Express : What Does MI6 Have To Say About The Spy In The Bag?

WHAT DOES MI6 HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE SPY IN THE BAG?

By James Gillespie | May 5, 2012

THE bizarre case of Gareth Williams has thrown the spotlight on an intelligence service whose shadowy work leads some critics to ask whether it has become a law to itself.

There is an address in South London where even the police can’t go. Detective Chief Inspector Jackie Sebire, the officer leading the investigation into the baffling death of MI6 agent Gareth Williams – the so-called “Spy in the Bag” case – must have wished her powers extended to 85 Vauxhall Cross. But they don’t.

That address is the home of MI6 and although Sebire is a highly-experienced murder detective she doesn’t have security clearance to even enter the building much less question its inhabitants.

Instead her investigation depended on the mediation of Detective Superintendent Michael Broster of SO15, the counter-terrorism branch, which works closely with the intelligence services.

Only in the final stages of the inquest into Williams’s death this week did it emerge that no verbatim notes were taken of interviews with his MI6 colleagues and that a black holdall and nine memory sticks had been found at his desk but not handed over to the investigating officers.

Now 50 MI6 staff are facing DNA tests after the coroner Dr Fiona Wilcox, in a narrative verdict, ruled that it was likely Williams was “unlawfully killed”. Investigators are understood to believe that a colleague either from MI6 or the Government’s secret listening post at GCHQ was in the Pimlico flat when Williams died.

For his family – sister Ceri and parents Ian and Ellen – the inquest has raised as many questions as it has answered. And the most disturbing question of all is: does MI6 think it’s above the law?

The family has accused the intelligence service of withholding vital clues and failing to make “basic inquiries” until a week after Williams disappeared. “We are also extremely disappointed over the reluctance and failure of MI6 to make available relevant information,” they added.

Dr Wilcox echoed those concerns when she said that the forgetfulness of some employees at MI6, where Williams was on secondment from GCHQ, “stretched probability” and she refused to rule out the possibility that someone from the world of intelligence was involved.

From the moment the 31-year-old’s body was discovered in a North Face bag in the bath of his flat the response of MI6 has been puzzling. It took staff seven days even to report Williams – a conscientious time-keeper – missing then they appeared keen for police to be first into the apartment that MI6 has used for many years as temporary accommodation for employees.

The flat’s heating had been turned up high, despite the warmth of August, speeding up the decomposition of the body. The placing of the bag containing Williams into the bath prevented the giveaway leakage of fluids through the floor.

There were suggestions that the flat had been “swept” by someone who was forensically aware, to remove as many clues as possible.

Dr Wilcox said there was no evidence to suggest MI6 was involved in the death but “it is still a legitimate line of inquiry” and she added that “many agencies fell short” in the aftermath.

Sir John Sawers, MI6 chief, has apologised “unreservedly”, saying that lessons had been learned. But have they?

The problem may be that deep within MI6, in its culture and attitudes, lies a belief that the law is for other people.

The very nature of its work (MI6 deals with foreign intelligence, MI5 with domestic) means it is often on the boundaries of legality. The service is already under investigation for its part in sending Libyan dissidents into the hands of Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police.

Conservative MP Andrew Tyne, chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, this week called on Foreign Secretary William Hague to investigate whether MI6 officers had briefed journalists over the Libyan case – in breach of the Official Secrets Act.

The 1994 Intelligence Services Act allows MI6 officers to carry out acts abroad that if done in Britain would be in breach of criminal law. It would be hardly surprising if that attitude spreads to their staff at home.

Michael Smith, author of SIX: The Real James Bonds, says: “MI6 would recoil at any suggestion that it sees itself as above the law but the inherent secrecy of organisations like MI6 does tend to make them think that keeping everything they do secret, even the slightest thing, is so important that it transcends everything else.

“We’ve definitely seen that here, which is why the coroner and some police officers are so angry, justifiably so.”

But who are the people who spend their days working in the modernistic building on the banks of the Thames at 85 Vauxhall Cross?

There are about 2,500 people working for MI6 of whom about half are support staff.

The others are divided into two types: Intelligence Branch (IB) officers and General Service officers.

General Service officers asses reports.

It is the IB officers who are the real James Bonds. They train in the "killing houses" of the SAS and SBS at Hereford and Poole and have their own firing range at the MI6 training school at Fort Monckton on the Solent.

Within their shadowy world there are as many tensions and disagreements as in any workplace but these are hidden. In the Williams case a senior MI6 officer identified as F blamed his subordinate G for a "breakdown in communications" but G was not disciplined and no one will ever know who they are.

But Williams was a computer expert on secondment from GCHQ in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. What sort of people work there?

“Geeks,” said one who knows GCHQ staff but did not want to be identified. “They are brilliant in languages, maths or computers but they tend to be the sort of people who don’t mix easily. At university they are always the top ones in their class but they’re loners. A bit awkward.”

