Sky : Spy Death: The Evidence Behind The Theories

Spy Death: The Evidence Behind The Theories

May 2, 2012

Three general theories have been put forward to explain the death of MI6 spy Gareth Williams, with evidence to support each one.

:: Suicide

The theory that Mr Williams' chose to take his own life is perhaps the most prosaic explanation for his death and the inquest has heard evidence that suggested he was unhappy with his work.

He had passed an exam to become fully operational with MI6 just months before his death but his sister said he disliked office culture and the rat race - and had spoken of friction among colleagues.

One common theme throughout the inquest has been Mr Williams' prodigious intelligence, which saw him secure a first-class mathematics degree at the age of 17 before his eventual fast-tracking through the ranks at GCHQ.

Correlations have often been drawn between depression and the high levels of perfectionism evident in Mr Williams - an impression his intense fitness regime and pristinely tidy flat did little to dispel.

Irrespective of his state of mind, however, no-one has been able to fully explain how he would have been able to lock the bag his body was found in from the outside.

Stephen Gale, his boss at GCHQ's Cheltenham base, said Mr Williams stunned fellow intelligence specialists with his codebreaking talents when he landed his first job at 21.

"He was considered something of a prodigy and it was quite remarkable that he had achieved those levels of qualifications at such a young age," he said.

It could be argued that such outstanding achievement at such an early age could lead to the kind of listlessness later in life that can eventually develop into suicidal thoughts.

But Mr Williams' reputation as a "world-class" codebreaker may also give rise to the more outlandish theory that he took his own life while deliberately leaving an apparently inextricable riddle.

:: Accident

Mr Williams' interest in women's clothing - on which receipts showed he spent around £20,000 during 2008 and 2009 - has been among the most prominently-reported details of the case.

His curiosity with drag queen culture has also been a focus for the media, as has his apparent interest in bondage footage.

The inquest heard that in 2007, Mr Williams' landlord and landlady had to rescue him in the middle of the night after he apparently tied his wrists to the headboard of his bed to see if he could "get free".

Such revelations could contribute to a theory that Mr Williams' death was an accident, even the result of a sex game gone-wrong.

However, close friends say he never mentioned cross-dressing and he is only known to have been to see a drag act once.

Detective Constable Simon Warren also moved to quell speculation around the 31-year-old's private life, saying his interest in bondage footage on his computer was "an isolated (incident) among a sea of other data".

And it is not entirely inconceivable that a third party may have manufactured an image of someone with flamboyant personal habits in order to distract from a more sinister truth.

Indeed, this possibility was acknowledged by the coroner in her summing up, when she questioned whether leaks to the media about Mr Williams' cross dressing were attempts to manipulate evidence.

She pointed out that most of the women's clothes found would have been too small for him and said the lack of female underwear was "inconsistent".

Mr Williams was described as a cautious risk assessor by his sister, which the coroner said did not "square" with the suggestion of an interest in bondage.

:: Murder

Despite having no suspects, the police have said from the outset that they believe a third party was involved in Mr Williams' death.

Found naked, curled up in a padlocked North Face holdall in the bath of his flat in Pimlico, central London, bag experts have said that even renowned escapologist Harry Houdini would have struggled to lock himself in the bag.

One even tried and failed to carry out the task more than 300 times before saying they were "unbelievable scenarios".

Lawyers for his family have suggested "dark arts" of the secret services were responsible.

The recent emergence of the news that MI6 failed to hand over nine computer memory sticks from Mr Williams' office to Scotland Yard has done little to confound such claims.

Conspiracy theories are fuelled by the fact that the force's counter-terror SO15 branch, which has specialist security clearance and acted as a conduit between MI6 and the investigation team, only took three items from Mr Williams' office - his phone, some notes and a copy of his birth certificate.

Detective Superintendent Michael Broster, who was the main liaison from SO15, said: "I have seen no information or evidence that someone is involved. I am not saying that a member of SIS is not involved. I don't know."

Poisoning and asphyxiation are the "foremost contenders" in causing Mr Williams' death, pathologists said.

But experts believe there would have been signs of damage to his fingers and hands if he had struggled to get out of the bag within the three minutes it would have taken to suffocate.

The fact that Mr Williams was dead for up to 10 days before his post-mortem examination meant many poisons and/or bruise marks could have disappeared from his body.

Another matter to have attracted suspicion is MI6's failure to report his absence for more than a week after his disappearance.

Forensic experts hope ongoing DNA tests on a green towel discovered in his kitchen may still yield a breakthrough.

But given the assumed capabilities of MI6, the fact that no physical evidence has yet been found to establish the involvement of a third party is unlikely to halt speculation that secret service agents were to blame.

Daily Mail : The secret double identity of murdered spy: Friend insists Gareth Williams was not gay - and was being trained by MI6 for undercover role

The secret double identity of murdered spy: Friend insists Gareth Williams was not gay - and was being trained by MI6 for undercover role

The spy found dead in a sports bag had been given a new identity by his MI6 bosses in the months leading up to his mysterious death.

By Daniel Boffey | December 25, 2010

Gareth Williams, a GCHQ codebreaker on secondment to MI6, had two passports and told his best friend that he was preparing for an undercover operation.

Details of the 31-year-old’s role within the secret services are disclosed today in an interview with his confidante and childhood sweetheart, Sian Lloyd-Jones.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, she said: ‘I find it difficult to see anything in his personal life which could lie behind this.’

