Original subtitles

NARRATOR: In 2010, the death of an MI6 spy,

found locked in a bag in his bath, shocked Britain, and the world.

He was found unclothed

in a zipped and padlocked red sports holdall.

The authorities ruled it a tragic accident...

This was probably a sex game that went wrong.

..but some have serious doubts.

Everything about this case absolutely stinks of a cover-up.

Could he have got in the bag?

And if he couldn't get in the bag on his own,

there must be someone else.

What were the events leading up to his tragic death?

What Gareth may have stumbled across

is the identity of a Russian mole in GCHQ.

He had to be eliminated.

This is the story

of one of Britain's most shocking mysteries,

but now, 14 years after it happened,

has a new police investigation finally solved the case?

We think there's new technology here that might give us more evidence.

Or has the truth been buried?

I believe the purpose of this re-examination

was to shut the case down.

The mystery isn't solved.

If the police think it is,

they're deluding themselves or trying to delude the public.

I just feel bloody angry the intelligence agencies

can always sweep everything like this, every scandal,

under the blanket of national security.

It was murder by people who knew exactly how to do it

without leaving a trace.

2010...

a busy year of memorable worldwide events.

At home, Prince William gets engaged.

He's a true romantic.

The Conservative Party unites with the Liberal Democrats

to form a coalition government.

Apple released the first generation of the iPad,

heralding a new dawn in technology.

REPORTER: Three Lions torn apart by the Germans.

At the World Cup, Germany send England home...

Frank Lampard's disallowed goal added...

..but in Russia, a darker, deadly atmosphere pervades.

I have no doubt that this was an attempt to kill.

Journalists, businessmen, human rights activists

are found shot, strangled, poisoned, murdered.

REPORTER: Quite a few of Putin's enemies have perished

by swallowing things they shouldn't have.

The killings weren't limited to Moscow.

REPORTER: The death of a jogger

in this exclusive Surrey neighbourhood

is officially unexplained.

The Secret Intelligence Service was awakening

to a new era of Cold War espionage.

In 2006, the murder of Litvinenko in London

confirmed there were no borders or barriers to the Kremlin's dark arts.

I cannot think of another capital globally

that really represents the centre of espionage

more than London itself.

And that was an interesting experience being an MI6 officer,

because I would deploy as much tradecraft,

simply going across London

as I would do in any other city in the world.

The world of espionage had entered its most dangerous phase

since the Cold War,

and London was the battle ground.

This was the deadly environment that Gareth was promoted to in 2010.

Just months later, he was dead.

But who was the spy in the bag?

Gareth Williams was a highly talented mathematician.

I think probably fair to call him a genius.

Gareth Williams was regarded as a highly proficient

and a very effective member

of the security organisation for which he worked.

He was based normally at GCHQ in Cheltenham

but was on short-term transfer to MI6.

MI6 is the elite institution of the British Intelligence Service,

and it's always looking to recruit the best minds in the country.

MI6 is much more about individualists

who go and work abroad undercover

and recruit agents to gather information.

So the culture shock from someone going from being a boffin at GCHQ

to being someone working in a shark pit, effectively,

which is MI6, must have been hideous.

So, how did this brilliant 31-year-old MI6 operative

meet such a chilling end?

RINGING TONE

One day in August 2010,

the police received a call

from the Government Communications Headquarters,

the hub of the UK intelligence service,

better known as GCHQ.

RINGING TONE

It was a phone call that would lead

to one of Britain's biggest unsolved mysteries.

CALL OPERATOR: Emergency - which service?

I wanted to report one of our members of staff,

who lives and works in London, as missing.

Detective Sergeant Paul Colgen was first to respond.

There was certainly nothing within the message to suggest

that this was anything more

than a knock on the door to see who was there,

if they're OK, and then report back.

It was in a quiet residential road. An old Victorian building.

This revealing footage gave an insight

into Gareth's lifestyle and the contents of his flat.

Going into the flat, it was immaculate.

There wasn't a thing out of place.

I remember there were laptops, certainly computers in there.

A couple of mobile phones I do remember being on the table.

There was a number of North Face bags piled up,

and I remember there was a couple of wigs on the side.

The bedroom, again, was tidy.

There was certainly nothing to suggest there'd been a struggle,

or any form of crime had taken place at that point.

I'm walking into the bathroom,

nothing to suggest anything had happened.

The only strange thing was the bag in the bath.

It was secured with a padlock

through two zippers meeting in the middle.

When I picked it up, it was heavy, but not inordinately heavy,

in that I could lift it myself without help from anybody else.

But because of the odour that was coming from it

and the fluid that was leaking from it,

I decided that it had to be cut open.

I decided to cut down the side of it,

near the zipper, but not on the padlock itself,

in order to preserve as much forensics as possible.

On cutting through the bag,

I-I was met by an overpowering stench...

..of... of decomposing flesh.

That's something you never forget.

The first thing I saw was a nose.

But then I opened the bag a little bit further,

and then it was a... a face of a body

who'd clearly been dead for some time...

frothing at the mouth and nose.

That was the point I decided that this was a crime scene,

and we would leave the premises, secure them,

and then call in the murder teams to take over.

There's been a huge amount of police activity

and people in forensic outfits.

All a bit grim, really.

Good gracious me,

how a man can be obviously murdered in his flat there is awful,

that doesn't normally happen.

Now being treated as a suspicious death,

forensics teams were called to the flat

to start looking for any potential evidence.

I think, obviously, that you always feel very saddened

by the scene in front of you, you can't help that.

I think you wouldn't be human if you didn't.

But the great thing that I've found

is that you become so overwhelmed almost immediately

with the need to start doing something really meaningful,

and it's really important that you get going as quickly as possible.