That description certainly fits Williams. He was a fitness fanatic who loved competitive cycling but also had a £20,000 collection of women’s clothing in his flat. When it came to the inquest, friends were few and far between.

HOWEVER those who did know him believe the picture painted during the inquiry was misleading. Some have claimed the clothes were gifts for female friends and talk of him visiting claustrophilia websites turned out to be based on four visits in two years. Hardly evidence of a dangerous obsession, as Dr Wilcox pointed out.

Perhaps the truth about what happened to Williams has fallen victim to MI6’s rather ambivalent attitude to the law.

“The secret world lives in a bubble,” says Smith. “It very often seeks to keep secret even things that are freely available on the internet.”

Another intelligence services expert, author Michael Burleigh, says: “After imagining that it could outmanoeuvre Plod, meaning highly-competent detectives, MI6 needs to think about how it lost track of its ‘vital’ employee – for tracking people is what it allegedly does on a global stage.

“It needs also to think about how it can allay the understandable distress of the Williams family while helping DCI Sebire, who has every right to feel short-changed.”

By protecting its right to secrecy every step of the way in the case of Gareth Williams, MI6 may actually be doing nothing more than what it does best: keeping secrets. What it does not appear to have done is to have helped significantly in finding out the truth of what happened in that Pimlico flat.

And MI6 seems to have shown scant regard for the others involved, not least Williams’s sister and his parents.

Because MI6 appears to think of itself as being above the law it hasn’t convinced anyone that it did the right thing.

It has just made itself look guilty.

Wales Online : MI6 spy Gareth Williams killed by foreign agents, claims security expert

MI6 spy Gareth Williams killed by foreign agents, claims security expert

Darren Devine | May 4, 2012

Welsh spy Gareth Williams was murdered by a foreign power because his appetite for bizarre sex games made him a soft target for blackmailers, a security expert claims.

Professor Anthony Glees believes Mr Williams was probably killed after either passing on or refusing to divulge secrets to foreign spies.

An inquest into his death heard how he once had to be rescued by his landlady after tying himself to a bed in an incident she believed was “sexual”.

Prof Glees, head of the Buckingham University Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies, said: “It was clear that there was a connection between his private life and the work he was doing being used to effectively blackmail him.

“In other words, it was always possible that the bizarre and unusual sexual interests he was developing had been communicated to a hostile intelligence service.

“It was entirely unintentional, but they got to know of it and encouraged him. He was killed either because he had not given them what they wanted or he had given them what they wanted and they wanted to make sure they left no tracks.”

Mr Williams was found padlocked inside a holdall in the bath at his London flat - coroner Dr Fiona Wilcox said it was highly unlikely he got in the bag alone.

Professor Glees has previously said he believes Iranian or Russian spies would have been most likely to target 31-year-old Mr Williams.

In her narrative verdict coroner Dr Wilcox said Mr Williams, from Valley, near Holyhead on Anglesey, was probably the victim of a “criminally mediated” unlawful killing in which poison may have been used.

Dr Wilcox also said it “remained a legitimate line of inquiry” that the secret services may have been involved in the death of the GCHQ code breaker.

But she said “there was no evidence to support” that Williams, who was on secondment to MI6, died at the hands of spies.

Prof Glees also said nine memory sticks found among Mr Williams’ personal possessions at his office in Vauxhall Cross, London, lend weight to the idea the spy was murdered.

He said: “You wouldn’t expect to get a memory stick out of MI6 or MI5 or GCHQ and Gareth must have known that.

“However to have those sticks was highly irregular and because he was clearly taking risks maybe he was thinking about taking the risk of taking stuff out of MI6.”

The failure of MI6 to hand over the memory sticks to the police was the subject of criticism by the coroner, who accused the security services of hampering the investigation.

MI6 were also criticised for waiting a week before raising the alarm over the spy’s disappearance.

But terrorism expert Michael Burleigh believes the explanation for Mr Williams’ death in August 2010 is more straightforward.

The author of Blood And Rage: A Cultural History Of Terrorism, believes the spy died after a sex game went wrong.

He said the lack of hand or footprints in Mr Williams’ bathroom suggests he got into the bag voluntarily.

Mr Burleigh said part of the game may have involved the others leaving the flat while Mr Williams tried to get out of the bag.

Scientists found traces of "at least" two unknown people in his upmarket London apartment despite evidence Mr Williams rarely invited people over.

The author, who believes Mr Williams was too junior a spook interest a foreign power, said: “I think it’s very likely to be sexual and I think the most plausible explanation, given that he didn’t leave prints on the bath, was that somebody was involved in whatever he was doing.

“I think whoever he was doing this with went away and probably thought he’s got a key in the bag. They went away and maybe panicked and came back and found him dead.

“I don’t believe he was killed and put in the bag because dead bodies are extremely heavy and inert and because of rigor mortis it’s virtually impossible to make them flexible.”

