew would not have behaved this way. And, for now, the family was all the police had, since they had found no close friends or lovers. Another pressing problem with their theories was that detectives had failed to turn up any other suspects or accomplices.
Police, pathologists and forensic investigators agreed on one thing only. They would have to focus on the 12 days between the last call Gareth made to Ceri and the discovery of his body on 23 August. Pulling mobile phone records and credit card transactions, scouring hours of CCTV footage, the Operation Finlayson team dug deep, as ever more lurid stories circulated.
"Murdered MI6 worker Gareth Williams was a secret transvestite who may have been killed by a gay lover, detectives said yesterday… Cops found women's clothing that would fit him at his Pimlico flat in central London." The Sun ran with this version of events, while other newspapers, quoting similar unnamed sources, reported that cocaine had been found, a cache of gay pornography, a small armoury of S&M paraphernalia. Williams was also said to have frequently paid for male escorts.
Senior detectives angrily rebutted the stories. Uncle William in Anglesey thought they read like a concerted smear, and wondered why anyone would want to destroy Gareth's reputation after he was dead.
Like most well-constructed character assassinations, however, this one was founded on a grain of fact that made it that much harder to quash. Detectives had been quietly investigating whether Gareth Williams was gay. They had canvassed witnesses in the Vauxhall Cross village of gay clubs and bars, a short walk from Alderney Street. They had also studied Williams's computers and reading matter, his journals, magazines and computer cache. Despite outright denials from his family, detectives were privately certain that Gareth was gay, although they had been unable to find trace of any sexual encounters. They had also come to believe that his sexual orientation was not central to the inquiry (although his sexual preferences might be). There was no evidence of Williams paying for escorts, buying S&M equipment, using porn or drugs of any kind. "This man didn't really even drink," one frustrated detective said.
The police felt they were being hurried along by other parties, keen for the scandal to go away. "Someone, somewhere, who has access to case material, is saying, 'He's queer and asked for it', rather than waiting for the outcome of the case," one veteran detective said.
In North Wales, the family lit their fires, closed their curtains and privately pondered if anyone had ever understood the real Gareth.
At Ysgol Gynradd Morswyn, Gareth's primary school, a short hop between Valley and Holyhead, head teacher Islwyn Williams remembers him as an exceptional pupil. At five, Gareth made a beeline for the school computer and never left it. While most of his classmates were still playing with Lego, Gareth had a GCSE in maths. At the age of 10, he went to secondary school, gaining A grades in A-level maths and computer science at 13. The school contacted Bangor University, which accepted him as a part-time student on a maths degree course. "He was the best logician… with the fastest brain I have ever met," said Geraint Williams, his maths teacher.
Fellow pupils remember Gareth as a loner. Dylan Parry, 34, thought him "isolated" by his intellect. His abilities shut him off from everyone else. He was naive. Parry believed someone "could easily take advantage of him". He recalled Gareth travelling by train each week to university, while still living at home with Ian and Ellen. Too clever for school. Too young for university.
The family downplay his isolation. They point to their closeness and his sporting prowess. By the time he was 17, Gareth had followed his father into competitive cycling. Keith Thompson, of Holyhead Cycling Club, with whom Ian and Gareth rode, says: "He was a really lovely young man, but wasn't a great conversationalist. Gareth wasn't the sort to go to the pub after a race."
In 1997, aged 18, Gareth left home to begin a PhD at Manchester University, acquiring an advanced level of learning that sat uneasily with his elementary life skills, although his academic mentor, professor Terry Hewitt, believed he could take it: "He was very private and worked well on his own. He was certainly not a 'geek' even if he was reserved." His dissertation focused on computer games. They had always been a private passion, with him achieving an online reputation as unbeatable. Three years on, aged 21, Gareth was approached by the British security services, who the university believes had spotted his precocious online gaming abilities. Hewitt recalled: "In 2000, Gareth came into my office and said, 'I'm going to GCHQ'. He had to tell me, as I was his referee for his vetting." Gareth left Manchester and Anglesey behind to sign the Official Secrets Act.
Williams began an advanced maths course at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, but withdrew the following year, torn between academia and the demands of his new employer. At GCHQ, he was seen as stable, reliable and potentially brilliant, according to a contractor who worked there at the time. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he recalled that GCHQ was a world in which Gareth fitted, working alone, or in small teams, waist-deep in mathematical problems, challenged by cutting-edge technology and real-time problems. Possibly for the first time, he was part of a community of similarly focused individuals who were taken on for their discretion as well as for their brains, intercepting, monitoring and analysing email and telephone calls from around the world. He did feel the pressure, constantly, according to the contractor, who noted that at GCHQ many technicians were as clever or cleverer than Williams.
Work became his life. There was little time for much outside it, something evidenced by how he chose to live, renting a modest room in the Prestbury area of the town. Inside was a single, child-sized bed, a small chest of drawers, three upright wooden chairs and a gas heater – all furnished by Jenny Elliot. Over the decade he spent there, Williams introduced no luxuries, accumulated no clutter. He brought no one back. He rarely even went out after work, excepting an occasional "drink with colleagues". He worked late into the night and rose early. There was something oppressively austere about him, those colleagues thought, something they used to call his "GDR sensibility". So serious and quiet was he that when he did become animated, he "alarmed people with his unusual laugh".
Due to the nature of his work, it is hard for those who met Gareth to describe what he did, and those who talked to us did so having already left GCHQ. But all agreed that, although very capable, Williams was "a middle-ranking" technician "asserting himself in a number of sensitive areas, any one of which could theoretically have brought him into contact with enemies of our state". While GCHQ gathers intelligence from Europe, Africa and Russia, its partners in the US National Security Agency (NSA) also had access to British and European signals traffic at Menwith Hill, a top-secret RAF base near Harrogate, in Yorkshire.
When Williams arrived at Menwith, shortly after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, GCHQ and the NSA were increasingly focused on the threat of Islamist violence at home and abroad. "Between the UK and the US, we were deluged by the chatter from radicals here and over the Atlantic as they talked on landlines, satellite or mobile phones – with contacts in hot countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as with Saudi, and hubs like Dubai," one former GCHQ security consultant said. "A group around Williams worked on software to assemble, search and analyse the data, drawing out patterns and meanings."
Williams's elevation within GCHQ came with the "Liquid Bomb" plot, where a group of British radicals of Asian origin were found to be planning to detonate home-made explosives on board seven flights to major north American cities. Intercepting emails and phone calls between these plotters and their contacts abroad, Williams flew between the UK and the US, working at Fort Meade (the NSA HQ, in Baltimore).
Williams was brought into close proximity to US intelligence, Islamic radicals and Middle Eastern agents. He would rub shoulders with the Russians, too, according to a foreign intelligence analyst based in the UK, who described how technology and software honed by GCHQ was deployed in tracking a Moscow-backed sleeper cell to which Britain had been alerted as early as 2003. The case blew up in June 2010 when 10 people were arrested in the US and accused of being part of an espionage ring. One of them, a glamorous 28-year-old called Anna Chapman, had lived for five years in the UK. According to the former GCHQ contractor, "Williams had been obsessed by the case, its methodology and characters."
He was now on secondment to MI6, with its focus on foreign targets and intelligence-gathering, becoming more of a spy than a desk-bound technician, although Williams would shortly be called back to GCHQ to work on a new and ambitious project.
He had been liaising again with counterparts at the NSA, who were part of an effort to create an American cyber defence policy, to prevent the siphoning off of secret or commercially sensitive data or a military style assault on defence or civil systems. Its importance was alluded to last month in a speech by home secretary Theresa May, in which she identified cyber crime as among the pre-eminent future threats facing the UK. A cyber crimes specialist who knew Williams revealed that at the time of his death he was researching British vulnerability to Russian, Turkish and Chinese gangs: "He was already on top of it."
Rogue individuals and nation states, Islamist terror groups and radical loners, extortionists and organised criminals – these were just some of those Williams had observed, investigated, disrupted and provoked. Any one of them was capable of reciprocating, lethally.
Back at the Yard, Operation Finlayson detectives were looking at a vast range of potential threats, but still had few clues, no accomplices or even a plausible denouement for a man whose personal and professional inclinations were to camouflage everything he did.
By September, an exhaustive trawl had come up with some CCTV footage. In the frames released to the public, Gareth Williams saunters by Holland Park tube station in west London at 3pm on 14 August, three days after he had last spoken to his sister.
Staff at the nearby Valerie's Patisserie said that in the week before, a man fitting Gareth's description had spent several hours in the cafe on consecutive days, sitting at the rear with a laptop, receiving occasional visitors. One security source said that he believed Williams was "working" in west London – monitoring one of the many foreign embassies in the area – just as he had been "working" while on his recent "holiday" to the US.
Police released footage of Williams on 15 August, too. At 2pm, he was filmed at a cash machine, visiting Harrods, walking at 2.30pm via Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge towards Sloane Street. Soon after he vanished.
By the end of September, after a second barrage of toxicology tests proved inconclusive, Gareth Williams's body was released and laid to rest in North Wales. On 26 September, the extended Williams clan gathered outside the Bethel chapel in Holyhead to bid farewell. Given the florid rumours that had circulated around his death, they were surprised by the appearance there of Sir John Sawers, head of MI6. Williams had been with his service for less than a year, yet Sawyers told reporters, "I wanted to be here today as the only public face of the Secret Intelligence Service. My deepest sympathies go to the family. Gareth was a hugely talented person, and he was very modest and generous as well. He did really valuable work with us in the cause of national security."
What a difference 30 days make. After an investigation that had failed to turn up the smallest vice, Williams was no longer lampooned but celebrated as a very British spy: modest, capable and known well by no one.
As they buried Gareth, Dr Chris Subbe, speaking for his wife Ceri and the family, recalled how they had laughed and chatted with him at the Ritz, celebrating their marriage and his brilliant career. "The world was ours for the taking," he said. "Yet here I am three months later to the day, trying to describe your rich life with my poor words."
Filed under
Ceri Subbe,
Chris Subbe,
clothing,
contorted,
decomposing,
Dylan Parry,
Finlayson,
Geraint Williams,
Guardian,
Islwyn Williams,
Jenny Elliot,
Keith Thompson,
padlocked,
Patisserie Valerie,
Sir John Sawers,
suicide,
technology,
Terry Hewitt,
toxicology,
William Hughes
by Winter Patriot
on Saturday, November 20, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
Daily Mail : Parents of murdered British spy hit back at 'government's gay smear' campaign to discredit him
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Parents of murdered British spy hit back at 'government's gay smear' campaign to discredit him
By Charlotte Gill, Emily Andrews and Liz Hull | August 27, 2010
The family of murdered British spy Gareth Williams today accused the government of running a 'dirty tricks' campaign to blacken his name.'
William Hughes, the codebreaker's uncle, said Mr Williams' parents Ellen and Ian were 'furious' at suggestions their son has been labelled as gay and a cross dresser.
'It is completely false,' Mr Hughes, 62, who yesterday visited the Williams's family home in Holyhead, North Wales.
'They are very, very angry,' he told the London Evening Standard.
'The lad had been away from home for a long time — we did not know much about his private life, but it has never crossed any of our minds that he could be gay.
'It's not the picture they have of their son.
'Maybe it's the Government or somebody trying to discredit him.'
The mathematics genius, who was on secondment to MI6, was found dead in a sports holdall in the bath of his Government flat on Monday.
Scotland Yard detectives continued to investigate whether GCHQ codes expert the 31-year-old lived a secretive double life.
Police sources believe one theory is the spy's killer may have planted a trail of clues to make it seem as though he was murdered by a gay lover.
They said gay magazines and the phone numbers of gay escort men were found in the apartment near the agent's body.
The latest reports on Mr Williams include claims that bondage gear and equipment associated with sado-masochism had been discovered in the flat he used in Pimlico, London, while it has also been claimed he had links to a male escort.
Mr Williams lived alone and did not have a partner.
But people who knew the cycling enthusiast said he never gave any indication of being homosexual and a former landlord, who rented a flat to him for ten years, never saw him bring anyone – male or female – back to his home.
Sources close to the inquiry have dismissed some of the allegations, which raises questions over who was behind them - and why they were made.