She reveals:

* He was training to take on a new identity eight months before he was found dead.
* He often purchased designer women’s clothes, but she insists they were gifts for her and his sister.
* The maths genius was found dead two days before he was due to visit Paris with his sister.

The revelations shed new light on Mr Williams’s work which, until now, had been regarded as highly technical and carrying little risk.

His body was found inside a zipped and padlocked North Face holdall in the bathroom of his MI6 flat on August 23. A post-mortem was inconclusive.

Last week police released e-fits of a couple they wish to question and provided intimate details about Mr Williams’s life, including his interest in bondage websites and his extraordinary collection of women’s designer clothes and shoes, worth about £15,000.

But Ms Lloyd-Jones, 33, claims Mr Williams would have confided in her and his sister, Ceri, if he had any homosexual urges. Ms Lloyd-Jones, a fashion stylist, said: ‘I’m not in denial and nor is his mum, dad or sister. It would have been fine if he was [gay].

‘I have seen every item of clothing that was there. I truly believe that Ceri and I were going to receive the clothing. He was so generous you wouldn’t believe.’

She finds it difficult to see anything in his private life which could have led to his killing.

But she reveals his work was more complex than previously believed.

‘He said he was learning his new identity,’ she said. ‘In February he said he’d be unavailable for nine days because he was on a training exercise. He’d often go away, so I didn’t think any more about it.’

Ms Lloyd-Jones added that she last heard from Mr Williams on the day he was last seen alive when he was ‘happy and warm and the same as he always was’.

But it was Mr Williams’s sister – who was due to accompany him on a trip to Paris later that week – who alerted her that something may be wrong when she couldn’t get hold of him on the phone. She said that was when she became worried ‘because he’s like clockwork, he’s so predictable’.

There's no mystery about those women's clothes. He bought them for me and his sister

To Sian Lloyd-Jones, it was just another ordinary evening. A fashion stylist, she was pottering around the sitting room of her Knightsbridge flat organising outfits for the following day’s photoshoot.

Meanwhile her friend, Gareth Williams, was sitting on the sofa leafing through the contents of a black box file. Inside there were documents and notes and two passports.

‘He said he was learning his new identity,’ says Sian now. ‘It was all so relaxed. I was taping up shoes and co-ordinating outfits and he was going through his papers.

‘He often came round with his work. That night he came over with his box file and started going through it. He had two passports. He probably fell asleep on the sofa that night and stayed overnight with all the documents.’

At the time, Sian thought nothing of it. Nor did she think it significant when Gareth said he’d be ‘unavailable’ for nine days the following month as he would be away on a training exercise.

Sian knew her friend was a spy and that his job would often take him away for weeks at a time. She also knew there was a necessary element of secrecy to his life. What she couldn’t know was that eight months later, Gareth would be found dead, and in the most horrific circumstances.

It was on August 23 that police were called to Gareth’s flat in Pimlico, Central London, an MI6-owned safe house. He had been missing for more than a week. They found his decomposed body locked in a large red North Face sports bag.

In the months since, his friends and family have not only had to try to come to terms with their loss, they have had to endure a stream of unsavoury leaks from mysterious sources.

It was rumoured that Gareth, 31, was gay after bondage equipment was allegedly found in his apartment along with phone numbers for gay escorts. This was denied by the police, but by then the damage had already been done. Then there were reported irregularities in his finances, also denied.

And last week there were further lurid allegations after police said they wanted to question a Mediterranean couple who were seen calling at Gareth’s flat before he died. But as well as releasing e-fits of the unknown man and woman, they revealed that Gareth had bought £15,000 of designer clothes and shoes, including labels such as Stella McCartney and Christian Louboutin. They were all stored unopened in their bags and boxes alongside a number of women’s wigs.

Police disclosed that Gareth had visited five bondage websites, which were not pornographic but would give readers advice on how to get in and out of confined spaces. They also said they had found tickets for a number of drag shows.

Gareth devoted his life to serving his country. He was already acknowledged as a talented codebreaker and had worked for the Government listening post GCHQ for ten years before being seconded for a year to MI6. Now, it appears he was rather more than that and was involved in the type of tradecraft more commonly found in a John le Carre novel. There is even a plaque to him at GCHQ in Cheltenham in honour of his work.

'The person everyone talks about .  .  . I don’t recognise him at all. He was the complete opposite of everything that has been said about him.'

Yet the constant drip-feed of sordid allegations has not only destroyed his reputation, it suggests that he is somehow to blame for his own demise. For Sian, and for Gareth’s parents, Ian and Ellen, and sister Ceri, this has caused untold pain at an already heart-wrenching time.

Until now, those close to Gareth have kept their counsel. Yet now Sian, 33, has agreed to speak about the man she has known since she was eight; a man who is very different from the one she keeps hearing about in the media.

A bubbly, garrulous young woman, who also comes from Gareth’s home town of Holyhead, she’s not the sort of girl who would be friends with a ‘strange loner’, as Gareth has so often been painted.

She says: ‘The person everyone talks about .  .  . I don’t recognise him at all. He was the complete opposite of everything that has been said about him. It’s been awful for everyone but particularly his family. They’re at breaking point, to be honest. They’re not celebrating Christmas. They weren’t going to anyway but the latest revelations have just made it even worse for them.