Irish Independent : MI6 spy Gareth Williams: An enigma, in life and death

MI6 spy Gareth Williams: An enigma, in life and death

By Michael Burleigh | May 3, 2012

THE south bank district of Vauxhall, London, is famous for two principal reasons. After long spells at 54 Broadway in Victoria and Century House across Westminster Bridge, SIS (or MI6) took possession of its new headquarters at 85 Vauxhall Cross in 1995.

Staff dubbed Sir Terry Farrell’s vast cream and green-coloured ziggurat “Legoland”. It is also known as Babylon-on-Thames, for there are 60 terraces, as well as cameras surveying spiked railings from every angle. Staff enter and leave as inconspicuously as possible through electronic gates.

These look on to an establishment across the road called Roman Chariots Spa. For Vauxhall is also well known as “VoHo”, because of its dense concentration of gay clubs.

Some of these – The Hoist and The Spike, within the cavernous railway arches – cater to a specialist clientele which may well include adventurous heterosexuals. Their names indicate what happens within. A cottage craft industry has also sprung up in the area, including a black-painted Master of Leather shop offering bespoke harnesses and studded belts, when it opens after dark.

By some terrible coincidence, elements of these two worlds appear to have met in the macabre case of Gareth Williams. His decomposing body was found in a red North Face bag in the bath of his flat in Alderney Street, Pimlico on August 23 2010 – circumstances which have given rise to speculation that he died as a result of a bondage-related sex game.

The last evidence that he was alive was a week earlier, on August 16, when he logged on to a cycling time-trial website. The top floor flat was registered to New Rodina, a front for the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, for it was used by people visiting Vauxhall Cross, half a mile across the Thames. At the time, Williams was seconded from the Cheltenham-based communications intelligence agency GCHQ to SIS in Vauxhall Cross. It is mooted that he was involved in securing the computer systems of the Bank of England from hostile cyber-raiders. He was certainly well qualified. Having passed his GCSEs aged 10, Williams graduated with a First in maths from Bangor aged 17. Four years later, with a PhD under his belt, he was recruited by GCHQ. They sent him on an advanced maths course at Cambridge.

In many respects, the 31 year-old had a healthy extracurricular life. Raised on Anglesey, he adored the rugged outdoors. He loved cycling, climbing and fell-running and was extremely fit, lithe and strong. But he would appear to have had idiosyncratic sexual interests, though these have been downplayed by the coroner Dr Fiona Wilcox, in her narrative account of his unexplained death.

Although his friends and family have put a favourable construction on the evidence, claiming that he was generous to his small coterie of girlfriends, Williams’s possessions included a woman’s wig and £20,000 of carefully stored designer clothes, though not necessarily in sizes that would have fitted him. A few days before his death he attended a show by the “Trannie Superstar” Jonny Woo, who blends fashion with transvestism for a variety of clubs and corporate clients. Police investigating Williams’s death also discovered a short film in which he “gyrated” for the camera, wearing nothing but leather boots; the coroner accepted that he derived a sexual thrill from women’s footwear, while noting that this might not be uncommon.

Several years before Williams’s death, his Cheltenham landlord and landlady had to cut through knots to free him when his cries for help led them to discover him tied up in his boxers on his bed. “Gareth, we cannot have you doing this,” exclaimed a perplexed Brian Elliot. The Elliots and Williamses never mentioned the incident again, though the Elliots decided that it did not involve escapology related to Williams’s secret work.

These snapshots from his private life suggest why a man in touch with his feminine side may have been unhappy at Vauxhall Cross, with its strong quotient of hard-drinking public schoolboys and ex-military types telling tales of derring-do in foreign parts. He had been granted a transfer back to GCHQ shortly before his death, and evidently felt ill at ease in London and alienated by SIS’s culture of red tape.

Certainly, Williams seems to have slipped through the net of modern human resources scrutiny. Although he was as punctual “as a Swiss clock”, Williams’s absence – including from a meeting he was supposed to chair – does not seem to have alarmed his SIS managers, an oversight for which Sir John Sawers, the head of SIS, apologised yesterday. But just as seriously, an organisation that positively vets its staff seems to have been surprised by Williams’s on-off interest in bondage and transvestism. In the past, SIS officers were supposed to report to their superiors anything which might be useful to blackmailers.

It is plausible that with SIS having to process a workforce that doubled after 9/11, no such attention was paid to a man who came in through the back door of GCHQ. How very modern, too, of his SIS line manager to claim that lifestyle and sexual preferences “would not in themselves pose a problem”. One is only surprised that they do not make available leaflets on safer autoerotic sex. Of course, people able to conduct double lives – like Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt or Kim Philby in earlier times – are as ideal for the secret services as those with unmemorable faces. But while homosexuality is unexceptional nowadays (and anyway there is no suggestion that Williams was gay), would an interest in bondage be a problem if the person sought to conceal it?