You don't have much time to dwell on the emotional,

the obvious emotional aspects of the... of what's in front of you.

The investigation would be overseen

by Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell.

My initial thoughts were like many others,

it was certainly bizarre and rare.

And in ordinary circumstances,

the discovery of a naked person inside a locked bag,

in their own premises,

almost invariably would result in immediate identification of murder.

When you're looking at homicide,

you have to have some theories to it,

and in this case, Gareth's death had only three options, primarily.

Either his death was a single event by himself,

and no-one else involved.

The second scenario was that his death

was a result of another person, or persons involved

in him being placed in that bag.

And the third possibility is, again,

that other person or persons were involved,

and it was murder.

And that Gareth was therefore deliberately killed

and placed in the bag.

The forensics teams had to follow a strict process

to ensure any clues that could solve the mystery weren't missed.

The principles that are followed

are control, preserve, record, recover.

So you get control of the crime scene,

you preserve the evidence,

make sure it's not interfered with in any way.

And then try and establish who is inside the bag,

what condition the body is in,

and gradually start working towards

what is the evidence that's available that might explain

how this body got in the bag and how they died.

If you look at this crime scene,

even as a specialist who attends the scene,

it's very likely that you will never have encountered

anything like this before.

If you then link that to Gareth's background

and all the issues that that might bring,

someone who's employed by GCHQ and currently working with MI6,

it brings an even more extraordinary dimension to it.

Whilst forensic evidence was being collected,

the content of Gareth's flat had already been leaked to the press,

and the mystery was deepening.

£20,000 worth of women's clothes were found.

Along with wigs, mobile phones -

one restored to factory settings,

one with a search history that included bondage sites.

The mixture of spying and sex quickly reduced Gareth's lifestyle

to a perverse, headline-grabbing version of the truth.

The public was fascinated by the case,

and television news bulletins were all too happy

to broadcast the salacious details of his death.

He'd visited bondage websites,

gone to gay bars and bought tickets to drag shows.

Police have revealed new details

about the intensely private life of MI6 spy Gareth Williams,

who was found dead in his London flat in August.

Of course, he had a flat, he had tens of thousands of pounds

of women's clothing in this flat.

He was interested in women's fashion.

He'd been portrayed as a cross-dresser,

which there was no evidence that he was.

And... And so what?

You know, that was Gareth, and he should have been allowed...

He should be allowed that space to be who he was,

not be portrayed as some kind of geek,

cross-dresser, kind of demi-spy.

That simply doesn't represent him as an individual.

This grisly discovery quickly moved

from a standard welfare check

to an international, headline-grabbing story.

A story that involved a dead spy, locked naked in a duffel bag,

whose name was already being smeared in the press.

Rumours started to circulate that shadowy forces were involved.

Maybe he was the first casualty

of what I'd call the New Cold War with Russia.

He didn't deserve to die in the course of his duty.

He certainly didn't deserve to be rubbished

and to be smeared in a way that subsequently happened.

It was murder.

And it was murder by people who knew exactly how to do it

without leaving a trace.

NARRATOR: August, 2010,

police had been called to an address in Pimlico, West London.

It's a straightforward welfare check on a 31-year-old male.

But this was no ordinary man.

This was a brilliant code breaker,

part of the elite spy network

responsible for preventing atrocities, espionage and terrorism.

Gareth Williams' body was found naked, decomposing,

and in a bag padlocked from the outside.

With very little evidence to go on,

the case was getting more complex by the second.

To have any hope of unravelling this extraordinary mystery,

investigators needed to build a profile of Gareth.

The first clue came from his childhood in rural Wales.

He loved a problem, he loved solving it.

Especially if it was a sort of...

anything to do with computing or anything in the digital world.

To give an example, I was asked to write a program

which would deal with staff absences in the school,

but I was stuck on one thing, and I couldn't get it to work.

And I said, "Gareth, have a look at that for me."

And he got hold of it, and he had a look,

and he went through it and said, in Welsh, he said,

"Mr Thomas, this is inelegant."

And so he had a look at it,

and he brought a little routine that dealt with it supremely.

That was the kind of thing he loved.

He wasn't a social child, if you understand what I mean.

I'm not aware that he had any friends, as such.

He didn't have any friends

in the sense that you had a best friend,

or that he had somebody he went out with.

He was just totally on his own, and the computer was his friend.

It's that simple.

When he was separated from the computer and was asked to go out,

quite often, I've seen him sort of just walking up and down

outside the computer room waiting to be let in, like a lost sheep.

He was definitely happier

when he was sitting in front of a computer,

there's no doubt about it.

Although not medically trained

and going on his own interactions with Gareth,

Nigel believes he may have been on the autistic spectrum.

What I know of autism,

and I think that Gareth was slightly on the autistic spectrum,

is that it is difficult to interact with other people.

It's difficult to understand the emotions,

it's difficult to know what to do in a certain situation.

I know that it's difficult for people with autism

to have relationships

because they have to renew the relationship

every time they meet that person.

It's a very, very difficult thing to say.

Gareth passed his GCSEs aged 10 and his first degree by 17.

I've never come across anybody who had that ability at all.

He was away above anything that I've ever seen.

We had people who went to Oxford and Cambridge,

but this was something totally different.

He was way above anything I could imagine, to be quite honest.

By the time Gareth had graduated from university

and started his second degree at Cambridge,

his talents had been noticed by the security services,

and a job was offered at GCHQ.

The beating heart of GCHQ are its mathematicians.

They are the codebreakers, the direct descendants

of the people who shortened the Second World War

by a number of years

by breaking German codes in Bletchley Park.

His work involved developing software,

analysing patterns of communication

and cracking terrorist activities.