Mr Hughes, a cousin of Mr Williams's mother, Ellen, said: 'I have spoken to Gareth's parents and they are not doing well at all.
'They are in a state of shock and struggling to come to terms with what has happened.
'They have seen what has been in the papers and they are very, very upset about these untruths. I don't see any evidence of it.
'It never crossed my mind that Gareth was that sort of person. He left home at a young age and what happened in his private life was his business,' he said.
'When you have these rumours in the papers, it is most distressing.
'It is heartbreaking that he has died so young and his family have enough on their plate without having to read these stories.'
A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: 'There is no question of there being a government dirty tricks campaign; we are as concerned as the family to establish the facts of Gareth's death.
'But the police investigation is now underway and we must await its outcome.'
The family criticisms comes as CIA agents began examining details of Mr Williams's work and private life in the US to establish if there could be a link to his death — or a threat to national security.
The Daily Mail can reveal Mr Williams flew to the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's listening post and the largest intelligence agency in the world, up to four times a year.
Mr Williams, who worked for the GCHQ listening station in Cheltenham but was on secondment to MI6 in London, returned from his last trip to America only a few weeks before he was found dead.
Questions also remain over why his body lay undiscovered for up to a fortnight at his £400,000 flat in a Victorian townhouse in central London, half a mile from MI6 headquarters.
The body of the keen cyclist was found in a sports holdall in the bath on Monday afternoon.
But yesterday his former landlady in Cheltenham insisted he had not been off work, intensifying the mystery surrounding his death.
Security sources could not explain why some one holding such a sensitive post was able to go 'missing' for such a long time before police were called.
Officers were last night examining the hard drive of a laptop computer found in the flat.
Landlady Jenny Elliott said: 'He definitely wasn't on annual leave as the security services woman who came to see me after they found his body told me that he wasn't on holiday.
'Why did no one notice? It's disgraceful the police weren't alerted earlier that he was missing. His murder is devastating and I just hope the person who did it is caught.
Mrs Elliott, 71, who rented Mr Williams a self-contained flat attached to her home in Cheltenham, said he would often travel to America for weeks at a time three or four times a year either with a male colleague or on his own.
His uncle, Mr Hughes, who lives in Anglesey, North Wales where Mr Williams grew up, said: 'He'd been making the trips for a couple of years.
'I only found this out very recently and I do not know where in America he was staying or who he was working for out there, but I do know it was in relation to his job.
'His last trip was this summer. He returned from the States just a couple of weeks or so before he died.'
A U.S. intelligence source said there was 'no panic' yet within the National Security Agency and people who knew Mr Williams were still to be questioned.
The source said: 'The strong implication is that his death is not connected to his intelligence work, though this could change at any time. They are understandably concerned about what has happened and are keeping a close eye on developments.'
Police are still waiting for the results of toxicology tests which could shed light on how he died.
Police have also asked a pathologist to check whether Mr Williams's neck was broken, which would suggest a professional hit, the sources said
A postmortem examination proved inconclusive and now they must wait for toxicology results to find out whether drugs, alcohol, poisoning or suffocation were the cause of death.
Sources say he was not stabbed, shot, strangled or beaten. Scotland Yard is describing the death as 'suspicious and unexplained'.
A former MI6 officer said that intelligence chiefs are furious that details of Mr Williams's work as a spy had been leaked.
Harry Ferguson said senior officials at the Secret Intelligence Service wanted to suppress any information about his work and to simply refer to him as a 'civil servant' when news of the murder was made public.
'They hoped details of his role could all be kept covered up. It is a standard process. Blurting it out has caused a lot of unnecessary embarrassment, risk and upheaval to the SIS.
'If it had been managed properly it could have been kept quiet. He could simply have been described as a government worker or civil servant.
'They are especially frustrated that it has emerged that not only was he was working in GCHQ, but also on secondment to MI6.'
Mr Ferguson said secret service bosses feared that the 'nightmare scenario' had come true when the body was discovered.
'One of the concerns about having such a high profile building as the SIS does is that, while staff can be protected when inside the building, there a significant risk that they could be followed home,' he said.
'It is the sort of thing that a small group of Islamists or other terror network would clearly be capable of doing.'
He said the apparent 'ritualistic' scene at Mr Williams' flat, with his mobile phone and SIM cards carefully laid out, also suggested it could have been carried out by a foreign agency to send a message.
The reclusive maths genius and rumours of cross-dressing and blackmail
From a tender age, it was clear to his teachers at Morswyn primary school on Anglesey that there was something special about Gareth Williams.
A talented pupil, he was fast-tracked through education, earning his maths GCSE aged nine while most of his contemporaries were still grappling with basic arithmetic.
By 13 he had secured his A-levels and had a degree in maths by 17.
He was known as ‘the maths genius’ by fellow pupils and possessed the ‘fastest brain’ his teachers had encountered. But his academic excellence came at a price.
Forced to study with children several years older than himself, he found it hard to make friends and was last night described by former school mates as ‘socially naive’ and ‘introverted’.
Detectives were last night investigating whether this shy, private side to his nature made him vulnerable to blackmail amid lurid claims that he was a secret cross-dresser.
Geraint Williams, his maths teacher at secondary school, recalled how young Gareth was so clever that he sat his intermediate maths GCSE, gaining a grade B, while still at primary school, before being moved up to Bodedern Secondary School, Holyhead, a year ahead of his peers.
Within months of his arrival he took his advanced GCSE, scoring an A grade, and received top marks in A-level maths and computer studies two years later, when he was 13.
His teachers were initially at a loss at how best to educate him.Their solution was to move him up two years and enrol the youngster, then aged 15, on a three-year maths degree course at his local university at Bangor, which he attained in just two years with first class honours.
Teacher Mr Williams said: ‘I’d heard about this amazing pupil who had done his GCSE at primary school and got a B at intermediate level.
‘He took the higher level GCSE in a couple of months and got an A. It was a problem for us – what could we do with him? We got him to follow A-levels and he did A-level maths and computer science in the third-form. He achieved As in them.
‘That was a big problem because he was still only 13, so we contacted Bangor University and he followed the first year of maths degree course.’
The teacher added: ‘He was the best logician and the pupil with the fastest brain I have ever met. You only had to say things once, that’s why he was so successful. He could understand things immediately. He was also extremely good with computer science.
‘Gareth was also a very nice lad, quiet and unassuming. It’s very sad.’
After leaving Bangor University at 17, Mr Williams went on to study for a PhD at Manchester University before enrolling in postgraduate certificate at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in 2000.
He dropped out a year later, but last night friends speculated that he left after being taken on by the Secret Services, which traditionally recruit from Oxbridge.
They said it was an open secret that Mr Williams worked at GCHQ, but added that any notion that the quiet, unassuming boy lead a James Bond spy lifestyle was laughable.
One close friend, who attended primary school with Mr Williams, said: ‘Gareth was a super, super brain. Beyond intelligent, a very, very clever guy.
‘He was hand-picked while at Cambridge by the services, they want the cream of the crop and he certainly was that.
‘It was common knowledge that he worked at GCHQ, but any notion that he led a James Bond style lifestyle is rubbish.
‘Those kind of people have to be able to blend in, but Gareth wasn’t like that, he was very different.
‘He was introverted and found it difficult to make friends, but he was a lovely, lovely bloke. It is such a tragic waste of such a talented life.’
The dead man’s parents, Ian, an engineer at Wylfa power station, and mother Ellen, who worked in education, were on holiday in America celebrating their joint 50th birthdays when news of their son’s death broke.Last night they were said to be ‘devastated’.
Another former school friend, Dylan Parry, 34, said he was ‘dumfounded’ by the murder.
‘Gareth was the last person I would have believed would be involved in the murkier elements of life,’ said Mr Parry, of Holyhead. ‘He really was about as far from a James Bond figure as it’s possible to imagine.
‘Gareth was introverted and socially awkward. He wasn’t dashing or cavalier or a charmer, although he was extremely nice in a quiet way.
‘There has been a lot of speculation about his sexuality, but he was so introverted as to be asexual.‘
He wasn’t able to form relationships because he was so obsessed with his maths studies.
‘We nicknamed him the maths genius because he was so clever. He was so naive, he was someone people could easily take advantage of.
‘I wouldn’t have thought he was a very good judge of character and it’s possible he got to know someone who wasn’t very safe. He was so innocent.’
By Charlotte Gill, Emily Andrews and Liz Hull | August 27, 2010
The family of murdered British spy Gareth Williams today accused the government of running a 'dirty tricks' campaign to blacken his name.'
William Hughes, the codebreaker's uncle, said Mr Williams' parents Ellen and Ian were 'furious' at suggestions their son has been labelled as gay and a cross dresser.
'It is completely false,' Mr Hughes, 62, who yesterday visited the Williams's family home in Holyhead, North Wales.
'They are very, very angry,' he told the London Evening Standard.
'The lad had been away from home for a long time — we did not know much about his private life, but it has never crossed any of our minds that he could be gay.
'It's not the picture they have of their son.
'Maybe it's the Government or somebody trying to discredit him.'
The mathematics genius, who was on secondment to MI6, was found dead in a sports holdall in the bath of his Government flat on Monday.
Scotland Yard detectives continued to investigate whether GCHQ codes expert the 31-year-old lived a secretive double life.
Police sources believe one theory is the spy's killer may have planted a trail of clues to make it seem as though he was murdered by a gay lover.
They said gay magazines and the phone numbers of gay escort men were found in the apartment near the agent's body.
The latest reports on Mr Williams include claims that bondage gear and equipment associated with sado-masochism had been discovered in the flat he used in Pimlico, London, while it has also been claimed he had links to a male escort.
Mr Williams lived alone and did not have a partner.
But people who knew the cycling enthusiast said he never gave any indication of being homosexual and a former landlord, who rented a flat to him for ten years, never saw him bring anyone – male or female – back to his home.
Sources close to the inquiry have dismissed some of the allegations, which raises questions over who was behind them - and why they were made.
Mr Hughes, a cousin of Mr Williams's mother, Ellen, said: 'I have spoken to Gareth's parents and they are not doing well at all.
'They are in a state of shock and struggling to come to terms with what has happened.
'They have seen what has been in the papers and they are very, very upset about these untruths. I don't see any evidence of it.
'It never crossed my mind that Gareth was that sort of person. He left home at a young age and what happened in his private life was his business,' he said.
'When you have these rumours in the papers, it is most distressing.
'It is heartbreaking that he has died so young and his family have enough on their plate without having to read these stories.'
A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: 'There is no question of there being a government dirty tricks campaign; we are as concerned as the family to establish the facts of Gareth's death.
'But the police investigation is now underway and we must await its outcome.'
The family criticisms comes as CIA agents began examining details of Mr Williams's work and private life in the US to establish if there could be a link to his death — or a threat to national security.
The Daily Mail can reveal Mr Williams flew to the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's listening post and the largest intelligence agency in the world, up to four times a year.
Mr Williams, who worked for the GCHQ listening station in Cheltenham but was on secondment to MI6 in London, returned from his last trip to America only a few weeks before he was found dead.
Questions also remain over why his body lay undiscovered for up to a fortnight at his £400,000 flat in a Victorian townhouse in central London, half a mile from MI6 headquarters.
The body of the keen cyclist was found in a sports holdall in the bath on Monday afternoon.
But yesterday his former landlady in Cheltenham insisted he had not been off work, intensifying the mystery surrounding his death.
Security sources could not explain why some one holding such a sensitive post was able to go 'missing' for such a long time before police were called.
Officers were last night examining the hard drive of a laptop computer found in the flat.
Landlady Jenny Elliott said: 'He definitely wasn't on annual leave as the security services woman who came to see me after they found his body told me that he wasn't on holiday.
'Why did no one notice? It's disgraceful the police weren't alerted earlier that he was missing. His murder is devastating and I just hope the person who did it is caught.
Mrs Elliott, 71, who rented Mr Williams a self-contained flat attached to her home in Cheltenham, said he would often travel to America for weeks at a time three or four times a year either with a male colleague or on his own.
His uncle, Mr Hughes, who lives in Anglesey, North Wales where Mr Williams grew up, said: 'He'd been making the trips for a couple of years.