‘They’re completely broken by this because it’s not the true Gareth at all. He was a lovely guy, a true, old-school gentleman. He had an excellent sense of humour and, from the bottom of my heart, he was the most charming, sensitive, gorgeous man. Truly, he was one in a million. He was somebody who really had a sound judgment for life.

‘He was very effortless as a person. Nothing was a bother to him; whether you asked him to call you a cab or do a big deed, he was always the same. He wasn’t a loner and he wasn’t lonely. He had close chums in Cheltenham whom he was very friendly with and whom he spoke highly of, but because of the line of work they do they naturally keep in the background. He loved what he did and he thrived on it. He was a workaholic. That kept him very happy and content.

‘When Gareth was not at work, I was the person he spent more time with than anyone else. I have thought about this every day since he died. I find it difficult to see anything in his personal life which could lie behind this. But I know this is a murder investigation so we must remain open to every possibility.

‘His family respect, 100 per cent, that he worked for MI6. I and the family respect the role he was
in. But personally, I don’t think we’ll ever get an answer as to what happened.’

As for the latest allegations, Sian rejects them absolutely. While most men might not keep thousands of pounds of designer clothes, she says it was merely a sign of his generosity. She told police in the summer that Gareth would often buy her and his sister, Ceri, expensive gifts and she believes the clothes were meant for them.

As if to prove it, she points to her £760 Stella McCartney PVC trousers which were a present from Gareth.

She says: ‘I’ve seen every item of clothing that was there in the flat. There was Diana von Furstenberg, Stella McCartney, all in a size 6 or 8 which he wouldn’t even fit an arm or a leg into. He was small but not that small. And the shoes they found in his apartment were not in his size, but his sister’s. He was so generous you wouldn’t believe.

'I truly believe if he had any interest in homosexuality, he would have spoken to his sister and to me as well.'

‘The list is endless. He bought me a high-end Balenciaga top, a Gucci bag, a Mulberry bag, an Armani fur. He did the same for his sister. I truly believe that Ceri and I were going to receive the clothing. We received so many things from him, that wouldn’t have been strange.’

As for the women’s wigs, Sian says there is an entirely innocent explanation. ‘He and an American friend were going to a fancy-dress party in October,’ she says. One of his hobbies was Japanese superhero cartoons and they were going to go as two of the characters. They were pink and yellow and those are the only wigs that were found.

‘I didn’t know he went to the drag clubs but I think that was quite a new thing. He spoke in depth to his sister about everything. He mentioned he’d been to the transvestite comedy club so it’s not something he was trying to hide.’

The constant implication throughout all the rumour and counter-rumour is that Gareth was gay. This is something Sian also denies. She says: ‘They said last week that he had been training in fashion, doing night school at Central St Martin’s. I didn’t know about that but I knew he liked fashion. He saw it as art.

‘He had lots of magazines at his flat, Italian Vogue and all sorts, but he was open with his family, and if he was gay and had any temptations he would have spoken about them, especially to his sister. Hand on heart, there were no “innuendoes” about him.

‘His father was his best friend and he adored his mother and his sister. He was really open with his friends and family about his personal life and I truly believe if he had any interest in homosexuality, he would have spoken to his sister and to me as well.

‘I’m not in denial and nor are Gareth’s mum, dad or sister. It would have been fine if he was but he had too much interest in women. He wanted a girlfriend and he wanted a wife and family. The truth is he wished he was better with women. He had a mild stutter, which was a big barrier as it would get worse when he was nervous.

I don’t know if he ever had a girlfriend. There weren’t any I was aware of but to be honest, we never mentioned it. I know it was my next big project to get him a girlfriend. He felt he lacked confidence with women. He cherished the time he had with his sister and with me and he wanted that with other girls. I know because Gareth had a bit of a soft spot for me.’

Sian and Gareth first met at Ysgol Gynradd Morswyn primary school where her mother, Eleri, was a dinner lady. Her father Alwyn was a BT engineer.

Gareth was two years younger than her, the brilliant child prodigy of Ian, an engineer at Wylfa power station, and Ellen, who worked in education. Sian says: ‘He was moved up two years because he was so clever. He used to read encyclo-pedias at six. Even in primary school, he was doing his GCSEs during lunchtime.

'I was quite naughty at school. I used to sell his homework. He used to have a big list. People used to come, all those who couldn’t do their maths, and he would do it for them.'

‘We were childhood sweethearts at school. Then when we went to Bodedern, our secondary school, he moved on leaps and bounds with his intellect. He really was a genius. I would say a date, say May 15, 1974, and he would count back and then say, yes it was a Wednesday. He could work it out. But if he was here today, he’d hang out and enjoy a chat and a catch up. He was so approachable.

‘I was quite naughty at school. I used to sell his homework. He used to have a big list. People used to come, all those who couldn’t do their maths, and he would do it for them. We only sold it for school dinner money, 70p a time or something like that, and I used to buy magazines. He got nothing, to be honest. He didn’t want anything. That’s how he was, how we were as friends.’

After school the two friends went their separate ways.

Mr Williams gained special permission to leave school for Bangor University aged just 15, and at 18 he left home to study for a PhD at Manchester University. Three years later, he was approached by the British security services, who apparently spotted his precocious online gaming abilities.

Sian left school at 16 to become a window-dresser for Next in Bangor before going on to become a celebrity fashion stylist. She moved to Manchester and worked on Hollyoaks and Coronation Street.