Then there is the investigation. Det Chief Insp Jackie Sebire is the detective charged with clearing up Williams’s death. Although a highly experienced homicide detective, she lacked security clearance to even enter SIS’s Vauxhall Cross headquarters; evidence, if one needs it, of the absurd levels of secrecy practised by Britain’s deep state. This meant that Sebire’s investigation relied upon the “mediation” of Det Supt Michael Broster, of SO15, the counter-terrorism branch, which works closely with the security services.

Imagine Sebire’s surprise that no verbatim notes were taken of interviews with Williams’s colleagues; and that the existence of nine memory sticks, and a black holdall, in or under his SIS desk, was revealed only in the final stages of the coroner’s inquest. Not that other agencies are entirely blameless, since the DNA evidence seems to have been contaminated by a scientific incompetent who put his palm on the bag in which Williams was found.

In addition to clumsy obstructions in the path of the police investigation, there are several disturbing aspects of this case. The coroner was rightly mystified by how the bag containing Williams got into the bath without his leaving foot or handprints on it. Getting into the bag would have been hard enough; it would have been incredibly difficult to fit a heavy and rigid body into it. So Williams was alive when he went in.

It could be that to focus on Williams’s alleged sexual proclivities exaggerates what were merely the tentative inclinations of a fundamentally private man. That is certainly how Williams’s friends and family feel. After all, in 1990 the young defence expert and former RAF helicopter pilot, Jonathan Moyle, was said to have died while engaged in autoerotic strangulation in a cupboard of his hotel room in Santiago, Chile. The fact that he was wearing a nappy indicates he fully intended to live, if you think about it. Details like the orange segment in his mouth were given prominence, as if he had died in a sex game that went wrong.

But Moyle appears to have uncovered illicit helicopter sales by the Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen to Saddam’s Iraq. Like Neil Heywood, the Briton poisoned recently in China, he seems to have poked his nose into some very murky business with undue self-confidence. A reconvened British inquest in 1998 found that Moyle had been unlawfully killed, probably by the needle mark in his leg that was missed by the initial police investigation.

As with the death of the government weapons expert David Kelly, speculation about another party’s involvement in Gareth Williams’s death will run and run. Suicide has been explicitly ruled out. After imagining that it could out-manoeuvre “Plod”, meaning highly competent detectives, MI6 needs to think about how it lost track of its “vital” employee – for tracking people is what it allegedly does on a global stage – and how it can allay the understandable distress of the Williams family while helping DCI Sebire, who has every right to feel short-changed. SIS director Sawers’s apology is a start, for otherwise we would be hearing much more speculation about whatever happened in Alderney Street. Does anyone remember the new dawn of greater transparency?

- Michael Burleigh

Daily Mail : Riddle of the missing two weeks: Why did body of British spy with 'secretive' private life lie undiscovered for so long?

Riddle of the missing two weeks: Why did body of British spy with 'secretive' private life lie undiscovered for so long?

Police probe claims Gareth Williams had double life outside work
Shocked family describe him as a 'very, very private person'
Post-mortem inconclusive: Was spy strangled or poisoned?

By Daily Mail Reporter | [updated] December 20, 2010 | originally published date N/A (possibly Oct 1)

Detectives investigating the murder of a British spy were picking over his private life today for clues that could identify his killer.

The decomposing body of codes expert Gareth Williams, 30, was found stuffed into a bag in the bath of his London Government flat.

He was days from completing a one-year secondment to the headquarters of MI6 from his job at national 'listening post' GCHQ in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

Further tests were taking place to determine how the cycling and fitness fanatic met his death after a post-mortem examination was inconclusive.

They could reveal if Mr Williams was strangled or asphyxiated, as well as if drugs or alcohol were present in his system.

Police believe Mr Williams's body could have lain undiscovered for up to a fortnight. Mystery still surrounds why no-one raised the alarm sooner.

It is thought he was on holiday at the time of his death. Another explanation may lie in claims that he travelled regularly to the U.S. for his work.

Detectives believe the key to the case could lie in his private life. His family said he was an extremely reserved person who kept himself very much to himself.

But investigators will be attempting to discover if the quietly spoken, mild-mannered codes and ciphers expert was leading a double life which he kept from his colleagues.

There have already been a series of lurid claims about his personal affairs while others have raised the possibility that his death was a sex game gone wrong.

Police sources said the telephone numbers of escort agencies were found on one SIM card while pornographic material had also been discovered in the flat

Detectives are examining his mobile phone and a number of Sim cards found at the address, a top-floor flat at a Georgian townhouse in Pimlico, central London.

Several clues are believed to have emerged from the analysis of telephone numbers called and received on the phone.

Parents Ian and Ellen travelled to London with his sister Ceri today from their home in Anglesey to speak to police and identify his body.

