Whichever way you look at it, the case of Gareth Williams worryingly continues to raise more questions than answers.
a. Why did his employers MI6 take more than a week after William’s disappearance to alert either his family or the police?
b.Why did officers of the Met’s counter-terrorism branch SO15 delay informing investigating police officers of the existence of nine memory sticks and a black holdall found at Williams’s MI6 office until two days before the inquest into his death ended?
c. How much of Williams’ private life-the inquest revealed this included tying himself to bedposts, visited bondage sites, and having £20,000 collection of ‘high-end’ women’s clothing and 26 pairs of designer women’s shoes in his London flat- was known to his employers?
d. Exactly what kind of work did Williams do? We heard at the inquest that after being recruited by GCHQ, the government’s secret listening agency, and then seconded to MI6, his work involved the design of “practical applications for emerging technologies”. He had also passed a course to become “full deployable” as an MI6 officer, was operational only in UK and not overseas, and had had contact with two undercover agents. All this tells us very little.
e. Was Williams personal life- of a kind that might have led him into unpredictable encounters- properly checked or overlooked before being recruited ? What are we to make of an MI6 officer, identified at the inquest only as F blaming William’s line manager, identified only as G, on a “breakdown of communication,”?
If we accept the coroner’s verdict that Williams was on the ‘balance of probabilities’ unlawfully killed by being placed in a holdall, padlocked, and suffocated, then the ‘cock-up’ theory looks pretty thin although cock-up along the way, there may have been .
If, as I suspect, there has been an attempt at a cover-up by MI6 and compliant police officers, then one can only assume that Williams’ work was of a more sensitive nature than has been revealed so far and was the prime motivation behind his death.
To me, this case has uncomfortable echoes of the death of Jonathan Moyle, the Editor of the magazine Defence Helicopter Work who was found dead in his hotel in Santiago, Chile, in March 1990, hanging in a wardrobe. An inquest into the death of Moyle , who had been investigating sensitive arms deals at the time of his death, found that he was unlawfully killed.
Let me make clear that I am not suggesting that MI6 is culpable for William’s death. Perhaps there is suspicion although no evidence that a foreign agency was involved. I do believe however that the intelligence world’s ‘silo’ mentality-where secrecy breeds a culture of non-accountability-is evident in this case. The public interest deserves more answers than questions. The case cries out for an urgent and focused judicial enquiry whose terms of reference should include the conduct of MI6 and the police-for this may help unlock the key to the mystery.
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