Real Life intrigue and spy Novel: An M16 Agent Found Naked and Dead
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?
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
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&Mparaphernalia. Williams was also said to have frequently paid for
of S&Mparaphernalia. 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
theVauxhall 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 theOfficial 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 basenear
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."
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