William Hughes, Mrs Williams’s cousin, said the family was deeply shocked. He said: 'The last time I saw Gareth was just a few months ago at a family party and he was fine.'

Mr Hughes said he never knew Mr Williams to bring home a girlfriend or a partner, describing him as a 'very, very private person'.

Scotland Yard detectives from the Homicide and Serious Crime unit are investigating the death in liaison with counter terrorism officers and the security services although they have not yet opened a murder inquiry.

There are no obvious signs of a robbery at the flat, believed to be one of several MI6-owned 'safe houses' in the Pimlico area.

However, security sources say they have a problem identifying what Mr Williams had so cannot be sure if anything was taken.

Experts have carried out a fingertip search of the address amid fears that top-secret work material could have gone missing.

Investigators suspect Mr Williams might have known his killer as there was no sign of forced entry at the flat in Alderney Street.

Last night it emerged that Intelligence officers were investigating whether state secrets had been stolen by Mr William's killer.

Security services fear that his murderer could have taken classified material - possibly held on a laptop or MP3 player - which could be sold on to Britain’s enemies.

A security source said: ‘Whatever the motives for this killing, there is the strong likelihood that items will have been taken and that is potentially a real problem because it may be difficult identifying exactly what he had at home.’

With much of the focus of MI6 on the terror threat posed by fanatics linked to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, one theory was that Mr Williams had been targeted because of his work.

In the flat in Alderney Street, a mobile telephone and a collection of SIM cards had been carefully laid out - in what was described as a bizarre ritualistic scene - and officers are researching each number called.

Tight security controlled the entrance to the flat, which is just a few hundred yards away from the MI6 headquarters across the Thames at Vauxhall.

Such were the precautions, it is believed, that eye scanners could have been used to gain entry.

Eileen Booth, 73, who lives opposite the flat, said detectives had come round and asked neighbours for their eye colour and height.

Mr Williams, a bachelor who had been subjected to security clearance before he was given the job, was described as a mild-mannered fitness and cycling fanatic dedicated to his work.

He was due to leave London and return early next month to his job at Cheltenham.

Finance worker Gemma Wingfield Digby, 26, who moved into the basement flat of Mr Williams’s building three weeks ago, said: ‘I saw him only once but he was such a sweet guy. All I wanted to do was give him a hug.’

Public documents reveal current and former residents of the freehold block where Mr Williams lived have links to London and Cheltenham.

One fear is that an area used by MI6 to house operatives - and where two former senior Tory politicians are neighbours - had now been compromised.

Former MI6 officer Harry Ferguson said: ‘There are lots of flats in this area owned by MI6 and their big worry will be that a terrorist group or intelligence group was involved.’

As Alderney Street remained cordoned off last night and forensic experts continued to search for clues, police were releasing little about the case.

Land Registry documents reveal that the block at number 36 is owned by a private company, New Rodina, whose details are hidden because it is registered in the British Virgin Islands and is not listed with Companies House.

The word rodina means motherland in Russian and Bulgarian. Several other residents were also linked to Cheltenham leading to suggestions the flats may have been used regularly by MI6.

The property was bought for £675,250 in 2000 with a mortgage from the Royal Bank of Scotland and has been remortgaged twice, in September 2005 and February 2006.

The documents show that the owner operated through a law firm known as Park Nelson, a firm which once occupied a rented office block in Bell Yard, off Fleet Street, but no longer appears to exist.

One Frenchman who lived at the flat between 2005 and 2006 is an expert in global satellite positioning, radio communications and high sensitivity antennae.

THE SPY THEY CALLED THE QUIET MAN: MATHS GENIUS, LONER AND CYCLING FANATIC AT THE CENTRE OF MYSTERY

Few who crossed Gareth Williams’s path would have been surprised to learn that he was a spy.

A mild-mannered loner, who preferred cycling on gruelling lone runs to the pub or clubs, acquaintances knew him as ‘the quiet man’.

His landlady for a decade, Jenny Elliott, yesterday recalled how the 31-year-old bachelor lived without a TV in the annexe of her home, often hearing him working alone on the tapes she knew were part of his work.

‘There was never noise, never a problem,’ she said. ‘He was the perfect person to have in your home... a genuinely nice, decent man.’
Gareth Williams, from Cheltenham, who has been found dead in a flat in Pimlico. His body was discovered stuffed in a large sports bag in his bath in a flat just a few hundred yards from the MI6 HQ

Retired office worker Mrs Elliott, 71, and her husband Brian came to know Mr Williams well during the ten years he spent with them at their £500,000 home in the Prestbury area of Cheltenham, while he worked for GCHQ, the government’s listening centre.

‘It’s a real tragedy,’ she said. ‘Gareth was a really nice guy who was polite and mild-mannered and wouldn’t hurt a fly.
MI6 Gareth Williams

‘When someone has lived with you for ten years you get to know them really well, and Gareth almost became a part of the family.