He was surrounded by like-minded people,

fitted in very well, and excelled at his work.

You need extremely brave people.

You need people who can drink two bottles of wine at lunch

and walk home.

But you also need people with completely different skillsets.

And as the world digitises itself,

those people who really understand what it all means

and how to make it work, they are the jewels in the crown,

physically located at the centre of The Doughnut.

By 2010, Gareth had been seconded to MI6,

the elite section of the Secret Intelligence Service

and a very different working environment.

The mathematicians and coders had been replaced by elite spies

who risked their lives on a daily basis.

MI6 would always, fairly or unfairly,

categorise people who worked in GCHQ

as typically very introverted,

certainly not very sociable, not comfortable in large groups.

And certainly not outgoing personality types.

By contrast, in MI6,

the organisation is looking very much

for gregarious-type individuals,

people who can hold their own in social situations

and indeed can bend with the wind

according to the situation they were in.

By all accounts, Gareth's ability to interpret code was extraordinary.

But, if, as some have suggested, he may have been neurodivergent,

this new world of espionage he now found himself in

could have been extremely challenging.

A neurodivergent person is a person that,

what we would traditionally call "on the spectrum".

Possibly autistic.

That would have impacted him on his everyday life.

His sense of the world, the people around him,

his work, his challenges,

would have been very different to yours or mine.

Really, to become a spy,

you literally need to be able to read the room.

You need to be able to change tact very quickly.

And for somebody that is neurodivergent

and is used to working with computers, numbers, patterns,

that's a very different skillset

and perhaps would have been a lot more challenging

than Gareth may have anticipated himself.

Just weeks after starting at MI6,

Gareth requested a transfer back to GCHQ in Cheltenham.

At the same time, something dangerous was happening in Britain.

Money was pouring in from Russia,

with a super-rich elite community arriving,

keen to hide their wealth

and escape the tyranny of the Kremlin.

A tyranny that simply moved to London with them.

At the time, in 2010,

we had a new coalition government, of which I was a part.

David Cameron and George Osborne,

who were the main protagonists in that government,

were keen to improve relations with Russia.

George Osborne was keen to attract Russian money into London,

which he saw as advantageous to the city.

To attract wealthy foreign investors to the country,

the Government had launched the so-called Golden Visa Scheme.

Applicants had to provide a minimum investment of £2 million

in exchange for the right to live in Britain.

We saw an increase in Russian money coming into London

belonging to Russian oligarchs.

What followed the money

were individuals and organisations of fairly dubious character.

And as a consequence of that, a blind eye, in my view,

was turned to a range of assassinations which took place,

largely of Russian nationals in London,

on the basis that it was inconvenient

to draw attention to that

and to find the Russian State guilty of assassinations.

It's also worth bearing in mind, in 2006,

Vladimir Putin enabled a new law to be adopted in Russia,

which gave licence, authority,

for assassinations to take place abroad,

if they were assassinations

of people who were harmful to the Russian State.

Could Gareth's death be linked to Russia?

Over a ten-year period, 14 people with connections to Russia,

many of them former spies,

died in suspicious circumstances on British soil.

You've got Alexander Perepilichny,

who blew the whistle on massive Kremlin fraud.

He dropped dead while he was out jogging.

Mr Perepilichny was not just another man out jogging,

he was a whistle-blower

who was instrumental in trying to expose

a Russian scandal that stretches around the world.

You've got Matthew Puncher,

who helped pin Litvinenko's poisoning on Putin.

He was stabbed to death with two knives.

Litvinenko himself, who defected from the Russian Security Services,

who was poisoned with radioactive polonium in his tea.

Boris Berezovsky, who financed international opposition to Putin,

he was found hanging from a shower rail in his home.

REPORTER: Officially, Thames Valley Police

are treating the death as unexplained,

but there is no shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding it.

A close family friend told Sky News

he was not a man who would take his own life.

You've got Alex Chapman, revealed sex secrets

of his Russian spy wife, Anna,

found dead from a massive drugs overdose.

You've got Scot Young,

who interfered in Russian finance, not to Putin's liking,

who allegedly committed suicide by throwing himself out of a window

and found himself impaled on railings.

REPORTER: Did he fall or was he pushed?

He's one of half-a-dozen apparently healthy British men,

associates of rich Russian exiles, to die here.

The list is really quite long,

and what it demonstrates, I think, is over the years,

the police in this country

have been quite happy to conclude suicide

in the most unlikely circumstances.

The tactic of Russia of late,

certainly within the last ten-plus years,

has very deliberately been to take

a far more brutish approach to espionage.

It's, in many cases, not espionage as we know it,

it is crass, direct action.

Assassinations or attacks or sabotage or whatever.

And that is a deliberate tactic, driven from the very top by Putin,

to send messages to the Russian populous.

And that message being loud and clear that,

"Look, if you do similar, this is what will happen to you,"

so it's all about Putin controlling

what he perceives to be his Russian empire.

THEY SING RUSSIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM

My experience of operating in MI6

was a new world, a far more complex world,

far more dangerous.

As a spy, being in London,

it felt as hostile as anywhere else in the world,

because of the activities that were taking place there.

The bottom line is that we dropped our guard

against Putin's Russia.

We dropped our guard,

and that is a cause of huge national shame,

and it should be, rightly so.

Please don't forget, where does Putin come from?

You know, he comes from the KGB.

And it was blindingly obvious that somebody like Putin as president

would be big, big trouble

in intelligence and security terms for this country.

Was Gareth Williams discovering some uncomfortable truths

behind Russia's influence in Britain?

Maybe that is what Gareth Williams was charged to find out.

What were they really trying to do in the United Kingdom?

What were they really after?

What did it really tell us

about what was going on in the Kremlin?