It was in Manchester, four years ago, that she bumped into Gareth again. She says: ‘It was surreal at first. I was coming down the escalators at Selfridges and I spotted him coming up. We took off again. We went out for a drink and chatted. To be honest with you, I think we were both slightly in awe of each other. We were both excited by what the other was doing and amused too. He told me he was working for GCHQ.

‘We talked for a couple of hours and made a pact we would always stay in touch, and we did. We called each other every week from then on. And he would come up roughly once a month. He was hugely into music, from classical to rap. Music was his life. He’d always tie up his visits with a gig at the MEN Arena or the Apollo. I never went with him, I’d meet him afterwards or the next day. He’d often help me with the shopping for my shoots.’

Two years ago Sian moved to London, where she lives with her partner of three years Saul Herd, 37, who runs a corporate flooring company. Gareth also moved to the capital after he was seconded to MI6.

She says: ‘Our friendship deepened. We didn’t have many friends around us – he’d moved from Cheltenham, I’d moved from Manchester – and so we stuck closely together. We’d grown up together and enjoyed each other’s company.

‘We used to go to Nobu Berkeley Square in Mayfair. He always treated me. We just used to hang out.

‘Sometimes we’d go to the Fifth Floor bar at Harvey Nichols and drink cocktails. It would be apple sours for me. He would have a non-alcoholic cocktail. He used to join in with whatever was there, white wine or champagne if there was a group, but he wasn’t a drinker. If it was just me and him he wouldn’t have anything at all.

‘He used to just turn up at any time. He was always welcome. I might have spoken to him and told him I was finishing late and he would pop round. Sometimes he would stay over on the sofa. He would always bring me a bottle of rosé and often some cigarettes. He was a true old-school gentleman.

‘He loved candles. He used to love burning my expensive candles and then we’d have a catch-up and a gossip. There was no one like him, I had such an in-depth relationship with him. He was so knowledgeable about everything from restaurants to cars to maths to politics.’

Sian last saw Gareth in April. She had moved back to Wales for a while to take a break from the pressures of London life, while he was preparing to go on a driving holiday to the West Coast of America during July and August.

She says: ‘Before he went to America, we went down to Trearddur Bay and watched the sunset. We’d spent the whole afternoon together. I was at home with my parents and he stopped by. He was excited about his trip. He seemed very together. There was nothing troubling him. It was just a lovely, completely normal afternoon.’

She had no way of knowing she would never see Gareth again. The couple stayed in touch, as ever, on the phone and he called her on August 14, the day of the last known sighting of him at Holland Park Tube station. She says: ‘He just said, “Hi darling, how’s it hanging?”

‘He said he was leaving London and moving back to Cheltenham, and wondering when we would meet up next. He was happy and warm and the same as he always was. He left the message on the Saturday but I didn’t get it until the Wednesday as I was in Spain for work and couldn’t pick up messages abroad.

‘He was fine, which is why I’m sure he didn’t try to take his own life. And anyway, he’d never do that. He loved his family too much to commit suicide. Then on August 23, the day he was found, Ceri called me at 11am and asked if I’d heard from him. I said, “Yes, a week ago.” He and Ceri were due to go to Paris on the Wednesday of that week. She’d tried to get in touch over the weekend and there was no answer on the home phone or the mobile.

‘It was odd she hadn’t heard from him, particularly as they were going away. She said, “What do you think?” I told her I was sure it was nothing to worry about. But the minute I put the phone down, I knew something was wrong. He was like clockwork, so predictable. It was completely out of character for him.

‘I spoke to Ceri again later and we both admitted we were worried. We thought he must have had an accident or something. She called his work and they said he hadn’t shown up for a meeting on Wednesday.’

That day all their lives changed when Gareth was found dead. A month later, on September 24, they buried Gareth at Bethel Methodist Chapel in Anglesey. The head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, attended.

Sian says: ‘The family were really happy he came. There were around 20 people from his work there. They came in through the back door of the chapel and had a separate area they were guided into. To be honest, I don’t think anyone really noticed as there were so many people there.’

But they can never fully lay Gareth to rest until they have some idea as to how, and why, he died. Sian says: ‘I’m not sure we ever will know but the family need some answers. If anyone has any information about what happened to Gareth, I hope they will come forward. It’s not fair for his family to suffer like this.

Guardian : Who was Gareth Williams?

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."

Daily Mail : Clues point to sex game: MI6 spy Gareth Williams had 'no traces of foreign substances' in his body which was found zipped in a sportsbag

Clues point to sex game: MI6 spy Gareth Williams had 'no traces of foreign substances' in his body which was found zipped in a sportsbag

By Daily Mail Reporter | October 29, 2010

The MI6 spy found dead in a sports bag was not poisoned or under the influence of alcohol at the time of his death, tests have revealed.

After investigating all other avenues, detectives now believe it was a sadomasochistic sex game which led to Gareth Williams' death.

Toxicology tests ruled out the possibility of him being drugged or injected with any lethal toxin.

The codebreaker’s naked body was found locked in a sports bag in his empty bath.

Tests on his body, which have taken two months to complete, have failed to find any foreign substances – or alcohol – or give any indication as to how he died.

Police are now focused on finding a couple known to have been with the 31-year-old in the weeks before his death.

The Mediterranean couple, who are understood to have had a set of keys to the flat, are thought to be key to the investigation.

The man and woman, in their thirties, were known to Mr Williams and were seen entering the flat owned by the intelligence services in late June or early July. But, despite repeated appeals, they have failed to come forward.