‘Gareth was a very likeable person but didn’t really have any friends as such. He was a cycling fanatic and was forever off on some bike ride or another but never really had friends round.

'He was an extremely intelligent person but would not talk about his job as it was a secret, on account of working for GCHQ. All he told me was it was something to do with codes.’

The last time Mrs Elliott spoke to Mr Williams flat was two weeks ago, when he called to confirm when he would be returning to Cheltenham from London.

He was a keen cyclist with the Cheltenham and County Club and took part in uphill races - coming eighth in a recent event.

Mrs Elliott said she did not remember him ever bringing a girlfriend back to the self-contained flat, comprising a bathroom, bedroom and kitchen, above her garage.

’That’s not to say he didn’t meet girls. But if he did, he certainly didn’t talk about them to me.

‘Gareth occasionally said he was meeting some of the guys from work for a quiet drink but he wouldn’t tell me who they were or where they were going and I never pried.

'He never had a television and I never heard music coming from the flat. He was the perfect tenant and I doubt I’ll be able to find one as good as him again.’

Mr Williams, a Welsh speaker, was raised in Holyhead on Anglesey by his father Ian, who worked at the nuclear power plant, and mother Ellen, together with sister Ceri.

Friends recall how it was his father who led Gareth to a love of cycling and together they were a frequent sight - even recently - pounding the roads of Anglesey.

According to his uncle William Hughes, it was always apparent that Gareth was an outstandingly bright boy.

‘The family knew this from a very, very young age. He was a very clever lad. When he was at secondary school he would go to university one day a week.’

According Mr Hughes, Gareth graduated at the age of only 19 from Bangor University and went on to Cambridge to continue his studies.

‘He was quiet, unassuming. When he came home on his weekends and holidays he’d be on his bicycle riding around the lanes of Anglesey.

‘He worked for GCHQ for many years. We knew he was working in London, but he’d never talk about his work and the family knew not to ask really. We didn’t know what he was doing. He never spoke about it.’

Mr Hughes added that to learn of the murder was a terrible shock.

‘I got a phone call... I couldn’t believe that such a thing had happened.’

John Barnes, who once worked with Gareth Williams’s father and who regularly cycled with the two men, said: ‘Gareth was brilliant at maths - a genius.’

Mr Williams’s parents were abroad on holiday when their son’s death was discovered and were said to be staying last night in London. Scotland

Yard detectives were at the family home in Holyhead, where they were speaking with the dead man’s sister, Ceri Subbe, who lives with her doctor husband, Christian. #

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY: THE INTRIGUING TRUTH ABOUT LIFE AS A 21st CENTURY SPOOK

By MICHAEL BURLEIGH

Whether he was killed by Islamic extremists, Russian gangsters or someone altogether closer to him, MI6 operative Dr Gareth Williams died a spook's death.

Murdered in his Pimlico penthouse - which is owned by a Russian-named, British Virgin Islands-registered company - his body was found in the bathroom, in a sports bag.

Nearby, a mobile phone and numerous SIM cards had been laid out on a table. As murders go, it is the stuff of Bond films.

Williams usually worked in Cheltenham, inside the vast doughnut-shaped complex that is the Government's top secret communications monitoring agency, GCHQ - and was reportedly on secondment to MI6.

Indeed, 'Ceaucescu Towers', as MI6's brutally modernist Vauxhall Cross HQ is known, is just across the River Thames from his apartment, overshadowing a huge bus terminal, and the gay clubs and saunas of 'VoHo' - the area's red light district.

But are GCHQ and MI6 operatives such as Williams really James Bond figures? And what exactly do they do?

Gone are the days when agents were recruited after a discreet word from their Oxbridge tutor. In the 21st century, spooks are recruited like anyone else. Posts are publicly advertised, and hopefuls must first sit the kind of psychometric test - devised to reveal their powers of analysis and observation - that many blue chip companies now employ.

Nor are the successful candidates guaranteed an exotic life of high jinks and murky subterfuge. While television series such as Spooks - which is about the domestic intelligence service, MI5 - have glamourised life in Britain's secret services and have certainly proved a useful recruitment tool, the daily reality is rather less dramatic.

Many of the workers at GCHQ, for example, spend their days - and often nights - trawling through billions of emails, text messages and telephone calls, looking out for the one communication that might prove crucial.

They seek to glean intelligence on a wide range of targets, including terrorists, organised criminals and hostile foreign governments. They also seek to foil the growing threat of cyber attacks launched against Britain's banking system.

In 1998 they played a major role in locating the fugitive murderer Kenneth Noye - after he fled to southern Spain - by tracking his mobile phone.

During the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, GCHQ waged a sophisticated electronic war against the IRA. It used electronic signals to prematurely detonate radio-controlled bombs, or listened in on telephone conversations between terrorists, looking out for such phrases as 'Are you coming out for a drink then?' - meaning an attack was imminent - or 'the bricks are in the wall' - a bomb is in place.