'I only found this out very recently and I do not know where in America he was staying or who he was working for out there, but I do know it was in relation to his job.
'His last trip was this summer. He returned from the States just a couple of weeks or so before he died.'
A U.S. intelligence source said there was 'no panic' yet within the National Security Agency and people who knew Mr Williams were still to be questioned.
The source said: 'The strong implication is that his death is not connected to his intelligence work, though this could change at any time. They are understandably concerned about what has happened and are keeping a close eye on developments.'
Police are still waiting for the results of toxicology tests which could shed light on how he died.
Police have also asked a pathologist to check whether Mr Williams's neck was broken, which would suggest a professional hit, the sources said
A postmortem examination proved inconclusive and now they must wait for toxicology results to find out whether drugs, alcohol, poisoning or suffocation were the cause of death.
Sources say he was not stabbed, shot, strangled or beaten. Scotland Yard is describing the death as 'suspicious and unexplained'.
A former MI6 officer said that intelligence chiefs are furious that details of Mr Williams's work as a spy had been leaked.
Harry Ferguson said senior officials at the Secret Intelligence Service wanted to suppress any information about his work and to simply refer to him as a 'civil servant' when news of the murder was made public.
'They hoped details of his role could all be kept covered up. It is a standard process. Blurting it out has caused a lot of unnecessary embarrassment, risk and upheaval to the SIS.
'If it had been managed properly it could have been kept quiet. He could simply have been described as a government worker or civil servant.
'They are especially frustrated that it has emerged that not only was he was working in GCHQ, but also on secondment to MI6.'
Mr Ferguson said secret service bosses feared that the 'nightmare scenario' had come true when the body was discovered.
'One of the concerns about having such a high profile building as the SIS does is that, while staff can be protected when inside the building, there a significant risk that they could be followed home,' he said.
'It is the sort of thing that a small group of Islamists or other terror network would clearly be capable of doing.'
He said the apparent 'ritualistic' scene at Mr Williams' flat, with his mobile phone and SIM cards carefully laid out, also suggested it could have been carried out by a foreign agency to send a message.
The reclusive maths genius and rumours of cross-dressing and blackmail
From a tender age, it was clear to his teachers at Morswyn primary school on Anglesey that there was something special about Gareth Williams.
A talented pupil, he was fast-tracked through education, earning his maths GCSE aged nine while most of his contemporaries were still grappling with basic arithmetic.
By 13 he had secured his A-levels and had a degree in maths by 17.
He was known as ‘the maths genius’ by fellow pupils and possessed the ‘fastest brain’ his teachers had encountered. But his academic excellence came at a price.
Forced to study with children several years older than himself, he found it hard to make friends and was last night described by former school mates as ‘socially naive’ and ‘introverted’.
Detectives were last night investigating whether this shy, private side to his nature made him vulnerable to blackmail amid lurid claims that he was a secret cross-dresser.
Geraint Williams, his maths teacher at secondary school, recalled how young Gareth was so clever that he sat his intermediate maths GCSE, gaining a grade B, while still at primary school, before being moved up to Bodedern Secondary School, Holyhead, a year ahead of his peers.
Within months of his arrival he took his advanced GCSE, scoring an A grade, and received top marks in A-level maths and computer studies two years later, when he was 13.
His teachers were initially at a loss at how best to educate him.Their solution was to move him up two years and enrol the youngster, then aged 15, on a three-year maths degree course at his local university at Bangor, which he attained in just two years with first class honours.
Teacher Mr Williams said: ‘I’d heard about this amazing pupil who had done his GCSE at primary school and got a B at intermediate level.
‘He took the higher level GCSE in a couple of months and got an A. It was a problem for us – what could we do with him? We got him to follow A-levels and he did A-level maths and computer science in the third-form. He achieved As in them.
‘That was a big problem because he was still only 13, so we contacted Bangor University and he followed the first year of maths degree course.’
The teacher added: ‘He was the best logician and the pupil with the fastest brain I have ever met. You only had to say things once, that’s why he was so successful. He could understand things immediately. He was also extremely good with computer science.
‘Gareth was also a very nice lad, quiet and unassuming. It’s very sad.’
After leaving Bangor University at 17, Mr Williams went on to study for a PhD at Manchester University before enrolling in postgraduate certificate at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in 2000.
He dropped out a year later, but last night friends speculated that he left after being taken on by the Secret Services, which traditionally recruit from Oxbridge.
They said it was an open secret that Mr Williams worked at GCHQ, but added that any notion that the quiet, unassuming boy lead a James Bond spy lifestyle was laughable.
One close friend, who attended primary school with Mr Williams, said: ‘Gareth was a super, super brain. Beyond intelligent, a very, very clever guy.
‘He was hand-picked while at Cambridge by the services, they want the cream of the crop and he certainly was that.
‘It was common knowledge that he worked at GCHQ, but any notion that he led a James Bond style lifestyle is rubbish.
‘Those kind of people have to be able to blend in, but Gareth wasn’t like that, he was very different.
‘He was introverted and found it difficult to make friends, but he was a lovely, lovely bloke. It is such a tragic waste of such a talented life.’
The dead man’s parents, Ian, an engineer at Wylfa power station, and mother Ellen, who worked in education, were on holiday in America celebrating their joint 50th birthdays when news of their son’s death broke.Last night they were said to be ‘devastated’.
Another former school friend, Dylan Parry, 34, said he was ‘dumfounded’ by the murder.
‘Gareth was the last person I would have believed would be involved in the murkier elements of life,’ said Mr Parry, of Holyhead. ‘He really was about as far from a James Bond figure as it’s possible to imagine.
‘Gareth was introverted and socially awkward. He wasn’t dashing or cavalier or a charmer, although he was extremely nice in a quiet way.
‘There has been a lot of speculation about his sexuality, but he was so introverted as to be asexual.‘
He wasn’t able to form relationships because he was so obsessed with his maths studies.
‘We nicknamed him the maths genius because he was so clever. He was so naive, he was someone people could easily take advantage of.
‘I wouldn’t have thought he was a very good judge of character and it’s possible he got to know someone who wasn’t very safe. He was so innocent.’
Filed under
blackmail,
Bodedern,
bondage,
Cheltenham,
CIA,
Daily Mail,
Dylan Parry,
gay,
Geraint Williams,
Harry Ferguson,
Holyhead,
Jenny Elliot,
laptop,
murder,
sado-masochism,
transvestite,
William Hughes
by Winter Patriot
on Saturday, August 28, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
Daily Mail : CIA probes British spy murder as it emerges he was sent on frequent missions to Pentagon's high-security listening post
Friday, August 27, 2010
CIA probes British spy murder as it emerges he was sent on frequent missions to Pentagon's high-security listening post
By Charlotte Gill, Emily Andrews and Liz Hull | August 27, 2010
The CIA was called in to help investigate the murder of an MI6 spy last night as it emerged he was sent on frequent secret missions to the United States.
American intelligence officers are poring over every detail of Gareth Williams's work and personal life to see if the circumstances of his death endangered U.S. national security.
The Daily Mail can reveal that the 31-year-old codebreaker flew to the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's listening post and the largest intelligence agency in the world, up to four times a year. He returned from his last trip to America only a few weeks before he was found dead.
Questions also remain over why his body lay undiscovered for up to a fortnight at his £400,000 flat in a Victorian townhouse in Pimlico, central London, half a mile from MI6 headquarters.
Mr Williams worked at the Government's listening post, GCHQ in Cheltenham, but had been on secondment to MI6 for the past year and was due to return to GCHQ next Friday.
The body of the keen cyclist was found in a sports holdall in the bath on Monday afternoon.
But yesterday his former landlady in Cheltenham insisted he had not been off work, intensifying the mystery surrounding his death.
Security sources could not explain why some one holding such a sensitive post was able to go 'missing' for such a long time before police were called.
Officers were last night examining the hard drive of a laptop computer found in the flat.
Landlady Jenny Elliott said: 'He definitely wasn't on annual leave as the security services woman who came to see me after they found his body told me that he wasn't on holiday.
'Why did no one notice? It's disgraceful the police weren't alerted earlier that he was missing. His murder is devastating and I just hope the person who did it is caught.
Mrs Elliott, 71, who rented Mr Williams a self-contained flat attached to her home in Cheltenham, said he would often travel to America for weeks at a time three or four times a year either with a male colleague or on his own.
His uncle, who lives in Anglesey, North Wales, where Mr Williams grew up, said: 'He'd been making the trips for a couple of years.
'I only found this out very recently and I do not know where in America he was staying or who he was working for out there, but I do know it was in relation to his job.
'His last trip was this summer. He returned from the States just a couple of weeks or so before he died.'
A U.S. intelligence source said there was 'no panic' yet within the National Security Agency and people who knew Mr Williams were still to be questioned.
The source said: 'The strong implication is that his death is not connected to his intelligence work, though this could change at any time. They are understandably concerned about what has happened and are keeping a close eye on developments.'
Mr Williams's devastated parents Ian and Ellen have faced speculation over their son's private life.
It has been reported that Mr Williams, who lived alone and did not have a partner, was a gay cross dresser and may have been killed by a gay lover.
Police sources believe another theory is the spy's killer may have planted a trail of clues to make it seem as though he was murdered by a gay lover.
They said gay magazines and the phone numbers of gay escort men were found in the apartment near the agent's body.
Police have also asked a pathologist to check whether Mr Williams's neck was broken, which would suggest a professional hit, the sources said.
Those who know him say there is nothing to suggest that he may have been homosexual.
Mrs Elliott, who rented her flat to him for ten years during his time at GCHQ, never saw him bring anyone – male or female – back to his home.
Detectives are still trying to ascertainhow Mr Williams died. A postmortem examination proved inconclusive and now they must wait for toxicology results to find out whether drugs, alcohol, poisoning or suffocation were the cause of death.
Sources say he was not stabbed, shot, strangled or beaten. Scotland Yard is describing the death as 'suspicious and unexplained'.
A former MI6 officer said that intelligence chiefs are furious that details of Mr Williams's work as a spy had been leaked.
Harry Ferguson said senior officials at the Secret Intelligence Service wanted to suppress any information about his work and to simply refer to him as a 'civil servant' when news of the murder was made public.
'They hoped details of his role could all be kept covered up. It is a standard process. Blurting it out has caused a lot of unnecessary embarrassment, risk and upheaval to the SIS.
'If it had been managed properly it could have been kept quiet. He could simply have been described as a government worker or civil servant.
'They are especially frustrated that it has emerged that not only was he was working in GCHQ, but also on secondment to MI6.'
Mr Ferguson said secret service bosses feared that the 'nightmare scenario' had come true when the body was discovered.
'One of the concerns about having such a high profile building as the SIS does is that, while staff can be protected when inside the building, there a significant risk that they could be followed home,' he said.
'It is the sort of thing that a small group of Islamists or other terror network would clearly be capable of doing.'
He said the apparent 'ritualistic' scene at Mr Williams' flat, with his mobile phone and SIM cards carefully laid out, also suggested it could have been carried out by a foreign agency to send a message.
The reclusive maths genius and rumours of cross-dressing and blackmail
FROM a tender age, it was clear to his teachers at Morswyn primary school on Anglesey that there was something special about Gareth Williams.
A talented pupil, he was fast-tracked through education, earning his maths GCSE aged nine while most of his contemporaries were still grappling with basic arithmetic.
By 13 he had secured his A-levels and had a degree in maths by 17.
He was known as ‘the maths genius’ by fellow pupils and possessed the ‘fastest brain’ his teachers had encountered. But his academic excellence came at a price.
Forced to study with children several years older than himself, he found it hard to make friends and was last night described by former school mates as ‘socially naive’ and ‘introverted’.
Detectives were last night investigating whether this shy, private side to his nature made him vulnerable to blackmail amid lurid claims that he was a secret cross-dresser.
Geraint Williams, his maths teacher at secondary school, recalled how young Gareth was so clever that he sat his intermediate maths GCSE, gaining a grade B, while still at primary school, before being moved up to Bodedern Secondary School, Holyhead, a year ahead of his peers.