Detectives are convinced that the cipher expert could not have died alone.

One possible explanation being investigated by detectives is that Mr Williams was locked in the bag by someone else and left in the bath as part of the bizarre sex game. It is thought that when the person returned to release him they found him dead and fled.

Police are certain he was alive when he was padlocked into the large holdall by, which led to him suffocating. There were no injuries on his body to suggest a struggle.

Inquiries continue into his private life, which officers remain convinced will be the key to solving the case.

There has been months of speculation about the death of the spy, who had been working for the Secret Intelligence Service on secondment from GCHQ in Cheltenham.

The inconclusive toxicology results will only serve to deepen the intrigue surrounding the case.

Mr Williams’ decomposing body was found inside a zipped and padlocked North Face bag in his flat on August 23.

Initially it was thought the cycling enthusiast had been murdered, but the case remains officially classified as ‘suspicious and unexplained’.

Police have discounted suggestions that Mr Williams committed suicide alone. The Mail has learnt that the outer door to his flat in Pimlico, Central London, had apparently been locked from the outside when police arrived on the scene.

Detectives have found no evidence to support claims that Mr Williams was a cross-dresser, that bondage equipment was found at his home, that a laptop was missing from the flat, or that he had reported to spy bosses that he was being followed.

Nor, as was claimed in one report, was any suspicious liquid found next to his body in the sports bag.

Police have also dismissed allegations of irregularities in his finances and there is no evidence that Mr Williams had committed any criminal acts.

The spy was last seen eight days before his body was found. CCTV showed him shopping at Harrods and at Holland Park tube station.

Colleagues later raised the alarm after he had not been seen for days.

Officers found no sign of any forced entry to the property or a disturbance inside. Westminster Coroner Dr Paul Knapman is due to review the case in private next Wednesday, after opening an inquest last month.

Yesterday a Metropolitan Police spokesman said: ‘Results from comprehensive further toxicology tests carried out in relation to the death of Gareth Williams have come back negative, showing no trace of any drugs, alcohol, poisons or any other substances that would indicate cause of death.

‘There are no plans to carry out any further tests of this type, but enquiries continue to try and establish a formal cause of death.

‘Mr Williams’ death remains suspicious and unexplained and enquiries into the circumstances continue.’

Channel 4 : Did MI6 spy Gareth Williams commit suicide?

Did MI6 spy Gareth Williams commit suicide?

By Jonathan Rugman | September 14, 2010

One of the greatest mysteries of recent weeks has been the unexplained death of an MI6 employee found in a padlocked and zipped up bag in the bath of his flat. Channel 4 News' Jonathan Rugman analyses the possibility of suicide.
Gareth Williams, one of the last pictures taken of the MI6 spy, who was found dead padlocked into a sports bag (Image: Reuters)

The circumstances of his passing are so bizarre that no conspiracy theory can be ruled out - and nor will anything be ruled out until the police investgation is complete - but one theory currently in play is suicide.

This may sound extraordinary, but when you look at what we know, suicide may be no more extraordinary than any other aspect of this remarkable spy-novel case, which the police are still not confident enough to call murder.

Gareth Williams was found dead by police in Pimlico on August 23rd. The door of his flat was double-locked and a forensic sweep of his Alderney Street flat has not, as far as we know, revealed signs of forced entry.

Police toxicologists have concluded that drugs or alcohol did not contribute to his death, though more toxicology tests may be required. Police have appealed for information about a "Mediterranean couple" - a phrase which surely should be consigned to the novels of Agatha Christie or Eric Ambler - who apparently visited the flat a few weeks before.

But this may just be due diligence on the part of an investigative team duty bound to keep an open mind. From the very beginning, there has been no suggestion from the corridors of Whitehall that a national security breach has occurred.

Conspiracy theorists will argue that this is a cover up by the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, but for now I don't buy that.

First off, we know that Mr Williams travelled to the US listening centre in Maryland where he also worked, but he did not have any dealings - that we know of - with governments or foreign intellligence agencies potentially hostile to Britain.

Nor is there any reason to think that the Talibans or Al Qaeda, in their many franchises, knew who he was. And if terrorists killed him, surely they would have told us by now?

There is no evidence - again, that we know of - that anything like a laptop or mobile phone was taken from Williams' flat. In fact, we know that his phone SIM cards were neatly laid out on a table.

At first this was interpreted as a sign of a ritualistic killing, but with hindsight it may have been just the punctiliousness of a very private man - ideal for his job, I would have thought. Mr Williams was on secondment to MI6 from GCHQ in Cheltenham and was due to return to Gloucestershire imminently.

This fact - that he was going back to his former place of employment - is the only potential "trigger moment" we have which could provide a clue to the puzzle of his death. In the week the police found the body, I reported for Channel 4 News the theory that the code expert's "sexual preferences" may have had something to do with his death.

Two days later, The Sunday Times reported that it had spoken to two witnesses who had seen Mr Williams on the gay scene in South London.

All this apparently appalled the dead man's family in Wales - only beginning to come to terms with his tragic death - and both they and the police let it be known that this was not a useful line of enquiry. One outraged family member suggested that this could be an orchestrated "dirty tricks" campaign by British Intelligence. What would be the merits of MI6 falsely describing its employee as gay?

