Death of Spy, Zipped Into Bag, Spawns Theories and Inquest

[Matthew Kruk]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/world/europe/britain-riveted-in-death-of-spy-gareth-williams.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2_20120428

Death of Spy, Zipped Into Bag, Spawns Theories and Inquest
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: April 27, 2012

LONDON - Britain, home to the MI6 spy agency that inspired the James Bond
stories and the billion-dollar film franchise, has been wrestling this week with
one of the country's strangest real-life spy mysteries in a generation, one that
has become known popularly as the case of the spy in the bag.

An inquest held just across the Thames from MI6's headquarters here has brought
forth details of the bizarre and lonely death in August 2010 of Gareth Williams,
a 31-year-old rising star in supersecret counterterrorism work. He was found in
a fetal position, arms crossed on his chest, locked inside a duffel bag resting
in an unfilled bathtub at the government flat assigned to him in the upscale
Pimlico district of London.

His naked body had been in the bag for a week before it was discovered, so badly
decomposed that the police and pathologists have been unable to determine
whether he was murdered in what his family's lawyer has suggested to the court
was a plot by others skilled in the "dark arts" of spy work.

That theory has played prominently here, with Mr. Williams depicted alternately
as a victim of Russian secret service hit men, extremists with Al Qaeda, or a
multitude of other potential assassins working in the murky world of espionage
who poisoned him with potassium cyanide or an overdose of a powerful sedative
drug, GHB, a theory pathologists said could not be effectively tested because of
the advanced decomposition.

While the police and MI6 officials have refused to rule out those theories, they
suggested a more likely but mundane explanation: that although the day had long
passed when the agency dictated agents' lifestyles, he was leading a doubly
secret life, as a licensed MI6 field agent and as a sexual fantasist.

According to this hypothesis, he simply died in a sex game that went wrong,
probably involving someone who fled the scene. One of the sparse forensic
discoveries at the scene involved traces of DNA that were found on the duffel
bag's zipper and the lock, not belonging to Mr. Williams or to anybody on the
police or pathology teams, but too microscopic to offer a trail to anybody else.

The theory of sexual misadventure has been bolstered by evidence that Mr.
Williams, a bachelor with no known romantic involvements, went to transvestite
performances and visited sites on the Internet dedicated to bondage and
"claustrophilia," a condition that involves getting sexual thrills from being
shut in enclosed spaces.

Investigators also discovered that he had more than $30,000 worth of women's
high-fashion clothing, including Christian Louboutin shoes and Christian Dior
dresses, in carefully packed bags in his apartment. Much of the clothing was
brand new, but some of the 26 pairs of shoes had been worn, and a bright orange
woman's wig was found over the back of a chair, along with a pair of newly
pressed men's underpants, in Mr. Williams's otherwise sparsely decorated but
conspicuously tidy bedroom.

At the inquest on Friday, a video was played showing two men hired by the
police - one a yoga expert and the other a former military man trained in escape
techniques, and both of roughly the same size and height as the muscular,
athletic, 5-foot-7-inch Mr. Williams - trying to replicate what he would have
had to do to get himself into the bag alone and lock it from inside. Using the
same kind of red, extra-large North Face duffel bag, and the tub in the Pimlico
flat, the two men were shown contorting themselves - more than 100 times in the
case of one man, and 300 times in the case of the other - without managing the
feat.

Investigators concluded that someone else had to have helped in closing the bag
and locking it. The police have said further that they cannot rule out that Mr.
Williams was dead before being placed in the bag, or that the bag with his body
in it was lifted into the bathtub from somewhere else. There were no
fingerprints or other traces that would have been expected if Mr. Williams had
supported himself on the bathtub's rim while lowering himself into the bag.

Concerns about national security have contributed to the 20-month delay in the
inquest.

Mr. Williams, a Cambridge-educated mathematical genius from the mountains of
North Wales, was working on what his superiors have described as the practical
use of new technologies in the field of electronic surveillance. Police
testimony has described him as a picture of tranquillity in death, lying faceup,
looking "very calm," with no injuries to his nails or fingers and no "signs of
stress or fear" on his body or on the bag's interior netting. But the men who
tried to lock themselves in the bag, and pathologists, have said at the inquest
that he would have suffocated within 30 minutes from a rapid 20-degree rise in
heat and a buildup of carbon dioxide.

Family members, including Mr. Williams's parents and a sister, appealed
unsuccessfully to the coroner not to allow the video of the re-enactment to be
shown to the court, but it was quickly posted on the Internet after the court
session ended. Inquest sessions have been suspended when relatives have broken
into sobbing and hyperventilating, on one occasion when a senior MI6 officer
testified anonymously from behind a screen that their son's MI6 supervisor had
not been disciplined for failing to report him missing, even though the normally
punctilious Mr. Williams had not been at work for more than a week.

MI6 and the other spy agencies in Britain, including Government Communications
Headquarters, the powerful, partly American-financed electronic surveillance
center, which had transferred Mr. Williams to MI6, are no strangers to scandals
that have involved the sex lives of some of their greatest talents.

Alan M. Turing, the mathematician whom many regard as the father of modern
computer science, known for leading the team that cracked Nazi Germany's
military ciphers in World War II, committed suicide in 1954 by eating a
cyanide-laced apple after being convicted of homosexuality, then a criminal
offense. The so-called Cambridge spies of the 1950s, several of whom fled to the
Soviet Union, had homosexual liaisons as young men.

But MI6 has used the mystery of Mr. Williams's death to signal that efforts have
been made to neutralize the potential for blackmail in the private lives of
British agents. One of the two MI6 officials who have testified at the inquest
said the agency knew of Mr. Williams's sexual predilections, including his
visits to bondage Web sites, his interest in transvestite performances and his
collection of women's clothing, and deemed that they posed no problem in his
professional life, where he had performed "world-class work." Other MI6
officials have said some of his work involved close contact with American spy
agencies, and visits to the United States.

The MI6 official, identified in court as SIS F - for the Secret Intelligence
Service, MI6's formal name, and "female" - said agents' sex lives were now their
own private concern. "There is no set template for what their lifestyle should
be," she said. "Individuals have lifestyle and sexual choices and sexual
preferences which are perfectly legitimate." But she also said Mr. Williams had
used his MI6 computer to make "a small number" of illicit searches on the MI6
database, which she did not detail, that could have made him vulnerable to
blackmail by foreign agents. While the agency believed there was no connection
between his spy work and his death, she said, that could not be ruled out.

Another clue to Mr. Williams's mind-set at his death came from a clipping from
the newspaper The Observer that was found in his flat. Dated on the day before
his last Web search, the article focused on research into what people on their
deathbeds most regretted. These included not having the "courage to live true to
myself" and wishing they had "stayed in touch with friends" and had "let myself
be happier."