Within months of his arrival he took his advanced GCSE, scoring an A grade, and received top marks in A-level maths and computer studies two years later, when he was 13.
His teachers were initially at a loss at how best to educate him. Their solution was to move him up two years and enrol the youngster, then aged 15, on a three-year maths degree course at his local university at Bangor, which he attained in just two years with first class honours.
Teacher Mr Williams said: ‘I’d heard about this amazing pupil who had done his GCSE at primary school and got a B at intermediate level.
‘He took the higher level GCSE in a couple of months and got an A. It was a problem for us – what could we do with him? We got him to follow A-levels and he did A-level maths and computer science in the third-form. He achieved As in them.
‘That was a big problem because he was still only 13, so we contacted Bangor University and he followed the first year of maths degree course.’
The teacher added: ‘He was the best logician and the pupil with the fastest brain I have ever met. You only had to say things once, that’s why he was so successful. He could understand things immediately. He was also extremely good with computer science.
‘Gareth was also a very nice lad, quiet and unassuming. It’s very sad.’
After leaving Bangor University at 17, Mr Williams went on to study for a PhD at Manchester University before enrolling in postgraduate certificate at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in 2000.
He dropped out a year later, but last night friends speculated that he left after being taken on by the Secret Services, which traditionally recruit from Oxbridge.
They said it was an open secret that Mr Williams worked at GCHQ, but added that any notion that the quiet, unassuming boy lead a James Bond spy lifestyle was laughable.
One close friend, who attended primary school with Mr Williams, said: ‘Gareth was a super, super brain. Beyond intelligent, a very, very clever guy.
‘He was hand-picked while at Cambridge by the services, they want the cream of the crop and he certainly was that.
‘It was common knowledge that he worked at GCHQ, but any notion that he led a James Bond style lifestyle is rubbish.
‘Those kind of people have to be able to blend in, but Gareth wasn’t like that, he was very different.
‘He was introverted and found it difficult to make friends, but he was a lovely, lovely bloke. It is such a tragic waste of such a talented life.’
The dead man’s parents, Ian, an engineer at Wylfa power station, and mother Ellen, who worked in education, were on holiday in America celebrating their joint 50th birthdays when news of their son’s death broke.Last night they were said to be ‘devastated’.
Another former school friend, Dylan Parry, 34, said he was ‘dumfounded’ by the murder.
‘Gareth was the last person I would have believed would be involved in the murkier elements of life,’ said Mr Parry, of Holyhead. ‘He really was about as far from a James Bond figure as it’s possible to imagine.
‘Gareth was introverted and socially awkward. He wasn’t dashing or cavalier or a charmer, although he was extremely nice in a quiet way.
‘There has been a lot of speculation about his sexuality, but he was so introverted as to be asexual.‘
He wasn’t able to form relationships because he was so obsessed with his maths studies.
‘We nicknamed him the maths genius because he was so clever. He was so naive, he was someone people could easily take advantage of.
‘I wouldn’t have thought he was a very good judge of character and it’s possible he got to know someone who wasn’t very safe. He was so innocent.’
By Charlotte Gill, Emily Andrews and Liz Hull | August 27, 2010
The CIA was called in to help investigate the murder of an MI6 spy last night as it emerged he was sent on frequent secret missions to the United States.
American intelligence officers are poring over every detail of Gareth Williams's work and personal life to see if the circumstances of his death endangered U.S. national security.
The Daily Mail can reveal that the 31-year-old codebreaker flew to the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's listening post and the largest intelligence agency in the world, up to four times a year. He returned from his last trip to America only a few weeks before he was found dead.
Questions also remain over why his body lay undiscovered for up to a fortnight at his £400,000 flat in a Victorian townhouse in Pimlico, central London, half a mile from MI6 headquarters.
Mr Williams worked at the Government's listening post, GCHQ in Cheltenham, but had been on secondment to MI6 for the past year and was due to return to GCHQ next Friday.
The body of the keen cyclist was found in a sports holdall in the bath on Monday afternoon.
But yesterday his former landlady in Cheltenham insisted he had not been off work, intensifying the mystery surrounding his death.
Security sources could not explain why some one holding such a sensitive post was able to go 'missing' for such a long time before police were called.
Officers were last night examining the hard drive of a laptop computer found in the flat.
Landlady Jenny Elliott said: 'He definitely wasn't on annual leave as the security services woman who came to see me after they found his body told me that he wasn't on holiday.
'Why did no one notice? It's disgraceful the police weren't alerted earlier that he was missing. His murder is devastating and I just hope the person who did it is caught.
Mrs Elliott, 71, who rented Mr Williams a self-contained flat attached to her home in Cheltenham, said he would often travel to America for weeks at a time three or four times a year either with a male colleague or on his own.
His uncle, who lives in Anglesey, North Wales, where Mr Williams grew up, said: 'He'd been making the trips for a couple of years.
'I only found this out very recently and I do not know where in America he was staying or who he was working for out there, but I do know it was in relation to his job.
'His last trip was this summer. He returned from the States just a couple of weeks or so before he died.'
A U.S. intelligence source said there was 'no panic' yet within the National Security Agency and people who knew Mr Williams were still to be questioned.
The source said: 'The strong implication is that his death is not connected to his intelligence work, though this could change at any time. They are understandably concerned about what has happened and are keeping a close eye on developments.'
Mr Williams's devastated parents Ian and Ellen have faced speculation over their son's private life.
It has been reported that Mr Williams, who lived alone and did not have a partner, was a gay cross dresser and may have been killed by a gay lover.
Police sources believe another theory is the spy's killer may have planted a trail of clues to make it seem as though he was murdered by a gay lover.
They said gay magazines and the phone numbers of gay escort men were found in the apartment near the agent's body.
Police have also asked a pathologist to check whether Mr Williams's neck was broken, which would suggest a professional hit, the sources said.
Those who know him say there is nothing to suggest that he may have been homosexual.
Mrs Elliott, who rented her flat to him for ten years during his time at GCHQ, never saw him bring anyone – male or female – back to his home.
Detectives are still trying to ascertainhow Mr Williams died. A postmortem examination proved inconclusive and now they must wait for toxicology results to find out whether drugs, alcohol, poisoning or suffocation were the cause of death.
Sources say he was not stabbed, shot, strangled or beaten. Scotland Yard is describing the death as 'suspicious and unexplained'.
A former MI6 officer said that intelligence chiefs are furious that details of Mr Williams's work as a spy had been leaked.
Harry Ferguson said senior officials at the Secret Intelligence Service wanted to suppress any information about his work and to simply refer to him as a 'civil servant' when news of the murder was made public.
'They hoped details of his role could all be kept covered up. It is a standard process. Blurting it out has caused a lot of unnecessary embarrassment, risk and upheaval to the SIS.
'If it had been managed properly it could have been kept quiet. He could simply have been described as a government worker or civil servant.
'They are especially frustrated that it has emerged that not only was he was working in GCHQ, but also on secondment to MI6.'
Mr Ferguson said secret service bosses feared that the 'nightmare scenario' had come true when the body was discovered.
'One of the concerns about having such a high profile building as the SIS does is that, while staff can be protected when inside the building, there a significant risk that they could be followed home,' he said.
'It is the sort of thing that a small group of Islamists or other terror network would clearly be capable of doing.'
He said the apparent 'ritualistic' scene at Mr Williams' flat, with his mobile phone and SIM cards carefully laid out, also suggested it could have been carried out by a foreign agency to send a message.
The reclusive maths genius and rumours of cross-dressing and blackmail
FROM a tender age, it was clear to his teachers at Morswyn primary school on Anglesey that there was something special about Gareth Williams.
A talented pupil, he was fast-tracked through education, earning his maths GCSE aged nine while most of his contemporaries were still grappling with basic arithmetic.
By 13 he had secured his A-levels and had a degree in maths by 17.
He was known as ‘the maths genius’ by fellow pupils and possessed the ‘fastest brain’ his teachers had encountered. But his academic excellence came at a price.
Forced to study with children several years older than himself, he found it hard to make friends and was last night described by former school mates as ‘socially naive’ and ‘introverted’.
Detectives were last night investigating whether this shy, private side to his nature made him vulnerable to blackmail amid lurid claims that he was a secret cross-dresser.
Geraint Williams, his maths teacher at secondary school, recalled how young Gareth was so clever that he sat his intermediate maths GCSE, gaining a grade B, while still at primary school, before being moved up to Bodedern Secondary School, Holyhead, a year ahead of his peers.
Within months of his arrival he took his advanced GCSE, scoring an A grade, and received top marks in A-level maths and computer studies two years later, when he was 13.
His teachers were initially at a loss at how best to educate him. Their solution was to move him up two years and enrol the youngster, then aged 15, on a three-year maths degree course at his local university at Bangor, which he attained in just two years with first class honours.
Teacher Mr Williams said: ‘I’d heard about this amazing pupil who had done his GCSE at primary school and got a B at intermediate level.
‘He took the higher level GCSE in a couple of months and got an A. It was a problem for us – what could we do with him? We got him to follow A-levels and he did A-level maths and computer science in the third-form. He achieved As in them.
‘That was a big problem because he was still only 13, so we contacted Bangor University and he followed the first year of maths degree course.’
The teacher added: ‘He was the best logician and the pupil with the fastest brain I have ever met. You only had to say things once, that’s why he was so successful. He could understand things immediately. He was also extremely good with computer science.
‘Gareth was also a very nice lad, quiet and unassuming. It’s very sad.’
After leaving Bangor University at 17, Mr Williams went on to study for a PhD at Manchester University before enrolling in postgraduate certificate at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in 2000.
He dropped out a year later, but last night friends speculated that he left after being taken on by the Secret Services, which traditionally recruit from Oxbridge.
They said it was an open secret that Mr Williams worked at GCHQ, but added that any notion that the quiet, unassuming boy lead a James Bond spy lifestyle was laughable.
One close friend, who attended primary school with Mr Williams, said: ‘Gareth was a super, super brain. Beyond intelligent, a very, very clever guy.
‘He was hand-picked while at Cambridge by the services, they want the cream of the crop and he certainly was that.
‘It was common knowledge that he worked at GCHQ, but any notion that he led a James Bond style lifestyle is rubbish.
‘Those kind of people have to be able to blend in, but Gareth wasn’t like that, he was very different.
‘He was introverted and found it difficult to make friends, but he was a lovely, lovely bloke. It is such a tragic waste of such a talented life.’
The dead man’s parents, Ian, an engineer at Wylfa power station, and mother Ellen, who worked in education, were on holiday in America celebrating their joint 50th birthdays when news of their son’s death broke.Last night they were said to be ‘devastated’.
Another former school friend, Dylan Parry, 34, said he was ‘dumfounded’ by the murder.
‘Gareth was the last person I would have believed would be involved in the murkier elements of life,’ said Mr Parry, of Holyhead. ‘He really was about as far from a James Bond figure as it’s possible to imagine.
‘Gareth was introverted and socially awkward. He wasn’t dashing or cavalier or a charmer, although he was extremely nice in a quiet way.
‘There has been a lot of speculation about his sexuality, but he was so introverted as to be asexual.‘
He wasn’t able to form relationships because he was so obsessed with his maths studies.
‘We nicknamed him the maths genius because he was so clever. He was so naive, he was someone people could easily take advantage of.
‘I wouldn’t have thought he was a very good judge of character and it’s possible he got to know someone who wasn’t very safe. He was so innocent.’
Filed under
blackmail,
Bodedern,
Cheltenham,
CIA,
Daily Mail,
Dylan Parry,
gay,
Geraint Williams,
Harry Ferguson,
Holyhead,
Jenny Elliot,
laptop,
murder,
toxicology,
transvestite
by Winter Patriot
on Friday, August 27, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
The Australian : Slain spy Gareth Williams linked to bondage, male escort
Friday, August 27, 2010
Slain spy Gareth Williams linked to bondage, male escort
Staff writers | From: The Times | August 27, 2010
POLICE investigating the murder of a British spy found bondage equipment in his flat and evidence linking him to a male escort.
The find has raised questions over how Gareth Williams's private life slipped through the vetting procedures of the security services. Senior security personnel are said to be "extremely concerned" that an employee with high clearance had a lifestyle that put him in danger of being compromised.