And maybe, you know, he was the first casualty

of what I'd call the New Cold War with Russia.

Putin puts a high value on counterintelligence

and a low value on those that get in his way.

How likely is it that Gareth would become a target

for assassination?

Assassinations conducted either by a hostile intelligence agency

or even by terror cells,

they do take a lot of planning, a lot of forethought.

This is speculation,

but if Gareth had stumbled across something

that potentially compromised

what we would categorise as a hostile intelligence organisation,

such as Russia's SVR, or FSB, GRU,

it is conceivable that he would have been assassinated

purely to shut him up.

That is possible.

But it would have had to have been

an extraordinary potential breach

for Russia to have done something like that, would be my assessment.

Whatever secrets he may have uncovered,

just months later, Gareth would be dead,

locked in a duffel bag.

This was murder.

And literally, murder most foul.

NARRATOR: MI6 operative Gareth Williams' body,

discovered naked in a holdall in 2010.

The obvious cause of death had to be murder,

but the police were struggling

to find any solid evidence to close the case.

As a result, an inquest was opened

to explore all the circumstances

leading up to the discovery of his body

and work out how he had died.

The first question the inquest asked

was could Gareth actually have been able to get in the bag

and lock it himself?

Peter Faulding was one of two experts tasked to explore

every potential way of getting into the bag,

and what the forensic fall-out might be.

Gareth was slightly taller than me, and it's just, it...

You've got to get your shoulders, so you've got to stand in the bath,

you've got to lift yourself over,

and you have to pull the bag right the way round.

And I practised this time and time again,

where your head has got to go first into the bag

before you do it.

It's very, very difficult.

And there's lots of manoeuvring just to get into this bag.

It's very hot already.

But if you look at my feet now, my feet are all over the bath.

It was a very hot environment that day,

the heating was turned up, and he would have had,

his body would have been perspiring.

But there was no trace at all, anywhere, of his,

in this bath or around the bath.

When I visited the flat, the information I was given,

there was various traces left around the flat.

There was none around the bath, there was none on the padlock,

none on the zipper, none on the shower screen

relating to Gareth Williams himself.

It was very clear that Gareth did not do this himself.

It would be an absolute impossibility,

unless you were wearing forensic gloves and a forensic suit.

Gareth Williams was naked, and he would have left traces of sweat

and all sorts of marks everywhere within that bathroom.

Gareth Williams could have got into the bag,

he could have zipped it closed,

but you cannot do it without actually leaving a trace.

And that is what this is about, it's DNA and fingerprints evidence.

You've got to place your hands on the bath,

you've got to touch the lock, the zip,

and there was none of that of Gareth's

found anywhere near the area.

The other experts agreed with me.

They had a yoga expert bending himself into the bag,

and I believe their conclusion was the same as mine.

How could that possibly happen?

Did this point unequivocally to foul play?

For some, the lack of proof did not necessarily equal murder.

The absence of fingerprints in itself isn't proof of anything.

It's just the absence of fingerprints.

And I always wonder when, what... what...

..what process is occurring where you think

that there has to be fingerprints?

You can go to any crime scene where people live,

and where one of those persons in the house has been murdered,

and you won't necessarily find their fingerprints.

And we know they live there.

I've had much experience of that as well.

So, it, in itself, is not going to make a case

one way or another as to how to determine this crime scene.

There are situations, particularly with DNA and fingerprints,

where you simply DON'T find them where you expect them.

It's very difficult to predict.

Let's take DNA.

DNA is perhaps more easy... more easy to explain it.

You might think, if you pick something up,

that you will always find your DNA on it.

You won't always find your DNA on it.

You might think, if you pick something up,

you will always find a fingerprint.

You will not always find a fingerprint.

So my take on it is that every contact does NOT leave a trace.

It... You... And to go down that way of thinking

is a distraction in a case

where there is other important information available.

The inquest was shown videos of the inside of Gareth's flat.

Such was the public's interest in the story,

these clips were published online by a reputable newspaper.

The inquest now focused

on why Gareth might have put himself in the holdall.

Claustrophilia is the love of enclosed spaces.

Sometimes, it has a sexual element to it,

whereby people that find themselves in confined spaces

get sexually aroused.

Sometimes, in fact, they need to be very constrained

in terms of their space

to feel that they can reach sexual release.

Every year, we get a number of cases

where people have accidentally killed themselves

while engaging in some kind of auto-erotic activity.

And we know that many times,

they didn't really mean to harm themselves.

But this seemed a sort of slightly strange method,

because of the details of it, really.

You know, why bother to get into the bag in the bath?

There are some really odd aspects about this.

At the inquest, Gareth's sister insisted

that he was meticulous about assessing risk.

There was no way he would have put himself

in danger of suffocation without a back-up plan.

If this was something to do with erotic auto-asphyxiation,

it seems very unlikely to me that he would have put himself

in such a precarious situation

that he didn't have an escape route from the inside.

Because of his professional training, because of his skillset,

Gareth Williams understood about risk.

And if this had been a mad, auto-erotic adventure,

he would have taken a penknife or something like that with him

as he got into the bag.

None of that was there.

Gareth's flat was meticulously clean.

However, forensics found his semen on the bathroom floor,

likely to have been left there shortly before his death.

Did that mean that any sex act

had actually concluded before getting in the bag?

If it's a solo sexual game, if it is erotic asphyxiation,

the release, and therefore the semen,

would be found inside the bag.

Most certainly not outside the bag.

It seemed there were multiple arguments

against the solo sex act theory,

but they were far from conclusive.

The coroner also said he wouldn't have got in the bag of his own

because he was risk adverse.

I don't accept that either because I think risk

is often associated with sexual excitement.