Much of this expertise will now have been re-directed, along with GCHQ manpower, to pick up fanatical Islamists using coded language about the imminence of a 'big wedding', a favourite code for a bomb attack.

But some of their operations seem downright bizarre. After the entire electricity grid in Auckland went down in the late 1990s, for example, GCHQ helped the New Zealand authorities trace the cyber-attack back to a group named the 'Anti-Christ Doom Squad', which had managed this feat from a laptop in an Amsterdam drug café.

GCHQ also eavesdropped on UN diplomats from six (friendly) nations crucial to the Security Council's second resolution on the permissibility of the Iraq War. Some, including Mexico, are still demanding an official apology from the UK.

Holding a doctorate in maths, Williams would have been wellqualified to work in a service which uses extremely complicated decryption methods to access sensitive - and heavily protected - information.

No wonder one former landlady said that the only noise she heard from Williams's otherwise hushed flat was the whirr of audio tapes.

Much of the work of GCHQ overlaps with that of MI6, who deal with real people rather than data pulsing through the ether. But most of MI6's agents are also worlds apart from the fictional figure of James Bond.

The majority of MI6 agents work in office jobs, inside the Vauxhall Cross complex. Here, they also sift through masses of data, about 90 per cent of which is 'open source'.

That means it is available to you or I, in newspapers or via the internet. They certainly bring acute analytical skills to the table, but several former ministers have openly questioned the value of what they yield.

Indeed, only 150 or so MI6 personnel are actually stationed abroad as secret agents. They are usually 'camouflaged' as counsellor, first secretary or protocol officer on the official lists of serving British diplomats working in key embassies.

Their main job is to recruit foreign agents, often people with inside knowledge on defence or commercial matters - the links between the security services and British business run deep - that might give an edge to British interests.

Some of these contacts will volunteer their services; others will have to be blackmailed or coerced into co-operating.

These operatives will spend much of their time hanging around the sort of places where lonely businessmen, civil servants, politicians or journalists congregate.

In fact, it used to be said that MI6's real work began after 6pm, when the interminable round of diplomatic cocktail parties started.

Being the life and soul of the party, rather than a gormless wallflower, was essential to the job, which may explain why so many men like Guy Burgess or Donald Maclean - the notorious KGB double agents - became hopeless drunks.

It was a tradition that continued with rogue MI5 officer Michael Bettany. On one occasion, when caught the worse for wear travelling on a train without a ticket, he shouted: 'You can't arrest me, I'm a spy.' Indeed he was, selling British secrets to the Russians, for which he was jailed in 1984.

Of course, nowadays, MI6's contemporary Al Qaeda and Taliban opponents are not to be found sipping gin at embassy receptions.

And so a handful of MI6 agents will be getting down and dirty, not just with their opposite numbers in the Middle East, but with the local people who inhabit dusty mountain encampments.

Chief among their tasks will be monitoring British subjects who claim to be in Afghanistan or Pakistan attending family weddings when they are really planning the next London Tube bombing in a terrorist training camp.

These agents will also be directing covert strikes on Taliban leaders, while simultaneously seeking to peel off the more amenable or corruptible ones to join the Afghan government.

This is extremely dangerous work, requiring a clear sense of purpose and nerves of steel. But they are also the minority.

Regardless of how Dr Williams died, and it may be that he was killed by someone close to him for reasons that were obscurely personal, he was part of a highly secretive, but often surprisingly mundane, culture.

And that, presumably, is why his mysterious death is the exception, rather than the rule.

MICHAEL BURLEIGH is the author of Blood And Rage: A Cultural History Of Terrorism (Harper Perennial, £9.99).

Daily Mail : For your eyes only: The intriguing truth about life as a 21st century spook

For your eyes only: The intriguing truth about life as a 21st century spook

By MICHAEL BURLEIGH | August 26, 2010

Whether he was killed by Islamic extremists, Russian gangsters or someone altogether closer to him, MI6 operative Dr Gareth Williams died a spook's death.

Murdered in his Pimlico penthouse - which is owned by a Russian-named, British Virgin Islands-registered company - his body was found in the bathroom, in a sports bag.

Nearby, a mobile phone and numerous SIM cards had been laid out on a table. As murders go, it is the stuff of Bond films.

Williams usually worked in Cheltenham, inside the vast doughnut-shaped complex that is the Government's top secret communications monitoring agency, GCHQ - and was reportedly on secondment to MI6.

Indeed, 'Ceaucescu Towers', as MI6's brutally modernist Vauxhall Cross HQ is known, is just across the River Thames from his apartment, overshadowing a huge bus terminal, and the gay clubs and saunas of 'VoHo' - the area's red light district.

But are GCHQ and MI6 operatives such as Williams really James Bond figures? And what exactly do they do?