A source close to the investigation said that evidence discovered in the London flat included bondage items, porn films and paraphernalia associated with sado-masochism. It is also understood that Mr Williams, who was on secondment to M16 from GCHQ, the Government's top secret listening post, has been linked to a male escort.
Detectives have focused their investigations on the private life of Mr Williams, 30, since he was found on Monday murdered and stuffed into a holdall in his flat in Pimlico, a short walk from M16 headquarters.
It also emerged that Mr Williams travelled regularly to the United States on official business, raising further concerns about potential national security breaches because of the information he had access to. He went to Washington several times a year, stayed for a few weeks each time and went shortly before he died.
Last night the National Security Agency refused to confirm or deny that Mr Williams, who is believed to be an expert in codes and ciphers, had worked for them. It is not unusual for members of the security services to spend time working for government security departments in America.
Jenny Elliott, the spy's former landlady in Cheltenham, said Mr Williams regularly travelled to America. "He would go to Washington about three times a year. It was always Washington. That was part of his job." She said that Mr Williams would usually combine the trip with a holiday.
Detectives from the Homicide and Serious Crime Command may have to wait for up to a week to find out how Mr Williams died. The initial postmortem examination proved inconclusive and several tests, thought to include toxicology tests, are now being conducted.
A picture of Mr Williams as a genius who led a solitary existence began to emerge yesterday. Friends described him as athletic, kind and intelligent, but above all extremely private. Dylan Parry, a schoolfriend, described him as academically gifted but socially naive. Mr Parry, 34, said Mr Williams was an isolated child fascinated by mathematics and computers.
The pair attended Uwchradd Bodedern secondary in Anglesey, where Mr Williams was "the kind of person who found it difficult to engage with people on a normal level".
"It was clear he was going to go far, but we all assumed he would end up in academia. Finding out he became a spy was a shock," Mr Parry said.
Geraint Williams, the spy's maths teacher at Bodedern, said he had "definitely the best brain" he had known. "If you explained something once to Gareth he remembered it. You didn't have to explain a second time. It all stuck there. It didn't surprise me at all that he was very interested in codes and ciphers and it didn't surprise me that he was recruited by GCHQ."
Online tributes mainly referred to his shy and quiet nature. One fellow Cambridge student, said: "He seemed a shy and quiet chap, but had a peculiarly memorable laugh and smile that are haunting me somewhat today. I knew that Gareth had gone on to work at Cheltenham but would never have imagined his life culminating in this."
Keith Thompson, of Holyhead Cycling Club, said he had known Mr Williams since he joined the club at the age of 17. "It's true that he was very quiet. He wasn't a great conversationalist. We were clubmates but Gareth wasn't the sort to go the pub after a race so he didn't have any close friends in the group. I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth. It was his cycling that we knew about. A couple of times he won the club's 'best all-rounder' award."
Staff writers | From: The Times | August 27, 2010
POLICE investigating the murder of a British spy found bondage equipment in his flat and evidence linking him to a male escort.
The find has raised questions over how Gareth Williams's private life slipped through the vetting procedures of the security services. Senior security personnel are said to be "extremely concerned" that an employee with high clearance had a lifestyle that put him in danger of being compromised.
A source close to the investigation said that evidence discovered in the London flat included bondage items, porn films and paraphernalia associated with sado-masochism. It is also understood that Mr Williams, who was on secondment to M16 from GCHQ, the Government's top secret listening post, has been linked to a male escort.
Detectives have focused their investigations on the private life of Mr Williams, 30, since he was found on Monday murdered and stuffed into a holdall in his flat in Pimlico, a short walk from M16 headquarters.
It also emerged that Mr Williams travelled regularly to the United States on official business, raising further concerns about potential national security breaches because of the information he had access to. He went to Washington several times a year, stayed for a few weeks each time and went shortly before he died.
Last night the National Security Agency refused to confirm or deny that Mr Williams, who is believed to be an expert in codes and ciphers, had worked for them. It is not unusual for members of the security services to spend time working for government security departments in America.
Jenny Elliott, the spy's former landlady in Cheltenham, said Mr Williams regularly travelled to America. "He would go to Washington about three times a year. It was always Washington. That was part of his job." She said that Mr Williams would usually combine the trip with a holiday.
Detectives from the Homicide and Serious Crime Command may have to wait for up to a week to find out how Mr Williams died. The initial postmortem examination proved inconclusive and several tests, thought to include toxicology tests, are now being conducted.
A picture of Mr Williams as a genius who led a solitary existence began to emerge yesterday. Friends described him as athletic, kind and intelligent, but above all extremely private. Dylan Parry, a schoolfriend, described him as academically gifted but socially naive. Mr Parry, 34, said Mr Williams was an isolated child fascinated by mathematics and computers.
The pair attended Uwchradd Bodedern secondary in Anglesey, where Mr Williams was "the kind of person who found it difficult to engage with people on a normal level".
"It was clear he was going to go far, but we all assumed he would end up in academia. Finding out he became a spy was a shock," Mr Parry said.
Geraint Williams, the spy's maths teacher at Bodedern, said he had "definitely the best brain" he had known. "If you explained something once to Gareth he remembered it. You didn't have to explain a second time. It all stuck there. It didn't surprise me at all that he was very interested in codes and ciphers and it didn't surprise me that he was recruited by GCHQ."
Online tributes mainly referred to his shy and quiet nature. One fellow Cambridge student, said: "He seemed a shy and quiet chap, but had a peculiarly memorable laugh and smile that are haunting me somewhat today. I knew that Gareth had gone on to work at Cheltenham but would never have imagined his life culminating in this."
Keith Thompson, of Holyhead Cycling Club, said he had known Mr Williams since he joined the club at the age of 17. "It's true that he was very quiet. He wasn't a great conversationalist. We were clubmates but Gareth wasn't the sort to go the pub after a race so he didn't have any close friends in the group. I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth. It was his cycling that we knew about. A couple of times he won the club's 'best all-rounder' award."
Filed under
Bodedern,
bondage,
breach,
Cheltenham,
CIA,
clearance,
Dylan Parry,
Geraint Williams,
Holyhead,
Jenny Elliot,
Keith Thompson,
murder,
sado-masochism,
toxicology,
Washington
by Winter Patriot
on Friday, August 27, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
Guardian : Murdered spy's family 'deeply upset' about private life claims
Friday, August 27, 2010
Murdered spy's family 'deeply upset' about private life claims
Cousin says family in state of shock, as report says Gareth Williams was regular visitor to Pentagon listening post
By Mark Tran | August 27, 2010
The family of a murdered British spy said today they were "deeply upset" over claims about his private life and suggested the security services may be behind a smear campaign.
Gareth Williams's body was discovered in a holdall in the bath of a flat in Pimlico, central London, on Monday. Police believe he may have been dead for two weeks.
Williams, 30, worked at GCHQ, the eavesdropping and security centre, was days from completing a year-long secondment at MI6 and, it has emerged, was a regular visitor to the US national security agency that intercepts and analyses foreign communications.
However, reports that police had found evidence linking him to a male escort and that bondage equipment was found at his flat were challenged by his family.
William Hughes, 62, a Plaid Cymru councillor on the Isle of Anglesey county council and a cousin of Williams's mother, Ellen, said there was no evidence the allegations were correct.
He said: "I don't see any evidence of it. It never crossed my mind that Gareth was that sort of person. He left home at a young age and what happened in his private life was his business.
"When you have these rumours in the papers, it is most distressing. It is heartbreaking that he has died so young and his family have enough on their plate without having to read these stories.
"Gareth's parents are not doing well at all. They are in a state of shock and struggling to come to terms with what has happened. They have seen what has been in the papers and they are very, very upset about these untruths."
Hughes said it was possible the government or another agency may be trying to discredit Williams, who had been due to return to a rented flat in Cheltenham, where GCHQ is based.
The Daily Mail reported that Williams flew to the NSA, the Pentagon's listening post, up to four times a year. He returned from his last trip a few weeks before he was found dead. The paper said US intelligence officers were poring over Williams's work and personal life to see whether the circumstances of his death endangered US national security.
Tests are being carried out to determine whether he was asphyxiated, and whether drugs or alcohol were in his system. The tests are expected to take weeks.
Williams left school at 15, got a first-class degree in maths at 17, and a PhD at Manchester University. His former maths teacher, Geraint Williams, said: "He was the best logician and the pupil with the fastest brain I have ever met. You only had to say things once, that's why he was so successful."
Investigators suspect Williams may have known his killer as there was no sign of forced entry at his top-floor flat. Police have begun examining his mobile phone and financial records as well as CCTV cameras from streets and businesses surrounding his home.
His flat has been the subject of a fingertip search amid fears that top-secret work material could have gone missing. Officers broke down the door of his flat on Monday afternoon when attempts by government officials to locate him through his former landlady failed.
Cousin says family in state of shock, as report says Gareth Williams was regular visitor to Pentagon listening post
By Mark Tran | August 27, 2010
The family of a murdered British spy said today they were "deeply upset" over claims about his private life and suggested the security services may be behind a smear campaign.
Gareth Williams's body was discovered in a holdall in the bath of a flat in Pimlico, central London, on Monday. Police believe he may have been dead for two weeks.
Williams, 30, worked at GCHQ, the eavesdropping and security centre, was days from completing a year-long secondment at MI6 and, it has emerged, was a regular visitor to the US national security agency that intercepts and analyses foreign communications.
However, reports that police had found evidence linking him to a male escort and that bondage equipment was found at his flat were challenged by his family.
William Hughes, 62, a Plaid Cymru councillor on the Isle of Anglesey county council and a cousin of Williams's mother, Ellen, said there was no evidence the allegations were correct.
He said: "I don't see any evidence of it. It never crossed my mind that Gareth was that sort of person. He left home at a young age and what happened in his private life was his business.
"When you have these rumours in the papers, it is most distressing. It is heartbreaking that he has died so young and his family have enough on their plate without having to read these stories.
"Gareth's parents are not doing well at all. They are in a state of shock and struggling to come to terms with what has happened. They have seen what has been in the papers and they are very, very upset about these untruths."
Hughes said it was possible the government or another agency may be trying to discredit Williams, who had been due to return to a rented flat in Cheltenham, where GCHQ is based.
The Daily Mail reported that Williams flew to the NSA, the Pentagon's listening post, up to four times a year. He returned from his last trip a few weeks before he was found dead. The paper said US intelligence officers were poring over Williams's work and personal life to see whether the circumstances of his death endangered US national security.
Tests are being carried out to determine whether he was asphyxiated, and whether drugs or alcohol were in his system. The tests are expected to take weeks.
Williams left school at 15, got a first-class degree in maths at 17, and a PhD at Manchester University. His former maths teacher, Geraint Williams, said: "He was the best logician and the pupil with the fastest brain I have ever met. You only had to say things once, that's why he was so successful."
Investigators suspect Williams may have known his killer as there was no sign of forced entry at his top-floor flat. Police have begun examining his mobile phone and financial records as well as CCTV cameras from streets and businesses surrounding his home.
His flat has been the subject of a fingertip search amid fears that top-secret work material could have gone missing. Officers broke down the door of his flat on Monday afternoon when attempts by government officials to locate him through his former landlady failed.
Filed under
bondage,
Cheltenham,
CIA,
Geraint Williams,
Guardian,
murder,
NSA,
William Hughes
by Winter Patriot
on Friday, August 27, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
Windsor Star : Murdered spy may have mixed with bad crowd
Friday, August 27, 2010
Murdered spy may have mixed with bad crowd
By Richard Edwards and John Bingham, The Daily Telegraph | August 27, 2010
London -- The British spy found murdered in London this week was "one of life's innocents" who could have fallen in with "unsafe" company, friends have claimed.
As police continued to draw a blank over the mysterious death of Gareth Williams, friends said he had an extraordinary mathematical mind but was "very naive about people."
There was no sign of forced entry at the flat in central London where the 31 year-old was found stuffed into a sports bag on Monday afternoon, suggesting the killer was someone Williams knew.
Detectives have been unable to find any regular friends, male or female, linked to the cipher and codes expert, who worked for MI6 and the GCHQ listening station in Cheltenham. They are investigating whether he had recently met his killer and are analyzing mobile phone sim cards found in the flat in Pimlico, central London.