When we talk about auto-erotic deaths,

these are extremely unusual things.

Generally, you need to be aware that the range of things

that can excite people sexually

is enormous, it's kaleidoscopic.

Auto-erotic events are not necessarily things

that lead to ejaculation,

they are just things that give an intense feeling

of sexual excitement.

But how did his alleged sexual fantasies fit in

with his high-pressure role

at the most secretive workplace in Britain?

His whole life was about not being able to share

with his close group of family and friends what he really did.

Control, control, control.

It may have been, then, in his personal life,

what he really craved was having the ability

to be completely out of control,

in a way to balance his inner world with his outer world.

His external life with his inner truth.

So something about being in confined spaces

that made him feel that he could relax into it,

because you've got nowhere else to go. You're safe.

The inquest had heard that it would have been possible

for Gareth to get in the bag on his own,

although there were conflicting arguments

about fingerprints and DNA evidence.

It was also possible that he had a sexual or other motivation

for getting in the bag.

But those close to Gareth

said he would always have had a safety back-up plan

where risk was involved,

and this behaviour was entirely out of character.

But then a witness came forward with some startling new evidence.

REPORTER: In a statement read out at today's inquest,

his landlady described one night back in 2007,

when she and her husband heard a cry for help at 1:30 in the morning.

Jennifer and Brian Elliot found him dressed just in shorts,

lying on his back, with both hands tied to his bedposts.

NARRATOR: MI6 spy Gareth Williams was found dead in a bag,

locked from the outside.

Mysteriously, there were no fingerprints on the scene,

baffling investigators.

The inquest into his death had become focused on two main areas.

Was it somehow linked to his job with the Secret Service?

Or was it a sex act gone wrong?

The sex game theory would suggest Gareth had a fetish

for erotic asphyxiation,

an idea which was roundly dismissed by close friends and family.

But then a witness came forward with an extraordinary story.

REPORTER: He was, by all accounts,

a polite and friendly tenant, occupying the annexe of this house.

In a statement read out at today's inquest,

his landlady described one night back in 2007,

when she and her husband heard a cry for help

at 1:30 in the morning.

Jennifer and Brian Elliot found him dressed just in shorts,

lying on his back, with both hands tied to his bedposts.

Suddenly, the erotic fetish theory had gained pace.

But was this witness testimony enough to conclude

that Gareth had died accidentally

after entering the bag to fulfil his sexual desires?

The assumption that being found tied up

and having to call for help to his landlady

escalating into him being found inside a bag, locked up,

is perhaps parallel to the assumption

that if you take weed, you'll end up on heroin.

I don't think it necessarily follows

that everybody that's into bondage

will escalate their fetish into something much more extreme.

So, again, you know, I'm doubtful

that the connection is absolutely clear-cut.

In terms of him being found in that situation

of having to call for help...

one thing is true -

he knew that he needed to call out for help, and he did.

So he had an escape route, embarrassing as it may have been.

Then another clue emerged about Gareth's sexual interests.

He had previously used one of his phones

to search for bondage websites.

Was this further proof that this was indeed a sex game gone wrong?

The evidence that we used to form the view

that this was an auto-erotic death was weak.

There wasn't a great deal of evidence.

The evidence that he was tied to the bed in Cheltenham was quite weak.

But when you combine that with the fact that there's no evidence

that anyone else was in the flat

and the belief, albeit an extraordinary thing to do,

that it could be that he could have got in this bag on his own,

then it does start to make sense in a...

as a kind of circumstantial explanation of events.

The police could find no evidence of a sexual partner in the flat

in the hours leading up to his death.

Nor was there any hard evidence of his sexuality.

But one curious detail came to light

when searching for clues -

a wardrobe full of women's clothing.

They were all bought by him, they were a considerable sum of money,

thousands of pounds spent on women's clothing.

But we've never established why he bought it.

Some of them were still wrapped,

I remember, all wrapped in their tissue and clearly unused.

The suggestion that he may have been buying them for friends -

well, maybe, but they weren't given away

if he had bought them for friends, they were still in his flat,

you know, a considerable amount of them.

So, one's unsure.

He had gone on a fashion course,

they may have been purchased as part of that course,

erm, I don't know.

But is it... is it relevant to his death?

Probably not.

Because he, as the coroner identified,

well, we all identified, he wasn't dressed in any women's clothing

at the time of his death.

It later transpired that Gareth had attended

an evening class in dress design and was fascinated by fashion.

A friend explained that the wigs were for a fancy dress party

they were supposed to be attending together.

The sex act theory seemed to be losing momentum.

And other clues started pointing

to a much more harrowing explanation of events.

Gareth's death took place on a warm summer evening in August.

So why was the heating turned up to the highest setting?

The high temperature in his flat

resulted in the fast decomposition of the body,

compromising the forensics.

The heating was on,

it plainly contributed to the decomposition of the body.

Some people have speculated that was put on deliberately.

And when a body decomposes, the soft tissues go first,

and injuries can be more difficult or even impossible to identify.

This was one of the problems with being definitive

about the cause of death.

They can say that he died of, essentially of suffocation,

but they can't say, for example,

whether he had been punched or attacked or anything like that,

because you couldn't see any signs of this on the skin.

I wasn't sure what to make of that.

It does seem a bit odd, but it...

There's no way I can find,

I can make any sense of that in a forensic review.

You're making the assumption, of course,

that somehow, this delay was deliberate, purposeful,

and in intention to ensure total decomposition,

the heating's up.

By whom?

That starts to presuppose that someone else

in the workplace is involved,

and there's simply no evidence for that whatsoever.

But there was another detail in the handling of the case,

this time by MI6, that caused concern.

It took a week for Gareth to be reported missing by the agency.

