Daily Mail, 30 August 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.

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.

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.