Detectives are also investigating whether he lived a double life unknown to his superiors and are studying his recent movements, including a trip to Las Vegas he had described as a "real eye opener." School friends said that Williams was nicknamed "child genius." but added that he was "not a good judge of character."
Williams took a math General Certificate of Education at primary school and A Levels at 13. He graduated with a first from Bangor University by the age of 17 and earned a masters at Cambridge University. Like many prodigies, however, he struggled to make friends after being catapulted into the company of older people at an early age.
Dylan Parry, 34, a friend from his home in Anglesey, said he was an isolated child only interested in maths and computers. "He never really made friends, either his own age or from those younger than him. He didn't have any of the normal childhood interests or pursuits of teenagers.
"His only real interest was maths. He was obsessed with his subject. Socially he was very awkward but very nice."
Parry added that the spy was someone "people could easily take advantage of" and suggested the murder may have been nothing to do with his work for MI6. "Back then (in his teens) he wasn't the kind to have a girlfriend -- or a boyfriend for that matter. He was very naive about people.
"I wouldn't have thought he was a very good judge of character and it's possible he got to know someone who wasn't very safe. He was so innocent."
Geraint Williams, a math teacher at Bodedern High School, said the "exceptional" pupil had "the best brain I have ever seen."
"He was the best logician. It didn't surprise me at all that he was very interested in codes and ciphers and it didn't surprise me that he was recruited by GCHQ. He was definitely going to go into something like that with his brain."
Keith Thompson, who knew Williams through Holyhead Cycling Club, said: "I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth."
© Copyright (c) The Windsor Star
By Richard Edwards and John Bingham, The Daily Telegraph | August 27, 2010
London -- The British spy found murdered in London this week was "one of life's innocents" who could have fallen in with "unsafe" company, friends have claimed.
As police continued to draw a blank over the mysterious death of Gareth Williams, friends said he had an extraordinary mathematical mind but was "very naive about people."
There was no sign of forced entry at the flat in central London where the 31 year-old was found stuffed into a sports bag on Monday afternoon, suggesting the killer was someone Williams knew.
Detectives have been unable to find any regular friends, male or female, linked to the cipher and codes expert, who worked for MI6 and the GCHQ listening station in Cheltenham. They are investigating whether he had recently met his killer and are analyzing mobile phone sim cards found in the flat in Pimlico, central London.
Detectives are also investigating whether he lived a double life unknown to his superiors and are studying his recent movements, including a trip to Las Vegas he had described as a "real eye opener." School friends said that Williams was nicknamed "child genius." but added that he was "not a good judge of character."
Williams took a math General Certificate of Education at primary school and A Levels at 13. He graduated with a first from Bangor University by the age of 17 and earned a masters at Cambridge University. Like many prodigies, however, he struggled to make friends after being catapulted into the company of older people at an early age.
Dylan Parry, 34, a friend from his home in Anglesey, said he was an isolated child only interested in maths and computers. "He never really made friends, either his own age or from those younger than him. He didn't have any of the normal childhood interests or pursuits of teenagers.
"His only real interest was maths. He was obsessed with his subject. Socially he was very awkward but very nice."
Parry added that the spy was someone "people could easily take advantage of" and suggested the murder may have been nothing to do with his work for MI6. "Back then (in his teens) he wasn't the kind to have a girlfriend -- or a boyfriend for that matter. He was very naive about people.
"I wouldn't have thought he was a very good judge of character and it's possible he got to know someone who wasn't very safe. He was so innocent."
Geraint Williams, a math teacher at Bodedern High School, said the "exceptional" pupil had "the best brain I have ever seen."
"He was the best logician. It didn't surprise me at all that he was very interested in codes and ciphers and it didn't surprise me that he was recruited by GCHQ. He was definitely going to go into something like that with his brain."
Keith Thompson, who knew Williams through Holyhead Cycling Club, said: "I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth."
© Copyright (c) The Windsor Star
Filed under
Bodedern,
Cheltenham,
CIA,
Dylan Parry,
Geraint Williams,
Holyhead,
Keith Thompson,
murder,
mysterious,
NSA
by Winter Patriot
on Friday, August 27, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
Express : MURDERED SPY MAY HAVE MET HIS KILLER ON MISSIONS TO USA
Friday, August 27, 2010
MURDERED SPY MAY HAVE MET HIS KILLER ON MISSIONS TO USA
August 27, 2010
THE hunt for the killer of British spy Gareth Williams switched to the USA yesterday.
Grieving relatives of the MI6 code breaker revealed that he had been sent on several missions to America.
He is understood to have returned from there shortly before he was killed.
Police investigating the murder of the brilliant mathematician are trying to establish who he met in the US and if any of his contacts visited Britain recently. Scotland Yard detectives are trying to build up a picture of his private life and his movements in the month before he was killed.
They are convinced the key to the mystery lies in his personal not his professional life. His uncle Bill Hughes, of Anglesey said: “Gareth regularly flew out to the US on business. He’d be gone for a couple of weeks, maybe three, each time and he probably went out there two or three times a year for the past two years, I think. He must have got home from his last trip out there two or three weeks before he died.”
Family and friends described the spy as a man of great intellectual ability, bordering on genius, but also a loner, who was vulnerable because he was so naive. The 31-year-old was found dead on Monday afternoon stuffed in a sports bag and dumped in the bath of his flat in Pimlico, central London.
His body had lain there for up two weeks. Scientists are carrying out more tests after a post mortem examination proved inconclusive. Although no secret material is thought to have been stolen, detectives have not ruled out the possibility that the killer is from the intelligence world.
They believe the spy may have known his attacker and let him into the flat. However, reports that the spy was a transvestite with a secret double life have been dismissed. Mr Williams was on secondment to MI6 from the Government communications centre GCHQ. He was due back at the Cheltenham-based establishment next week.
The cycling fanatic was brought up in Holyhead, Anglesey, left school at 15 and got a first class degree from Bangor University at just 17 and then earned a PhD from Manchester University. Former teacher Geraint Williams said: “He was the best logician and the pupil with the fastest brain I have ever met.”
Dylan Parry, a childhood friend, said: “He didn’t have any of the normal childhood interests or pursuits of teenagers. He was extremely quiet.” In an internet tribute, he added: “Gareth was one of life’s innocents – so it’s hard to believe that he found himself involved in the rather exciting, and sometimes dangerous, world of espionage.”
Keith Thompson, of the Holyhead Cycling Club, said: “We were clubmates but Gareth wasn’t the sort to go to the pub after a race so he didn’t have any close friends in the group. I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth.”
August 27, 2010
THE hunt for the killer of British spy Gareth Williams switched to the USA yesterday.
Grieving relatives of the MI6 code breaker revealed that he had been sent on several missions to America.
He is understood to have returned from there shortly before he was killed.
Police investigating the murder of the brilliant mathematician are trying to establish who he met in the US and if any of his contacts visited Britain recently. Scotland Yard detectives are trying to build up a picture of his private life and his movements in the month before he was killed.
They are convinced the key to the mystery lies in his personal not his professional life. His uncle Bill Hughes, of Anglesey said: “Gareth regularly flew out to the US on business. He’d be gone for a couple of weeks, maybe three, each time and he probably went out there two or three times a year for the past two years, I think. He must have got home from his last trip out there two or three weeks before he died.”
Family and friends described the spy as a man of great intellectual ability, bordering on genius, but also a loner, who was vulnerable because he was so naive. The 31-year-old was found dead on Monday afternoon stuffed in a sports bag and dumped in the bath of his flat in Pimlico, central London.
His body had lain there for up two weeks. Scientists are carrying out more tests after a post mortem examination proved inconclusive. Although no secret material is thought to have been stolen, detectives have not ruled out the possibility that the killer is from the intelligence world.
They believe the spy may have known his attacker and let him into the flat. However, reports that the spy was a transvestite with a secret double life have been dismissed. Mr Williams was on secondment to MI6 from the Government communications centre GCHQ. He was due back at the Cheltenham-based establishment next week.
The cycling fanatic was brought up in Holyhead, Anglesey, left school at 15 and got a first class degree from Bangor University at just 17 and then earned a PhD from Manchester University. Former teacher Geraint Williams said: “He was the best logician and the pupil with the fastest brain I have ever met.”
Dylan Parry, a childhood friend, said: “He didn’t have any of the normal childhood interests or pursuits of teenagers. He was extremely quiet.” In an internet tribute, he added: “Gareth was one of life’s innocents – so it’s hard to believe that he found himself involved in the rather exciting, and sometimes dangerous, world of espionage.”
Keith Thompson, of the Holyhead Cycling Club, said: “We were clubmates but Gareth wasn’t the sort to go to the pub after a race so he didn’t have any close friends in the group. I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth.”
Filed under
Cheltenham,
CIA,
Dylan Parry,
Express,
Geraint Williams,
Holyhead,
Keith Thompson,
murder,
transvestite,
William Hughes
by Winter Patriot
on Friday, August 27, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
BBC : More tests due on body of MI6 worker Gareth Williams
Friday, August 27, 2010
More tests due on body of MI6 worker Gareth Williams
August 26, 2010
Further tests are to be carried out on the body of an MI6 worker found in a holdall in the bath at his central London flat.
The body of Gareth Williams, 30, from Anglesey, was found in the Pimlico flat on Monday afternoon. Police believe he may have been murdered two weeks ago.
A post-mortem examination carried out on Wednesday proved inconclusive.
The Metropolitan Police said more tests, including toxicological analysis of his blood, would be conducted.
The force is treating the death as "suspicious and unexplained".
The body was discovered when officers broke into the flat in Alderney Street after colleagues said Mr Williams had not been seen for at least 10 days.
Officers went to the flat after attempts by the Foreign Office to locate him via his former landlady failed.
'Peculiarly memorable laugh'
The post-mortem examination by a Home Office pathologist failed to determine a cause of death, although it is believed he had not been stabbed.
Originally from Holyhead, north Wales, Mr Williams was on secondment to MI6 from his job as a communications officer at the GCHQ "listening post" in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
A "maths genius", Mr Williams graduated with a first class degree in maths from Bangor University aged 17.
Secondary school maths teacher Geraint Williams said of his former pupil: "He was probably not the best mathematician I have seen, but the best logician."
Fellow cyclists have also paid tribute to Mr Williams, who often took part in road races and time trials.
One wrote on an internet forum: "People sometimes thought he was dense because he spoke rather slowly and sometimes seemed distracted. How wrong can you get?
"A pretty quick junior, and a very nice quietly-spoken young man."
A cyclist at Cambridge University's bicycle club, where Mr Williams was the "star rider", said: "He seemed a shy chap, but had a peculiarly memorable laugh and smile that are haunting me somewhat today."
Personal life
Officers who entered the Pimlico flat, which is about half a mile from the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) on the banks of the Thames, discovered a mobile phone and several mobile phone Sim cards laid out.
On Wednesday, Mr Williams' uncle, William Hughes, told BBC News that his nephew never spoke about his work but he said he was "very, very talented".
Mr Williams' father Ian, who works at Wylfa nuclear power station and lives in Valley, Anglesey, went straight to London after being told of the death, with his wife and daughter Ceri, who lives near Wrexham.
The police are understood to be looking into aspects of Mr Williams' personal life.
It is not known what work he was doing for MI6.
After it emerged he had been working for the intelligence services, a spokesman for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which is handling press inquiries for MI6, said: "This is a police matter.
"It is long-standing Her Majesty's Government policy not to confirm or deny any individual working for the intelligence agencies."
August 26, 2010
Further tests are to be carried out on the body of an MI6 worker found in a holdall in the bath at his central London flat.
The body of Gareth Williams, 30, from Anglesey, was found in the Pimlico flat on Monday afternoon. Police believe he may have been murdered two weeks ago.
A post-mortem examination carried out on Wednesday proved inconclusive.
The Metropolitan Police said more tests, including toxicological analysis of his blood, would be conducted.
The force is treating the death as "suspicious and unexplained".
The body was discovered when officers broke into the flat in Alderney Street after colleagues said Mr Williams had not been seen for at least 10 days.