How was that possible for a working spy?

The coroner, Fiona Wilcox,

picked up on the quite surprising delay

before MI6 actually discovered Gareth's body in his flat.

A delay of over a week.

MI6 officers were summoned to the inquest

to explain how this could have happened.

REPORTER: Among three intelligence officers

who gave evidence anonymously,

was Witness G, Gareth Williams' line manager at MI6.

He was asked to explain why it took a week

to report the spy's absence

after he had failed to turn up for work and for meetings.

With hindsight, he accepted,

he should have raised the alarm much sooner.

They found no link between his work and his death,

and offered nothing that could take the inquiry forward.

It just wasn't adding up that MI6,

who deal with national security at the highest level,

would not notice Gareth's absence for so long.

He'd been due to attend three meetings that week,

but no concerns had been raised,

and none of the usual protocols for absent staff were followed.

It took a phone call from his sister to raise any concern.

The no-show for a week is...an odd one.

Just simply not turning up,

alarm bells should have been ringing

to the extent that, day one of him not turning up,

calls should have been made.

There is a series of protocols

that are followed through in that instance,

so it's very surprising nothing happened for a full week,

unless it was a complete lapse.

Adding further intrigue,

there was a significant time lag between the phone call to GCHQ

and the subsequent call to the police.

We know that Gareth's sister, Ceri,

contacted the Security Services on the 23rd of August

at 11:30 in the morning,

to express concern that he'd gone missing, apparently.

But the police were not told about this matter until five hours later,

at 4:30.

And what about the phone call itself?

Why wouldn't MI6 attend the address,

a five-minute walk from their office?

Why call 999?

RINGING TONE

CALL OPERATOR: Emergency - which service?

I wanted to report one of our members of staff,

who lives and works in London, as missing.

This does sound very odd, though.

GCHQ obviously has a hotline to the...

You do not need to call 999,

so I do not understand what that phone call was.

And if it was an official call from GCHQ to the police,

there's better ways of dealing with it than 999.

I'm surprised by that level of detail, to be honest.

As criticism of MI6 mounted, a further issue was introduced -

nine memory sticks belonging to Gareth were found at his office.

They could have provided important information

but were not handed over to the police,

nor their content revealed.

Their existence only emerged during the last day of the hearing.

Taking any form of electrical equipment

in and out of the likes of MI6 headquarters,

that is extremely difficult.

You can't just take memory sticks into MI6 or MI5 or GCHQ!

You can't take mobile phones. Anything electronic.

And the most sophisticated sensors that exist

are operative in these places to pick up anything.

It was a sacking offence.

If Gareth Williams had taken those memory sticks into MI6

and they had been discovered,

he would have been dismissed immediately.

So the fact that memory sticks were in his locker in MI6,

suggest to me that he was authorised to have them there.

This raises questions

about what level of work Gareth was involved in.

Were these memory sticks sanctioned,

or had he smuggled them in for his own personal reasons?

Although, if they were deemed suspicious, either by MI6 or GCHQ,

then that's obviously puts doubt in the fact

that they could have been for work purposes.

If, therefore, they belonged to Gareth on a personal level,

then that would beg various questions -

why on Earth would he have been stupid enough

to bring them into one of the most secure,

top-secret buildings on the planet?

If he was doing it for covert espionage reasons,

in other words, he was looking to nick secrets,

that would have been very high-risk, but it is possible.

If that was the case, he would have intended

to have obviously removed them at the first opportunity.

But again, if I'd have been Gareth

doing something as untoward as that,

I'd have taken them in, and then upon leaving work,

I'd have taken them out.

I would not have left them in situ.

But what kind of secrets or compromising information

could have been stored on these memory sticks?

It could have been stuff

which was not related in any way to what he was doing,

and not related to his death in any way,

and which was sensitive material which MI6 didn't want to get out.

It could have been that. It could have been GCHQ files.

It may have been, in that sense, innocent.

However, if that's the case,

why didn't they declare what was there

at least in terms of generalities?

They could have said to the police,

"We've got nine memory sticks, they contain sensitive information,

"but here are the broad topics which are covered."

The disclosure of the memory sticks so late in the hearing

left the impression that MI6 were less than eager to help.

Indeed, the coroner said,

"It remained a legitimate line of inquiry

"that the Secret Services were involved in Gareth's death."

The interesting question is why MI6 appeared to be so willing

to impede the police investigation

to prevent the real facts about this matter from coming out.

And you have to conclude that there were security reasons

why that should be the case.

Gareth's sexual behaviour became the story.

Not the highly secretive work he was involved in.

This way of deflecting public interest away from the truth

is familiar territory for the Secret Service.

So, it's definitely conceivable that Gareth Williams

was effectively sacrificed, in reputational terms,

because it was deemed to be necessary for the national interest

to be carried out.

That's unfortunate, but, I mean, there is a history

of that sort of thing occurring in our country.

Stephen Milligan, the former Conservative MP

who was investigating arms to Iraq,

who was found dead in a sexually compromising position,

wearing suspenders and stockings, and with an orange in his mouth.

And, of course, that was the story which then became the news,

rather than what he was investigating,

as an MP, about dodgy arms deals.

There's also questions of how the press found that out.

They weren't there in his kitchen, were they?

They were told by the police about this

in order to generate that story.

Then there's Jonathan Moyle,

the defence journalist based in Santiago,

who was found stuffed into a hotel cupboard

in a way that implied some sort of sexual deviancy.

But the reality is that Jonathan Moyle had discovered

the sale of 50 helicopters, at a very sensitive time,

to Saddam Hussein.

Subsequently, the Chilean authorities

concluded he'd been murdered,

and that was endorsed by a British coroner.

I imagine that the family will have been distraught.