MI6 employs gay people, and like every other branch of the civil service it cannot discriminate against them. What it may not be able to tolerate is the security risk of an employee being a closet gay - leading a double life on top of their double life as a spy - in case this leaves an employee open to blackmail.

A "dirty tricks" campaign unfairly suggesting that Williams was a closet homosexual in fact does the reputations of GCHQ and MI6 few favours, because it makes it obvious that their supposedly rigorous vetting procedures failed. In other words, it is an "own goal" for SIS. So why suggest it if it wasn't true?

To disguise the fact that the Russians or the Iranians or Mafia hit men killed him, when they could have killed him in myriad and far less bizarre ways if they had wanted to, assuming they had even known who he was? Which brings us back to the body in the bag.

A padlocked bag in a flat which was double-locked with no sign of forced entry that we know of. Could the bag have been padlocked from the inside?

It has been reported that it could. Which leads us to the theory - and that is all this is - that an act of "erotic self-asphyxiation" or sex game caused Gareth Williams' death, either by accident or on purpose.

And if it was on purpose and involved no one else, what was the trigger? Perhaps it was his imminent departure from the bright lights of London and his return to his old life in Cheltenham.

I repeat that this is just a theory based on the little that we know; but Gareth Williams lived in a world of secrets, and perhaps the secret of his private life was, for him, one secret too many.

MercatorNet : Lonely life, lonely death

Lonely life, lonely death

The mysterious death of a British spy in the heart of London shows the hazards of the profession.

by Michael Coren | September 13, 2010

The British have a dark, sardonic sense of humour. It’s what got them through depressions, Nazi bombing raids and even socialist governments! So it took only a day or two late last month for the joke to circulate that the British intelligence services were so clever that their agents could commit the most extraordinary suicides in the world. The reference was to Gareth Williams, a young man seconded to MI6, whose body was found in a padlocked and sealed sports bag in the bath of his apartment.

Not funny for his friends and family of course. The 31-year-old was actually an employee of GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters based in Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. It is part of three main branches of British intelligence along with MI5 (domestic intelligence) and MI6, also known as the SIS or Secret Intelligence Service (foreign intelligence). GCHG is, as it were, the least glamorous of the trio and most of its work involves listening to and monitoring communications and – vital work – deciphering what potential threat targets are saying to each other.

Williams had been seconded to MI6 in London, based on the south bank of the River Thames just down the road from the Houses of Parliament and from MI5, both establishments across the river over Lambeth Bridge. He lived nearby in Pimlico, which is where his body was found. It’s likely that he wasn’t a field agent but a mathematical genius recruited from university and employed to work on codes. He was an isolated figure, a passionate cyclist, quiet, reliable and with few if any friends. It is also claimed that his body was found two weeks after he was killed, that there were no signs of struggle or even of how he died and that various identity cards were arranged in his home as if to leave some sort of signal.

I say “claimed” because there is no way to know if any of this is true. Would even a low-level member of the intelligence community not be searched for by colleagues if he had not checked in for work for two weeks? Front-line agents have to call in under a secret code at regular, usually daily intervals but even ordinary staff members are scrutinized. The police still claim to have no leads and the story is no longer receiving much coverage in the British press but all sorts of questions remain unanswered.

One being why there were suggestions of sexual violence – the implication being of a homosexual variety – made within 24 hours of the story breaking. There was never any evidence of this but some newspapers ran with the report that bondage equipment was founded in Williams’ home. According to local police officers who later spoke to the press this was utter nonsense. As was the idea that the poor man cruised gay bars – there is a gay bathhouse directly across the road from the MI6 offices – or that he had some sort of guilty and clandestine double life.

This is British intelligence for goodness sake. They know about double lives and investigate every person who works for them. Gay men and women are openly employed by MI6 and MI5 – it is the possibility of blackmail and not sexual preference that determines the suitability of an applicant. In other words, as long as there is nothing to hide there is nothing to worry about. in any case, his relatives have furiously denied that he was a homosexual and say that he is being smeared by the government.

Was it MI6 who discredited Williams or was it a foreign agency? Was his death political and if so was he killed by a friend or an enemy? We may know eventually but likely not for some time. There is and always has been a reciprocal if not symbiotic relationship between the intelligence services and the media in Britain – less a case of the “spooks”, as they are known, exploiting the press than the intelligence people letting it be known that if journalists want good stories and leaked information they need to do what they’re told at other times.

When I was at university in England one of my professors, an avuncular and kindly man, told me that I was “Intelligent and lazy. You’ll make a good journalist or a good spy.” I laughed, went on my way and eventually became a journalist. I realize now that he was probably making preliminary recruitment inquiries. A talent spotter. Not that I was very talented. A fellow student who was studying Russian did eventually join the MI5 – something he did not tell his friends until he had left. He refused to say very much about what went on – “boring really, just lots of listening to the radio and reading Soviet newspapers” – but did tell us that what surprised him was how untidy the offices always were.

“Thing is, you see, it’s quite difficult to do thorough security checks on people who clean offices and empty the bins. So the cleaning up is left to the people who work there and we resented doing it. Always argued about whose turn it was to do it. So most days it was a mess. Not as glamorous as I’d hoped.”

Not glamorous at all for the unfortunate Gareth Williams but British intelligence still enjoys a fine reputation and, apart from a bad period during the cold war, has performed its tasks extremely well. The problems of double-agents working for Moscow in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s was that many of the men and women who has done such excellent work spying on and monitoring the Nazis and their supporters during the 30s and the Second World War had a sympathy for Communism based on their hatred of fascism. Thus their loyalties became clouded once the war was over. It led to betrayal and to lack of faith on the part of the always more bellicose CIA.