Gone are the days when agents were recruited after a discreet word from their Oxbridge tutor. In the 21st century, spooks are recruited like anyone else. Posts are publicly advertised, and hopefuls must first sit the kind of psychometric test - devised to reveal their powers of analysis and observation - that many blue chip companies now employ.

Nor are the successful candidates guaranteed an exotic life of high jinks and murky subterfuge. While television series such as Spooks - which is about the domestic intelligence service, MI5 - have glamourised life in Britain's secret services and have certainly proved a useful recruitment tool, the daily reality is rather less dramatic.

Many of the workers at GCHQ, for example, spend their days - and often nights - trawling through billions of emails, text messages and telephone calls, looking out for the one communication that might prove crucial.

They seek to glean intelligence on a wide range of targets, including terrorists, organised criminals and hostile foreign governments. They also seek to foil the growing threat of cyber attacks launched against Britain's banking system.

In 1998 they played a major role in locating the fugitive murderer Kenneth Noye - after he fled to southern Spain - by tracking his mobile phone.

During the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, GCHQ waged a sophisticated electronic war against the IRA. It used electronic signals to prematurely detonate radio-controlled bombs, or listened in on telephone conversations between terrorists, looking out for such phrases as 'Are you coming out for a drink then?' - meaning an attack was imminent - or 'the bricks are in the wall' - a bomb is in place.

Much of this expertise will now have been re-directed, along with GCHQ manpower, to pick up fanatical Islamists using coded language about the imminence of a 'big wedding', a favourite code for a bomb attack.

But some of their operations seem downright bizarre. After the entire electricity grid in Auckland went down in the late 1990s, for example, GCHQ helped the New Zealand authorities trace the cyber-attack back to a group named the 'Anti-Christ Doom Squad', which had managed this feat from a laptop in an Amsterdam drug café.

GCHQ also eavesdropped on UN diplomats from six (friendly) nations crucial to the Security Council's second resolution on the permissibility of the Iraq War. Some, including Mexico, are still demanding an official apology from the UK.

Holding a doctorate in maths, Williams would have been wellqualified to work in a service which uses extremely complicated decryption methods to access sensitive - and heavily protected - information.

No wonder one former landlady said that the only noise she heard from Williams's otherwise hushed flat was the whirr of audio tapes.

Much of the work of GCHQ overlaps with that of MI6, who deal with real people rather than data pulsing through the ether. But most of MI6's agents are also worlds apart from the fictional figure of James Bond.

The majority of MI6 agents work in office jobs, inside the Vauxhall Cross complex. Here, they also sift through masses of data, about 90 per cent of which is 'open source'.

That means it is available to you or I, in newspapers or via the internet. They certainly bring acute analytical skills to the table, but several former ministers have openly questioned the value of what they yield.

Indeed, only 150 or so MI6 personnel are actually stationed abroad as secret agents. They are usually 'camouflaged' as counsellor, first secretary or protocol officer on the official lists of serving British diplomats working in key embassies.

Their main job is to recruit foreign agents, often people with inside knowledge on defence or commercial matters - the links between the security services and British business run deep - that might give an edge to British interests.

Some of these contacts will volunteer their services; others will have to be blackmailed or coerced into co-operating.

These operatives will spend much of their time hanging around the sort of places where lonely businessmen, civil servants, politicians or journalists congregate.

In fact, it used to be said that MI6's real work began after 6pm, when the interminable round of diplomatic cocktail parties started.

Being the life and soul of the party, rather than a gormless wallflower, was essential to the job, which may explain why so many men like Guy Burgess or Donald Maclean - the notorious KGB double agents - became hopeless drunks.

It was a tradition that continued with rogue MI5 officer Michael Bettany. On one occasion, when caught the worse for wear travelling on a train without a ticket, he shouted: 'You can't arrest me, I'm a spy.' Indeed he was, selling British secrets to the Russians, for which he was jailed in 1984.

Of course, nowadays, MI6's contemporary Al Qaeda and Taliban opponents are not to be found sipping gin at embassy receptions.

And so a handful of MI6 agents will be getting down and dirty, not just with their opposite numbers in the Middle East, but with the local people who inhabit dusty mountain encampments.

Chief among their tasks will be monitoring British subjects who claim to be in Afghanistan or Pakistan attending family weddings when they are really planning the next London Tube bombing in a terrorist training camp.

These agents will also be directing covert strikes on Taliban leaders, while simultaneously seeking to peel off the more amenable or corruptible ones to join the Afghan government.

This is extremely dangerous work, requiring a clear sense of purpose and nerves of steel. But they are also the minority.

Regardless of how Dr Williams died, and it may be that he was killed by someone close to him for reasons that were obscurely personal, he was part of a highly secretive, but often surprisingly mundane, culture.

And that, presumably, is why his mysterious death is the exception, rather than the rule.

MICHAEL BURLEIGH is the author of Blood And Rage: A Cultural History Of Terrorism (Harper Perennial, £9.99).