Officers went to the flat after attempts by the Foreign Office to locate him via his former landlady failed.
'Peculiarly memorable laugh'
The post-mortem examination by a Home Office pathologist failed to determine a cause of death, although it is believed he had not been stabbed.
Originally from Holyhead, north Wales, Mr Williams was on secondment to MI6 from his job as a communications officer at the GCHQ "listening post" in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
A "maths genius", Mr Williams graduated with a first class degree in maths from Bangor University aged 17.
Secondary school maths teacher Geraint Williams said of his former pupil: "He was probably not the best mathematician I have seen, but the best logician."
Fellow cyclists have also paid tribute to Mr Williams, who often took part in road races and time trials.
One wrote on an internet forum: "People sometimes thought he was dense because he spoke rather slowly and sometimes seemed distracted. How wrong can you get?
"A pretty quick junior, and a very nice quietly-spoken young man."
A cyclist at Cambridge University's bicycle club, where Mr Williams was the "star rider", said: "He seemed a shy chap, but had a peculiarly memorable laugh and smile that are haunting me somewhat today."
Personal life
Officers who entered the Pimlico flat, which is about half a mile from the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) on the banks of the Thames, discovered a mobile phone and several mobile phone Sim cards laid out.
On Wednesday, Mr Williams' uncle, William Hughes, told BBC News that his nephew never spoke about his work but he said he was "very, very talented".
Mr Williams' father Ian, who works at Wylfa nuclear power station and lives in Valley, Anglesey, went straight to London after being told of the death, with his wife and daughter Ceri, who lives near Wrexham.
The police are understood to be looking into aspects of Mr Williams' personal life.
It is not known what work he was doing for MI6.
After it emerged he had been working for the intelligence services, a spokesman for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which is handling press inquiries for MI6, said: "This is a police matter.
"It is long-standing Her Majesty's Government policy not to confirm or deny any individual working for the intelligence agencies."
Filed under
Alderney Street,
BBC,
blood,
Ceri Subbe,
Cheltenham,
CIA,
Geraint Williams,
Holyhead,
murder,
Valley,
William Hughes
by Winter Patriot
on Friday, August 27, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
BBC : MI6 worker Gareth Williams was an 'exceptional' pupil
Friday, August 27, 2010
MI6 worker Gareth Williams was an 'exceptional' pupil
August 26, 2010
More tributes have been paid to Gareth Williams, the MI6 worker whose body was discovered in a holdall in his London flat.
More tests are being carried out on the body of the 30-year-old from Holyhead on Anglesey after a post mortem proved inconclusive.
Metropolitan Police are treating his death as "suspicious and unexplained".
His maths teacher Geraint Williams said Mr Williams was an "exceptional" pupil.
"He was probably not the best mathematician I have seen, but the best logician.
"If you explained something once to Gareth he remembered it, you didn't have to explain it again," said Mr Williams, a teacher at Bodedern secondary school.
"It didn't surprise me at all that he was very interested in codes and ciphers and it didn't really surprise me that he was recruited by GCHQ.
"He was definitely going to go into something like that with his brain."
Mr Williams graduated with a first class degree in maths from Bangor University at just 17 after beginning his university studies while at secondary school.
The university said in a statement it "was saddened to hear of his death and we extend our condolences to his family and friends at this very difficult time".
In 2000, he took a postgraduate certificate in mathematics at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
Mr Williams was on a secondment to the secret intelligence service.
His body was discovered in his top floor flat in Pimlico, London on Monday.
Mr Williams' uncle, William Hughes, said his nephew never spoke about his work but he said he was "very, very talented".
Mr Hughes said: "He would never talk about his work and the family knew not to ask, really."
His father Ian, who works at Wylfa nuclear power station and lives in Valley, Anglesey, went to London after being told of the death, with his wife and daughter Ceri, who lives near Wrexham.
The police are understood to be looking into aspects of Mr Williams' personal life.
Keith Thompson, of Holyhead Cycling Club, said Mr Williams joined the club when he was 17.
He said: "I heard the news in a text message yesterday morning and it was a shock.
"We are totally devastated. He was a really lovely young man.
"Of course, once he moved to Cheltenham he joined the club there and we didn't see much of him."
Mr Thompson said he last saw Mr Williams at their meeting on Boxing Day.
Private life
"We were club mates but Gareth wasn't the sort to go the pub after a race so he didn't have any close friends in the group.
"I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth.
"It was his cycling that we knew about. He was known for being very good on hill races but a couple of times he won the club's 'best all-rounder' award."
He added they had cancelled a club event on Thursday and would be getting in touch with his family to offer their condolences.
August 26, 2010
More tributes have been paid to Gareth Williams, the MI6 worker whose body was discovered in a holdall in his London flat.
More tests are being carried out on the body of the 30-year-old from Holyhead on Anglesey after a post mortem proved inconclusive.
Metropolitan Police are treating his death as "suspicious and unexplained".
His maths teacher Geraint Williams said Mr Williams was an "exceptional" pupil.
"He was probably not the best mathematician I have seen, but the best logician.
"If you explained something once to Gareth he remembered it, you didn't have to explain it again," said Mr Williams, a teacher at Bodedern secondary school.
"It didn't surprise me at all that he was very interested in codes and ciphers and it didn't really surprise me that he was recruited by GCHQ.
"He was definitely going to go into something like that with his brain."
Mr Williams graduated with a first class degree in maths from Bangor University at just 17 after beginning his university studies while at secondary school.
The university said in a statement it "was saddened to hear of his death and we extend our condolences to his family and friends at this very difficult time".
In 2000, he took a postgraduate certificate in mathematics at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
Mr Williams was on a secondment to the secret intelligence service.
His body was discovered in his top floor flat in Pimlico, London on Monday.
Mr Williams' uncle, William Hughes, said his nephew never spoke about his work but he said he was "very, very talented".
Mr Hughes said: "He would never talk about his work and the family knew not to ask, really."
His father Ian, who works at Wylfa nuclear power station and lives in Valley, Anglesey, went to London after being told of the death, with his wife and daughter Ceri, who lives near Wrexham.
The police are understood to be looking into aspects of Mr Williams' personal life.
Keith Thompson, of Holyhead Cycling Club, said Mr Williams joined the club when he was 17.
He said: "I heard the news in a text message yesterday morning and it was a shock.
"We are totally devastated. He was a really lovely young man.
"Of course, once he moved to Cheltenham he joined the club there and we didn't see much of him."
Mr Thompson said he last saw Mr Williams at their meeting on Boxing Day.
Private life
"We were club mates but Gareth wasn't the sort to go the pub after a race so he didn't have any close friends in the group.
"I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth.
"It was his cycling that we knew about. He was known for being very good on hill races but a couple of times he won the club's 'best all-rounder' award."
He added they had cancelled a club event on Thursday and would be getting in touch with his family to offer their condolences.
Filed under
BBC,
Bodedern,
Ceri Subbe,
Cheltenham,
CIA,
Geraint Williams,
Holyhead,
Keith Thompson,
Valley,
William Hughes
by Winter Patriot
on Friday, August 27, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
Guardian : Gareth Williams's parents identify body
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Gareth Williams's parents identify body
Parents return from holiday to speak to police as picture emerges of MI6 officer as private and mild-mannered
By Sam Jones and Matthew Taylor | August 26, 2010
The grieving parents of an MI6 intelligence officer whose decomposed body was discovered in a flat in London formally identified their son's remains today, as detectives continued to search for his killer.
Gareth Williams's body was discovered in a holdall in the bath of a flat in Pimlico on Monday. Police believe he may have been dead for two weeks.
Williams, a cycling and fitness fanatic who worked at GCHQ, the eavesdropping and security centre, was days from completing a year-long secondment at MI6.
Tests are still being carried out to determine the cause of death. Initial reports that he was stabbed have been proved false. Further tests could determine whether Williams was asphyxiated, and whether drugs or alcohol were present in his system. The toxicology tests are expected to take weeks.
Williams's parents, Ian and Ellen, arrived back from holiday in Canada and America to speak to police and to identify their son's body, as a picture emerged of him as an intensely private and mild-mannered man.
William Hughes, Ellen's cousin, said: "The last time I saw Gareth was just a few months ago at a family party and he was fine. He was always a quiet person, he was from a young age."
Hughes said he had never known Williams to bring home a partner, describing him as a very private person. "I knew he worked at GCHQ and he had been working in London but I didn't know what he did. It wasn't said that we shouldn't talk about it, I simply never asked and he never told me."
Keith Thompson, of Holyhead cycling club, said Williams had joined the club at the age of 17. "He wasn't a great conversationalist. I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth."
Dylan Parry, a childhood friend, described him as academically gifted but socially naive. "He was the kind of person who found it difficult to engage with people on a normal level," Parry, who went to secondary school with Williams in Anglesey, north Wales, told the Evening Standard. "It was clear he was going to go far, but we all assumed he would end up in academia. Finding out he became a spy was a shock."
Williams's former maths teacher, Geraint Williams, recalled how the maths genius had transferred from a primary school at Holyhead to the secondary school at the age of 10, a year earlier than usual. "I'd heard about this amazing pupil. He had done his GCSE at primary school and got a B at intermediate level. He took the higher level GCSE in a couple of months and got an A," he said.
"It was a problem for us – what could we do with him? We got him to follow A-levels and he did A-level maths and computer science in the third form. He achieved As in them. That was a big problem because he was still only 13 so we contacted Bangor University and he followed the first year of a maths degree course."
The student left school at 15 and got a first-class degree in maths at 17, and a PhD at Manchester University. His old teacher added: "He was the best logician and the pupil with the fastest brain I have ever met. You only had to say things once, that's why he was so successful. He could understand things immediately."
Investigators suspect Williams may have known his killer as there was no sign of forced entry at his top-floor flat. Detectives think the motive could lie in Williams's private life, but sources close to the inquiry said it was not clear how he had died and played down speculation that the murder was linked to his secretive line of work.
One source said: "The suggestion there is terrorism or national security links is pretty low down the list of probabilities."
Police have begun examining Williams's mobile phone and financial records as well as CCTV cameras from streets and businesses surrounding his home. His body could have lain undiscovered for up to a fortnight as he is believed to have been on leave from work.
His flat has been the subject of a fingertip search amid fears that top-secret work material could have gone missing. Officers broke down the door of his flat on Monday afternoon when attempts by government officials to locate him through his former landlady failed.
Parents return from holiday to speak to police as picture emerges of MI6 officer as private and mild-mannered
By Sam Jones and Matthew Taylor | August 26, 2010
The grieving parents of an MI6 intelligence officer whose decomposed body was discovered in a flat in London formally identified their son's remains today, as detectives continued to search for his killer.
Gareth Williams's body was discovered in a holdall in the bath of a flat in Pimlico on Monday. Police believe he may have been dead for two weeks.
Williams, a cycling and fitness fanatic who worked at GCHQ, the eavesdropping and security centre, was days from completing a year-long secondment at MI6.
Tests are still being carried out to determine the cause of death. Initial reports that he was stabbed have been proved false. Further tests could determine whether Williams was asphyxiated, and whether drugs or alcohol were present in his system. The toxicology tests are expected to take weeks.
Williams's parents, Ian and Ellen, arrived back from holiday in Canada and America to speak to police and to identify their son's body, as a picture emerged of him as an intensely private and mild-mannered man.
William Hughes, Ellen's cousin, said: "The last time I saw Gareth was just a few months ago at a family party and he was fine. He was always a quiet person, he was from a young age."
Hughes said he had never known Williams to bring home a partner, describing him as a very private person. "I knew he worked at GCHQ and he had been working in London but I didn't know what he did. It wasn't said that we shouldn't talk about it, I simply never asked and he never told me."
Keith Thompson, of Holyhead cycling club, said Williams had joined the club at the age of 17. "He wasn't a great conversationalist. I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth."
Dylan Parry, a childhood friend, described him as academically gifted but socially naive. "He was the kind of person who found it difficult to engage with people on a normal level," Parry, who went to secondary school with Williams in Anglesey, north Wales, told the Evening Standard. "It was clear he was going to go far, but we all assumed he would end up in academia. Finding out he became a spy was a shock."