The intelligence war against Irish extremism, the modern hard left and small far right was and is far more successful but today an estimated 70 percent of the efforts, energy and finance of the security services is devoted to Islamic fundamentalism. Mosques are certainly infiltrated, Arabic, Farsi and Urdu speakers recruited and trained and a whole network of informants and intelligence-gatherers maintained. The country is on a permanent “high alert” level and it’s estimated that more than a dozen serious and up to a hundred potential Islamic terror attacks have been prevented by MI5, MI6 and their support group within the police – Special Branch.

So whatever happened to the unfortunate Mr Williams – may he rest in peace – is fascinating but has no effect on the work of a constantly challenged and, apparently, untidy British intelligence service. Will all of the secrets eventually be revealed? Don’t bet on it. The river Thames that back on to MI6 hides its treasures darkly and deeply; so do the spies who work next to it.

Chester Chronicle : Chester-based sister of dead MI6 spy helping Scotland Yard investigation

Chester-based sister of dead MI6 spy helping Scotland Yard investigation

by David Holmes | September 2, 2010

THE Chester-based sister of MI6 spy Gareth Williams has been helping Scotland Yard detectives investigating his mysterious death.

Ceri Subbe, who lives with husband Chris in Brook Lane, Chester, has been to the capital to help officers piece together the final movements of Mr Williams, whose body was found in a holdall in a bath at his London flat.

The News of World reports it was Mrs Subbe, a physiotherapist at Wrexham Maelor Hospital, where her husband is a doctor, who raised the alarm after her brother failed to return calls.

Her evidence has undermined claims his body lay undiscovered for a fortnight until its discovery on Monday of last week – she spoke to him on the phone the previous Wednesday.

Pathologists have been unable to explain how the 31-year-old code-breaker, who worked at GCHQ and was seconded to MI6, died. There were no obvious injuries on his body and further tests are being carried out.

Although detectives are working on the assumption that he was murdered, they have not ruled out the possibility that Mr Williams died in an accident, from an overdose or even suicide.

One theory is that someone who was present at the time panicked and put his body in the bag but failed to remove it.

The deceased’s family, who live in Anglesey, are said to be ‘furious’ about tabloid claims that he had a secret double life, including suggestions he was gay or a transvestite.

A keen cyclist, Mr Williams was a maths genius who gained a first class degree in maths from Bangor University at just 17 before gaining a postgraduate certificate from Cambridge University.

There was nobody at home when The Chronicle called at Mrs Subbe’s home, which is on the market for £240,000.

Telegraph : Spy Gareth Williams 'in good spirits' before death, family say

Spy Gareth Williams 'in good spirits' before death, family say

By John Bingham | August 31, 2010

The family of a British spy found dead in a bag in his bath insisted last night he was “happy and in good spirits”, casting doubt on claims his personal or financial problems played a role in his death.


Relatives of Gareth Williams described him as “steady, quiet and well balanced” and said he had shown no sign of any change in recent months.

It came as one former friend of the MI6 codebreaker claimed that he had been plagued by his own “demons”.

Pathologists have been unable to explain how the 31-year-old, whose body was found in a sports bag in the bath of a flat in Pimlico, central London, last week, died.

Remembered by school mates as a “maths genius”, Mr Williams was on a one-year secondment to MI6 from GCHQ, the government’s “listening post” in Cheltenham, Glos, where he worked for almost a decade.

His position regularly took him to the US where he liaised with the National Security Agency and the CIA and he is also reported to have made a number of visits to Afghanistan.

There were no obvious injuries on his body, which is thought to have lain undiscovered for more than a week and further tests are being carried out after a post mortem examination proved inconclusive.

Although detectives are working on the assumption that he was murdered they have not ruled out the possibility that Mr Williams died in a bizarre accident, from an overdose or even suicide.

One theory is that someone who was present at the time panicked and put his body in the bag but failed to remove it.

William Hughes, 61, Mr Williams’s uncle, insisted there was “no way” he could have taken his own life.

“He just wasn't that kind of person,” said Mr Hughes, who lives near the home of Mr Williams's parents, Ian and Ellen, in Anglesey, north Wales.

“He was always very steady. He was a quiet person, but he was a happy one, there'd been no shift in his personality.”

He added: “I saw Gareth a couple of months ago when he came home for a cycling event and he was in good spirits.

“He was just the same as he always was – friendly, happy and well balanced.”

Police have been interviewing friends and family in an attempt to find possible clues in his background.

But detectives have played down lurid claims that Mr Williams, remembered as a solitary figure despite his heavy involvement in competitive cycling, could have died in some form of sexual game.

Reports that a series of payments into and out of his bank account remain unaccounted for have also been dismissed as “speculation”.

Daily Mail : The dead MI6 spy was an unsung hero, so why are shadowy figures trying to blacken his name?

The dead MI6 spy was an unsung hero, so why are shadowy figures trying to blacken his name?

By Melanie Phillips | August 30, 2010

George Smiley would never have behaved like this. Ever since the body of the GCHQ code-breaker Gareth Williams was discovered stuffed into a hold-all in his bath, we have been treated to a stream of unsavoury and contradictory leaks from mysterious sources.