And then when he is smeared,

totally inappropriately and disgracefully,

probably by his own employers,

then that becomes a matter of deep regret and disgust.

I suspect that what MI6 did not want to say was,

"This was an operational death."

That Gareth Williams was doing something

that put him in harm's way, he agreed to do it

and, unfortunately, paid for it with his life.

But the balance was between our national security

and giving her the full story.

And the decision was taken that national security should win out,

and it has always been like that in this country.

But if the British Secret Service

was somehow involved in or covered up Gareth's murder,

the ultimate question remains -

why did they do it?

I think what Gareth may have stumbled across

is the identity of a Russian mole in GCHQ,

and that would have caused them to conclude he had to be eliminated.

NARRATOR: Gareth Williams was found dead, locked inside a bag, aged 31.

His work as an MI6 spy

meant the case had become headline news all over the world.

But was it murder or self-inflicted?

The coroner suspected foul play, but with insufficient evidence,

could only give a narrative verdict.

I've always been satisfied that a third party

may have been involved in his death,

and the coroner has confirmed that in her finding today.

The news headlines were quick to run salacious stories

about Gareth's private life.

Thousands of column inches were devoted

to his interest in bondage and women's clothing.

But could it have been that these very secrets were discovered

by Russian security forces and used as leverage for blackmail?

Fifty years ago, when I was a student,

if you were a homosexual,

you could not work for a secret British agency,

because you laid yourself open to blackmail.

Well, there's a very simple answer to that, which is to tell people,

for the people to accept that that's fine,

that's how you want to live your life,

as long as it doesn't get in the way of your professional duties,

that's fine.

And if you tell them, at a stroke, you remove the blackmail threat.

And I don't think getting kicks

by tying yourself up in bed

would put you in a position where you were being blackmailed.

For MI6 officers,

we are briefed about the potential of hostile agencies,

particularly the more sophisticated hostile agencies,

such as one belonging to the Russians,

approaching us as officers

and putting something compromising in front of us.

The rule of thumb with that, the organisation, MI6's attitude,

it was if that happens,

if you're approached, look them in the eye and say,

"Publish and be damned."

And then come back and be honest with us, MI6.

That is the approach taken - be defiant.

Do not allow a hostile agency

to get its hooks into you through blackmail.

So, I would anticipate that Gareth Williams

would have in fact been quite open with MI6 about his preferences.

However, the Russians may not have known that and, of course,

the Russians do specialise in kompromat,

when they secure information about someone's personal activities

and try to use that as blackmail.

That's a technique going back decades

which the Russians are very keen on.

Despite a thorough police investigation

and an inquest that had examined all the events

leading up to the discovery of his body in forensic detail,

his death remained a mystery.

Speculation continued that Russian forces were somehow involved,

but no definitive link had been found.

Then, something extraordinary happened,

a former Major in the KGB came forward

with some startling information.

Boris Karpichkov was someone who was in touch with me,

who I think was also fearful for his own position in this country,

given the number of suspicious deaths of Russians

which had been occurring.

And he believes he knows what happened from his contact,

which he still maintains,

within the Russian state and the Russian Security Services.

Karpichkov explained that Gareth had been identified

as a person of interest to the Russian Secret Service.

They were aware of his sexual interests

and were trying to blackmail him into working for them.

I think what Gareth may have stumbled across

is the identity of a Russian mole in GCHQ.

And I believe he would have told his MI6 handlers about that matter.

And they would have been fully in the picture.

That being the case, the Russians would have concluded, perhaps,

that Gareth Williams had to be disposed of

in order to protect their source within GCHQ Cheltenham.

That would give a reason for his disposal.

But not everyone agreed with this new intel.

That article appears in the newspaper, almost unattributable.

There's no further source to it, and it's printed,

and then that becomes an alleged truth.

And I don't understand that at all.

The whole story is fantastic, but it doesn't come with evidence.

It doesn't come with witness statements.

It doesn't come with any subsequent inquiry

from the police or the security services.

It's a story which is published just this side of anonymous,

faceless, certainly.

And what does one do with that? Where does that come from?

If someone knows that much information,

how come it's not then subject to full scrutiny

and a resolution?

Ultimately, Karpichkov's claims could never be proved,

and the case went cold.

Then, in 2024, Gareth Williams was once again front-page news.

It seems the police wanted to re-examine matters

for any new DNA evidence.

The suggestion was that if new DNA were discovered,

it could open new avenues.

There were two new bits that could have been reinvestigated

with new forensic technology.

One was a hair that was found in what had previously been described

as a forensically cleaned crime scene,

and there was a green towel as well.

The Met decided to have a real look at this case.

Here is a case that's unsolved.

We think there is new technology that might give us more evidence.

It may be a homicide, it may be an accident, it may be a suicide.

Is there something we've missed?

Fourteen years after Gareth's body had been discovered locked in a bag,

was a fresh forensic review about to reveal all?

Or was it an attempt to hide the truth?

We have to ask why the examination took place.

Was it really to find out whether there was new DNA

to prove something else,

or was it to reinforce their erroneous conclusion

that he was alone and committed suicide?

It's a classic cover-up.

I know how the intelligence agencies roll.

I know how the media can be controlled

by soft and hard power, particularly in the UK.

The mystery isn't solved.

If the police think it is, they're deluding themselves

or trying to delude the public.

NARRATOR: MI6 operative Gareth Williams had been found dead,

locked inside a sports bag in the bathroom of his London flat.

An inquest in 2012 couldn't offer his grieving family

any definitive answers.

But in 2024, reports emerged that the police had ordered

a fresh forensic review of the case.

So, the stated aim was for the police

to use new forensic techniques to investigate the one rogue hair

that hadn't been cleaned up in the professional cleaning of the flat.