Williams's former maths teacher, Geraint Williams, recalled how the maths genius had transferred from a primary school at Holyhead to the secondary school at the age of 10, a year earlier than usual. "I'd heard about this amazing pupil. He had done his GCSE at primary school and got a B at intermediate level. He took the higher level GCSE in a couple of months and got an A," he said.
"It was a problem for us – what could we do with him? We got him to follow A-levels and he did A-level maths and computer science in the third form. He achieved As in them. That was a big problem because he was still only 13 so we contacted Bangor University and he followed the first year of a maths degree course."
The student left school at 15 and got a first-class degree in maths at 17, and a PhD at Manchester University. His old teacher added: "He was the best logician and the pupil with the fastest brain I have ever met. You only had to say things once, that's why he was so successful. He could understand things immediately."
Investigators suspect Williams may have known his killer as there was no sign of forced entry at his top-floor flat. Detectives think the motive could lie in Williams's private life, but sources close to the inquiry said it was not clear how he had died and played down speculation that the murder was linked to his secretive line of work.
One source said: "The suggestion there is terrorism or national security links is pretty low down the list of probabilities."
Police have begun examining Williams's mobile phone and financial records as well as CCTV cameras from streets and businesses surrounding his home. His body could have lain undiscovered for up to a fortnight as he is believed to have been on leave from work.
His flat has been the subject of a fingertip search amid fears that top-secret work material could have gone missing. Officers broke down the door of his flat on Monday afternoon when attempts by government officials to locate him through his former landlady failed.
Filed under
CIA,
Dylan Parry,
Geraint Williams,
Guardian,
Holyhead,
Keith Thompson,
murder,
toxicology,
William Hughes
by Winter Patriot
on Thursday, August 26, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
UK Wired : More tests due on body of MI6 worker Gareth Williams
Thursday, August 26, 2010
More tests due on body of MI6 worker Gareth Williams
August 26, 2010
Further tests are to be carried out on the body of an MI6 worker found in a holdall in the bath at his central London flat.
The body of Gareth Williams, 30, from Anglesey, was found in the Pimlico flat on Monday afternoon. Police believe he may have been murdered two weeks ago.
A post-mortem examination carried out on Wednesday proved inconclusive.
The Metropolitan Police said more tests, including toxicological analysis of his blood, would be conducted.
The force is treating the death as "suspicious and unexplained".
The body was discovered when officers broke into the flat in Alderney Street after colleagues said Mr Williams had not been seen for at least 10 days.
Officers went to the flat after attempts by the Foreign Office to locate him via his former landlady failed.
The post-mortem examination by a Home Office pathologist failed to determine a cause of death, although it is believed he had not been stabbed.
Originally from Holyhead, north Wales, Mr Williams was on secondment to MI6 from his job as a communications officer at the GCHQ "listening post" in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
A "maths genius", Mr Williams graduated with a first class degree in maths from Bangor University aged 17.
Secondary school maths teacher Geraint Williams said of his former pupil: "He was probably not the best mathematician I have seen, but the best logician."
Fellow cyclists have also paid tribute to Mr Williams, who often took part in road races and time trials.
One wrote on an internet forum: "People sometimes thought he was dense because he spoke rather slowly and sometimes seemed distracted. How wrong can you get?
"A pretty quick junior, and a very nice quietly-spoken young man."
A cyclist at Cambridge University's bicycle club, where Mr Williams was the "star rider", said: "He seemed a shy chap, but had a peculiarly memorable laugh and smile that are haunting me somewhat today."
Officers who entered the Pimlico flat, which is about half a mile from the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) on the banks of the Thames, discovered a mobile phone and several mobile phone Sim cards laid out.
On Wednesday, Mr Williams' uncle, William Hughes, told BBC News that his nephew never spoke about his work but he said he was "very, very talented".
Mr Williams' father Ian, who works at Wylfa nuclear power station and lives in Valley, Anglesey, went straight to London after being told of the death, with his wife and daughter Ceri, who lives near Wrexham.
The police are understood to be looking into aspects of Mr Williams' personal life.
It is not known what work he was doing for MI6.
After it emerged he had been working for the intelligence services, a spokesman for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which is handling press inquiries for MI6, said: "This is a police matter.
"It is long-standing Her Majesty's Government policy not to confirm or deny any individual working for the intelligence agencies."
August 26, 2010
Further tests are to be carried out on the body of an MI6 worker found in a holdall in the bath at his central London flat.
The body of Gareth Williams, 30, from Anglesey, was found in the Pimlico flat on Monday afternoon. Police believe he may have been murdered two weeks ago.
A post-mortem examination carried out on Wednesday proved inconclusive.
The Metropolitan Police said more tests, including toxicological analysis of his blood, would be conducted.
The force is treating the death as "suspicious and unexplained".
The body was discovered when officers broke into the flat in Alderney Street after colleagues said Mr Williams had not been seen for at least 10 days.
Officers went to the flat after attempts by the Foreign Office to locate him via his former landlady failed.
The post-mortem examination by a Home Office pathologist failed to determine a cause of death, although it is believed he had not been stabbed.
Originally from Holyhead, north Wales, Mr Williams was on secondment to MI6 from his job as a communications officer at the GCHQ "listening post" in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
A "maths genius", Mr Williams graduated with a first class degree in maths from Bangor University aged 17.
Secondary school maths teacher Geraint Williams said of his former pupil: "He was probably not the best mathematician I have seen, but the best logician."
Fellow cyclists have also paid tribute to Mr Williams, who often took part in road races and time trials.
One wrote on an internet forum: "People sometimes thought he was dense because he spoke rather slowly and sometimes seemed distracted. How wrong can you get?
"A pretty quick junior, and a very nice quietly-spoken young man."
A cyclist at Cambridge University's bicycle club, where Mr Williams was the "star rider", said: "He seemed a shy chap, but had a peculiarly memorable laugh and smile that are haunting me somewhat today."
Officers who entered the Pimlico flat, which is about half a mile from the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) on the banks of the Thames, discovered a mobile phone and several mobile phone Sim cards laid out.
On Wednesday, Mr Williams' uncle, William Hughes, told BBC News that his nephew never spoke about his work but he said he was "very, very talented".
Mr Williams' father Ian, who works at Wylfa nuclear power station and lives in Valley, Anglesey, went straight to London after being told of the death, with his wife and daughter Ceri, who lives near Wrexham.
The police are understood to be looking into aspects of Mr Williams' personal life.
It is not known what work he was doing for MI6.
After it emerged he had been working for the intelligence services, a spokesman for the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which is handling press inquiries for MI6, said: "This is a police matter.
"It is long-standing Her Majesty's Government policy not to confirm or deny any individual working for the intelligence agencies."
Filed under
Alderney Street,
blood,
Ceri Subbe,
Cheltenham,
CIA,
Geraint Williams,
Holyhead,
murder,
UK Wired,
Valley,
William Hughes
by Winter Patriot
on Thursday, August 26, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
UK Wired : MI6 worker Gareth Williams was an 'exceptional' pupil
Thursday, August 26, 2010
MI6 worker Gareth Williams was an 'exceptional' pupil
August 26, 2010
More tributes have been paid to Gareth Williams, the MI6 worker whose body was discovered in a holdall in his London flat.
More tests are being carried out on the body of the 30-year-old from Anglesey after a post mortem proved inconclusive.
Metroplitan Police are treating his death as "suspicious and unexplained".
His maths teacher Geraint Williams said Mr Williams was an "exceptional" pupil
"He was probably not the best mathemitician I have seen, but the best logician.
"If you explained something once to Gareth he remembered it, you didn't have to explain it again," said Mr Williams, a teacher at Bodedern secondary school.
"It didn't surprise me at all that he was very interested in codes and cyphers and it didn't really surprise me that he was recruited by GCHQ.
"He was definitely going to go into something like that with his brain."
Mr Williams graduated with a first class degree in maths from Bangor University at just 17 after beginning his university studies while at secondary school.
The university said in a statement it "was saddened to hear of his death and we extend our condolences to his family and friends at this very difficult time".
"He would never talk about his work and the family knew not to ask, really”
He went to St Catharine's College Cambridge to undertake a postgraduate certificate in mathematics in 2000 but dropped out a year later.
Mr Williams was on a secondment to the secret intelligence service.
His body was discovered in his top floor flat in Pimlico, London on Monday.
Mr Williams' uncle, William Hughes, said his nephew never spoke about his work but he said he was "very, very talented".
Mr Hughes said: "He would never talk about his work and the family knew not to ask, really."
His father Ian, who works at Wylfa nuclear power station and lives in Valley, Anglesey, went to London after being told of the death, with his wife and daughter Ceri, who lives near Wrexham.
The police are understood to be looking into aspects of Mr Williams' personal life.
Keith Thompson, of Holyhead Cycling Club, said Mr Williams joined the club when he was 17.
He said: "I heard the news in a text message yesterday morning and it was a shock.
"We are totally devastated. He was a really lovely young man.
"Of course, once he moved to Cheltenham he joined the club there and we didn't see much of him.
Mr Thompson said he last saw Mr Williams at their meeting on Boxing Day.
Private life
"We were club mates but Gareth wasn't the sort to go the pub after a race so he didn't have any close friends in the group.
"I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth.
"It was his cycling that we knew about. He was known for being very good on hill races but a couple of times he won the club's 'best all-rounder' award."
He added they had cancelled a club event on Thursday and would be getting in touch with his family to offer their condolences.
August 26, 2010
More tributes have been paid to Gareth Williams, the MI6 worker whose body was discovered in a holdall in his London flat.
More tests are being carried out on the body of the 30-year-old from Anglesey after a post mortem proved inconclusive.
Metroplitan Police are treating his death as "suspicious and unexplained".
His maths teacher Geraint Williams said Mr Williams was an "exceptional" pupil
"He was probably not the best mathemitician I have seen, but the best logician.
"If you explained something once to Gareth he remembered it, you didn't have to explain it again," said Mr Williams, a teacher at Bodedern secondary school.
"It didn't surprise me at all that he was very interested in codes and cyphers and it didn't really surprise me that he was recruited by GCHQ.
"He was definitely going to go into something like that with his brain."
Mr Williams graduated with a first class degree in maths from Bangor University at just 17 after beginning his university studies while at secondary school.
The university said in a statement it "was saddened to hear of his death and we extend our condolences to his family and friends at this very difficult time".
"He would never talk about his work and the family knew not to ask, really”
He went to St Catharine's College Cambridge to undertake a postgraduate certificate in mathematics in 2000 but dropped out a year later.
Mr Williams was on a secondment to the secret intelligence service.
His body was discovered in his top floor flat in Pimlico, London on Monday.
Mr Williams' uncle, William Hughes, said his nephew never spoke about his work but he said he was "very, very talented".
Mr Hughes said: "He would never talk about his work and the family knew not to ask, really."
His father Ian, who works at Wylfa nuclear power station and lives in Valley, Anglesey, went to London after being told of the death, with his wife and daughter Ceri, who lives near Wrexham.
The police are understood to be looking into aspects of Mr Williams' personal life.
Keith Thompson, of Holyhead Cycling Club, said Mr Williams joined the club when he was 17.
He said: "I heard the news in a text message yesterday morning and it was a shock.
"We are totally devastated. He was a really lovely young man.
"Of course, once he moved to Cheltenham he joined the club there and we didn't see much of him.
Mr Thompson said he last saw Mr Williams at their meeting on Boxing Day.
Private life
"We were club mates but Gareth wasn't the sort to go the pub after a race so he didn't have any close friends in the group.
"I never spoke to him about his job or his private life. Nobody did with Gareth.
"It was his cycling that we knew about. He was known for being very good on hill races but a couple of times he won the club's 'best all-rounder' award."
He added they had cancelled a club event on Thursday and would be getting in touch with his family to offer their condolences.
Filed under
Bodedern,
Ceri Subbe,
Cheltenham,
CIA,
Geraint Williams,
Holyhead,
Keith Thompson,
UK Wired,
Valley,
William Hughes
by Winter Patriot
on Thursday, August 26, 2010 |
link |
email |
TSWKTM home |
SHATASM home |
WP home
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
