Spy Gareth Williams 'in good spirits' before death, family say
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.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/c...y-say.html
By John Bingham [Telegraph]
Published: 7:30AM BST 31 Aug 2010
Gareth Williams, who was found dead in a flat in Pimlico Photo: SWNS
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”.
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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. :dontknow: :dontknow: :dontknow: :dontknow:
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”.
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The Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham is Britain’s last great secret. Now it is in the focus of intense speculation among its stunned staff. Never before has one of their own been murdered. In GCHQ’s cafés, the seating area around the lawn at the core of the doughnut-shaped building and behind anonymous doors simply marked “No admission”, the same question continues to be asked: who murdered Gareth Williams – and why?
Despite his widow’s-peak haircut and geeky smile, he worked at the cutting edge of computer technology. His mathematical brain made him a vital tool in the fight against terrorism and cyber warfare. Yet the security services are anxious to play down his role, so as not to alarm the world over his importance to anyone involved in his murder.
In 2000, Williams left his Cambridge University course in advanced mathematics because he had already learned all he could. By then, he had also been “tapped” – recruited by GCHQ scouts, who tour universities looking for talent.
No one can be certain why he signed up. It wasn’t the salary. His £40,000 a year was far less than he could have earned in industry. But it is very likely that, like so many of his young colleagues at GCHQ, he was attracted by the challenges, the excitement of working at the centre of events that he would often know about before even the Prime Minister.
Being on the inside track would also have fitted his personality. Williams was the quintessential loner. His former landlady, Jenny Elliot, 71, said last week that “his life was his work”. He was exactly what GCHQ would have wanted.
The 30-year-old bachelor loved to go cycling and keep his muscular frame in trim in the GCHQ gym – pursuits of a single man. If he ever visited Cheltenham’s bars or went on dates, he kept such socialising to himself. Within the tight-lipped GCHQ community, he obeyed the law laid down by its director, Iain Lobban, who told his staff when he took over in 2008: “Say nothing to anybody.”
When Williams joined in 2001, he found himself among the largest group of mathematicians gathered within one UK organisation, along with hundreds of cryptologists and analysts. It’s a big operation: the electricity required to run GCHQ’s supercomputers would light a small town. He became part of a world where computers were linked to storage systems, each holding a petabyte of data – eight times more than the entire word count of the British Library. Soon, he found himself working in the Super Computer Centre, developing techniques to speed up data encryption.
A former GCHQ employee recalled last week that staff would boast that when one of its female employees became pregnant, “our computers could capture the first birth cry of her baby and follow the infant through life to its death, no matter where on earth it happened”.
Gareth Williams died without leaving such a trace. Last year, his section leader had told him he was being seconded to the London headquarters of MI6. It was a further sign of his steady progress up the hierarchy at GCHQ.
In 2003, he spent six months at Menwith Hill, the ultra-secret RAF station in Yorkshire. In reality, it is a transplant of the United States; the only connection with Britain is the detachment of Ministry of Defence police that patrols the perimeter.
It was here that Williams learned how to analyse the findings from Menwith Hill’s radomes – the imposing white structures resembling gigantic golf balls that intercept coded messages from satellite communication systems, which are then broken before being sent to GCHQ for further analysis.
In 2006, Williams also spent time at Fort Meade in Maryland, home of the United States’ National Security Agency, GCHQ’s partner in global surveillance. As GCHQ gathers secret intelligence from Europe, Africa and Russia west of the Ural Mountains, NSA covers east of the mountains, including Japan and China, the Pacific and South America. As a new arrival, Williams was invited to listen to recordings of Osama bin Laden talking to his mother on his satellite phone in the aftermath of 9/11.
With his tenure at MI6 coming to an end, Williams was told that he would rejoin GCHQ in a new department, the Cyber Security Operations Centre, a team of traffic analysts tracking the threat posed by would-be cyber terrorists to Britain’s banks and infrastructure. He died before he could take up this promotion.