And also, potentially find new forensic details

from a towel that was found there.

I was invited to review this case by the Metropolitan Police in 2012.

We made a range of recommendations,

and to keep it simple,

we categorised the recommendations

in relation to the forensic evidence.

So one of the categories was "This isn't very clear".

Another category was "Look out for new technology here".

So what we were saying to Met is,

"Don't take your eye off the ball here.

"Every time some kind of new technology comes along,

"pull the case back out, have another look at it,

"see if it can give you more information or evidence."

Fourteen years after Gareth died,

investigators were now able to take advantage

of huge advances in DNA science.

The Met will almost have certainly been using

something which is called DNA17.

It's a very detailed and refined

analytical way of DNA profiling.

This was not technology that was available at the time,

and it gives very reliable results.

In early 2024, the Met released the results of its review.

The police re-examination apparently found no new DNA

on the holdall or the padlock or the bag, generally.

And also found, for the first time, apparently,

DNA on a green towel which belonged to Gareth.

My interpretation of these results,

the particular mention of the green towel and the hair

is that they've found no other information.

So what the Met seem to be saying, basically,

is that their view hasn't changed.

That there was no third party involved in this

and that Gareth got into the bag himself

and it appears to be an autoerotic event.

The police now feel it's even more likely

that Gareth was alone when he died.

But some of those close to the case have serious doubts.

First of all, it's hardly surprising that DNA was found

from Gareth on his towel, so that proves nothing.

And for the police to conclude that this meant he was alone

is an absurd conclusion to reach.

The conclusion the police ought to have reached

is because no DNA was present anywhere,

somebody must have been in there to clean it.

The latest review was tasked only with finding

new forensic opportunities in the case.

But not everyone believes the Met's brief was wide-ranging enough.

The suggestion that this limited, highly limited,

re-examination by the police

solves the mystery is absurd.

Why was the heating on full in the middle of summer in his flat?

Why was the bathroom light off where his body was found

and the door closed?

Why is it that his credit cards were used,

and who used them in the week following his death

and before his body was discovered?

Why is it that locks were removed from his flat

before the police arrived?

In terms of Gareth Williams' absence for a week

before it was noticed he was not coming into MI6,

I think that's appalling.

I remember working in MI5.

You didn't come in for one day, they would get panicked and say,

"What's happened?" You know, "Has something awful happened?"

We know that security services were unhelpful

in terms of Jackie Sebire's investigation,

and she only found out at the coroner's inquest

that there had been nine memory sticks

which she had not been told about which Gareth had

and which had subsequently been wiped.

I just, one, feel sorry for him,

and, two, feel sorry for his family,

and, three, feel bloody angry

about the fact that the intelligence agencies

can always sweep everything like this, every scandal,

under the blanket of national security.

Was someone else involved in his death? I would suggest yes.

And the fact that it was the murder squad, the homicide squad,

that was sent in to investigate where they didn't have clearance

to do a proper, full investigation

and to freely interrogate Gareth Williams' colleagues at MI6,

that, to me, does smack slightly of a potential cover-up.

It's my view that the coroner got this absolutely right

in concluding that it was probably an unlawful killing.

An escapologist tried 300 times or thereabouts

to lock himself into this bag,

to zip it up, to lock the padlock, to put the key under his body.

And I don't think he even tried to do it in the difficult circumstances

that Gareth was alleged to have done.

But he concluded he couldn't do it.

The fact of the matter is that there was no DNA on the bag,

on the padlock, on the zip or anything else to give...

The flat gave the impression of having been cleaned.

I suspect that what was responsible for his death

was the work that he was doing for MI6.

I also suspect that work

almost certainly involved developing

some kind of a technical relationship,

personal technical relationship,

with a hostile intelligence service.

And increasingly, since 2014, I believe, come to believe,

that hostile intelligence agency was Russian in origin.

And I think that his death was arranged

and executed by agents,

officers of the Russian Government.

We know that the Russians were busy causing deaths in London

over a period of time.

We also know the authorities were keen to turn a blind eye to that

for political reasons at the time.

And that was indeed their view

until the events in Salisbury some years later.

One of the difficulties that I had in this case

was trying to see through the fog of conspiracy theories,

some of which were completely outlandish.

The best evidence we have suggests

that Gareth did get into that bag on his own,

and the best explanation is that it was autoerotic event.

So, for me, nothing has changed.

That was the view I reached in 2012,

there has been no additional information

that has come my way since then,

and I reach the same conclusion in 2024.

Gareth Williams, as far as I can tell,

was a loyal subject for this country.

He didn't deserve to die in the way he died,

and he certainly didn't deserve to be rubbished afterwards

by the implication that this was some sort of sexual activity.

It's important to remember that the secretive world of MI6

means we don't know what Gareth was or was not involved in,

or what level he was operating at.

However, the head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, certainly did.

He made a point of attending Gareth's funeral,

praising his enormous talent

and his valuable contribution to our national security.

Maybe Sir John Sawers turning up at the funeral is, in a sense,

giving him a posthumous medal.

The balance of evidence suggests that Gareth Williams

should be remembered as a hero

who was killed in the course of operations

and by enemy action.

In such a public death,

Gareth's life was thrown under the microscope,

and his true character lost in theories and supposition.

It's good to remember who he was

and what he meant to those who loved him.

At the inquest,

his sister said some beautiful words about Gareth.

She said, "In terms of a big brother figure,

"Gareth was perfect.

"It is impossible to do justice

"to Gareth's impressive character without meeting him."

The understanding is his family really knew him,

and by the sounds of things, really accepted him for who he was,

exactly as he was.

That's very precious.

Should we all be so lucky to be fully accepted by our families.