The story is throwing up more obfuscatory trade-craft than a John Le Carré novel. Of course, the secret intelligence world must of necessity work in a deeply shadowy way - concealing its tracks, laying false trails and employing sundry other means of disinformation.

It does so in order to keep this country safe from its enemies. So much is generally accepted.

But when one of its number is found apparently murdered in a flat in central London, you do not expect these black arts of subterfuge to continue.

You certainly don't expect them to thwart the investigation of an apparently sinister death or cause further and needless distress to the dead man's bereaved parents.

Yet this is precisely what seems to have happened after the discovery of Mr Williams's body.

It appears that he was no ordinary GCHQ operative but a vitally important contributor to the defence of the West.

A brilliant mathematical boffin, he was helping to oversee a network which links satellites and super-computers in Britain and the U.S. with those of other key allies.

He had also worked on breaking coded Taliban messages, helping to save the lives of countless British and other Nato soldiers under attack in Afghanistan.

So his death would seem to have serious security implications of one kind or another - including the possibility that he was murdered by enemies of this country.

Yet shadowy unnamed sources started putting it about that 'bondage equipment and gay paraphernalia' were found in his flat.

The implication was that his death was caused by some seedy sadomasochistic practice that went wrong.

At a stroke, Mr Williams's reputation was trashed - transforming him from an unsung hero of his nation into the sordid author of his own terminal misfortune.

Not surprisingly, this planted suggestion greatly upset his grieving family, who protested at the 'horrible and completely fictitious accounts of his private life'.

More remarkably, it was refuted in the strongest possible terms by the police who said no such paraphernalia had been found in Mr Williams's flat - although they wouldn't comment on the suggestion that he was indeed gay.

None of us has the faintest idea why or how he died. But why would these shadowy sources - whoever they may be - want to blacken his name like this? Of course, it is possible that he was killed by a lover.

Most killings, after all, have a rather more prosaic cause than an assassination perpetrated by clandestine agents.

But why plant this suggestion - and in the most lurid and apparently untruthful way - before the police have even established how or when he met his death?

Maybe a clue lies in the further claim that some £18,000 disappeared from one of his bank accounts two months ago - money reportedly moved 'by complex means', leading to speculation that Mr Williams was being blackmailed.

It is possible there is an entirely innocent explanation for all that, too. But why are we being treated to this drip-drip of partial, sensational and contradictory information while a criminal investigation is going on?

It all sounds disturbingly similar to the case of Jonathan Moyle, another British intelligence agent whose body was found hanging inside a hotel wardrobe in the Chilean capital Santiago in 1990 with a padded noose around his neck.

He had been investigating a company which was modifying helicopters, possibly to carry nuclear weapons, to sell to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

But MI6 planted the suggestion that he had died while engaged in an auto-erotic act. It took his outraged father to discover that his son had probably been drugged, suffocated, injected with a lethal substance and then strung up in the wardrobe - a view supported by the British coroner, who returned a verdict of unlawful killing at his inquest eight years later.

In the Williams case, it appears that a turf-war has broken out between the police and the intelligence world, with the police complaining that the spooks are hindering their investigation.

Shadowy

So just what does the intelligence world want to cover up in this case? Of course, it is possible that disclosure of the precise circumstances of Mr Williams's death would compromise national security in some way.

But it is also possible there is a less honourable motive for the dirty tricks being played in this investigation.


Maybe the intelligence world doesn't want us to know that it didn't vet Mr Williams thoroughly enough; or alternatvely that it shockingly failed to protect the life of its invaluable code-breaker from foreign or terrorist assailants; or maybe it wants to conceal the identity of a country or group that killed him in order to serve some diplomatic end or other.

Who knows? All we can see is that some very peculiar game is being played around this man's demise.

And it's hard not to put this together with that other mystery over the death of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly in 2003.

He was said to have committed suicide during the controversy over the Iraq war - a conclusion endorsed by the official inquiry that replaced an inquest into his death.

Yet the evidence suggests that he could not have killed himself, as we have been told, by slitting his ulnar artery and taking an overdose of pills - not least because there was not much blood at the scene and fewer than one tablet was found in his stomach.

We also learn that people who wanted or needed to give evidence at the inquiry were never called to do so.

Now the pathologist who inspected his body has insisted this was a 'textbook suicide' - an account that raises more questions than it answers.

Conspiracy

True, the idea that Dr Kelly was murdered and that this was covered up in an official conspiracy seems too implausible to be true.

Yet he did possess unique expertise in biological weapons intelligence. So there was a long list of terror organisations or rogue states that may have wanted him dead.

And if it is indeed true that the intelligence world sometimes plants false information that key operatives who have been murdered have instead been responsible for their own deaths, then the questions about Dr Kelly's 'suicide' become even more urgent.

No one expects the intelligence services to reveal their trade secrets or to compromise national security.

But they are also the servants of a free society. And that means they must observe due process - which means unexplained deaths must be properly investigated.

That means a transparent and thorough investigation. It means holding a proper inquest where evidence about the cause of death can be properly aired and interrogated. And it means not dripping salacious snippets manipulatively into the public domain.

We must also not lose sight of the fact that, however they died, the loss of both David Kelly and now gareth Williams has deprived us of two of the most brilliant minds in the intelligence world.

With their deaths, the defences of this country have been left that much weaker.

The coincidence of two random and unfortunate events? Perhaps. Who knows?

At this rate, none of us will do so.