A further sign of Williams’s importance was that he had been assigned to live at 36 Alderney Street – a high-security apartment in Pimlico that MI6 would have previously used to debrief one of its agents or a defector. Like all safe houses, it was functionally furnished – but with a direct phone line to MI6 headquarters less than a mile away. Williams would have been cautioned about who he was allowed to entertain at home.
In the days since his body was discovered last Monday, conspiracy theorists have filled the internet with claims that Williams had been stabbed and poisoned; that he was the victim of a sex attack; that he was either homosexual or transvestite; that sado-masochistic bondage gear had been found in the flat; that he was murdered because he had threatened to expose a cabal of gays in the intelligence world. All such possibilities are being examined this weekend by MI6 and MI5 working with Scotland Yard detectives.
Investigators have already discounted a theory that Williams was killed elsewhere and brought back to the apartment in the sports bag. But they are investigating whether a second key was cut for the apartment; locksmiths across London are being checked. CCTV footage at nearby Victoria station, as well as other London railway terminals, is under review for images of Williams returning from a recent holiday. He is known to have been back in London since August 11, and that a sighting was made on August 15 – one of the few details police have released.
As well as having trouble gathering evidence, police are finding it difficult to discover the exact nature of Williams’s work. They have been briefed that, despite earlier denials, it “impinged on national security”.
An intelligence officer close to the investigation confirmed: “He was not just a cog in the wheel. He had an important part in making the wheel go round.”
On Tuesday, a second post-mortem will be held: an initial post-mortem proved inconclusive, ruling out stabbing or shooting, with toxicology results still pending. I have been told that the Home Office forensic pathologist will be looking for evidence that Williams was neither stabbed nor poisoned, but smothered to death.
Dr Fawzi Renomran, the London-trained pathologist who conducted the autopsy on the body of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas terrorist who was killed in Dubai earlier this year, concluded that he had been smothered by a Mossad hit team. “It was a difficult form of murder to prove,” he said.
But, apart from Mossad, there are other intelligence services with experts in murder by smothering. They include the Russian SVR and the Chinese Secret Intelligence Service. Terrorist groups are also known to have used the method.
Until the next autopsy report becomes public, those two key questions – who murdered Gareth Williams, and why? – will continue to echo around GCHQ.
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Detectives say they are still looking at whether Gareth Williams may have been killed by a foreign intelligence agency seeking to stop his work on intercepting messages and code-breaking.
Interviews with friends and family of Mr Williams, 30, have offered no clear leads as to how or why he died. Checks on his phone records and bank accounts have also yet to provide anything conclusive.
As to Mr Williams’s social life, reports that he may have died in a sex game gone wrong have been played down by police, who say that although he may have visited a gay bar, they have found nothing to suggest that sex played a role in his death.
As a result, sources say they are continuing to co-operate closely with MI6, where Mr Williams was finishing a year-long secondment from GCHQ, and interviewing colleagues.
They are also investigating links with the US where he made a number of trips to liaise with the National Security Agency and the CIA.
He is thought to have returned to Britain from a foreign trip on Aug 11 and was last seen alive on Aug 15, eight days before his body was found in a holdall and left in his bath at the MI6 flat where he lived in Pimlico, London.
Investigators are keeping details of his exact movements secret to avoid encouraging spurious sightings. One source said: “Those people who know him will come forward and those who do not and have something to hide, we will track down.”
Sources close to the inquiry said they are looking at the possibility that his body was manhandled into the bag in order to remove it from the premises. They are searching the flat for fingerprints and DNA to determine if anyone was present when he died.
A pathologist has been unable to identify why Mr Williams died but toxicology test results are expected in the next few days that should identify whether he was smothered, poisoned or had taken drugs.
The keen cyclist seems to have had few close friends and been willing to confide little about his work or private life. Officers are eager not to jump to any conclusions about why Mr Williams was killed, or even whether he could have died in a bizarre accident and his body then moved.
One senior detective said: “It is possible he was the victim of a political assassination but the reality may be more mundane.”
Mr Williams’s family in Wales have said the continued speculation about his private life is “very distressing”.
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