Irene Silverman: Another Murder Victim in a Bag

There are two sides to the fact that the body of Gareth Williams was found in a large sports holdall, in the bath of his flat in Alderney Street in London. (Picture source: Daily Mail.)

There is a consensus that being placed in the bag was probably involved with the cause of death: slow suffocation either by CO2 buildup, or by the cramped position preventing Mr Williams from being able to breathe properly, which is like a crucifixion in reverse: the chest cannot move because of a compressed position rather than an extended one: the same slow death results.

However, it's also believed that the killer's plan was to leave the body in the holdall, in the bath, until it had decayed enough to obliterate any forensics inside the bag, the outside being easily washable. Then, of course, the body could have been removed in the bag without looking too much like a body. (If a body is not to look like a body, it really needs to be folded up before rigor mortis sets in, and that's obviously the case if the body is folded into the foetal position before death.) The flat heating was turned on, despite warm weather, to accelerate the composting of evidence.

There is a precedent for this: a wealthy former ballerina, Irene Silverman, had converted her multi-storey townhouse in New York City into a residential hotel, where tenants would rent rooms, usually for an extended period. The fraudster and murderess, Sante Kimes and her son, Kenneth, moved in, with the intent of defrauding Ms Silverman of the entire property and anything else of value that she might have had. (They had committed similar crimes in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and possibly Louisiana, too.)

This article contains the gist of Kenneth Kimes' description of how he and his mother bashed and strangled Ms Silverman to death, wrapped her in several plastic rubbish bags, and then placed her in a large duffle bag. It omits a telling detail, reported in the TV Documentary "Couples who Kill" that Kenneth Kimes then used a two-wheel sack trolley to get Ms Silverman down to the lobby of a quite tall building, and along the pavement to his car, under the gaze of several other residents and passers-by, without any of them noticing anything odd.

The main difference between Ms Silverman's murder and that of Mr Williams, was that in his case the holdall was of a rubberised material rather than heavy canvas, and therefore there was no need for plastic bags to contain odours and body fluids. The handles of a sports holdall would also make it easier for two men to share the load than would be the case with a duffle bag, especially as the body was was going to have to be lifted out of the bath.

It is probable that if the alarm had not been raised about Mr Williams when it was, his already meticulously clean flat would not have contained a body, and with all remaining forensic traces confined to the bath, the final stage of the cleanup would have taken a few minutes and a few squirts of "Flash" or "Mr Muscle." A sack trolley might have left a pressed track over the carpet, but so would the shoes of men carrying him. Probably, a small cordless vacuum cleaner would have been used to suck the carpet back into pristine shape by whoever was last out of the door.

The ultimate aim must have been to leave the flat looking as if Mr Williams had simply left without any clues, because otherwise it's very strange to remove all forensic clues- -except a dead body in a large holdall! As one of the least scrupulous defence attorneys in Texas has boasted in his cups, it's so much easier to successfully defend a client who manages to make the victim's body disappear!

The thing is, with decay inside and the outside washable, the holdall effectively became a sealed and removable crime scene in a bag.

It is also true that sewing a victim into a canvas bag, to slowly suffocate, was a means of exemplary execution for dissenting Nazi party members. And this may have informed the murderer about the refinement of using the holdall as the murder weapon as well as a forensically hygienic means of body removal. The modus operandi in the Williams case is an intriguing combination of Kenneth Kimes and Adolf Hitler.

PS: if the cleanup operation missed any forensic evidence, anywhere, then the gap between the toilet pedestal and the bath would be it.

Money, Global Power and Gareth Williams

After a preliminary hearing by the Westminster Coroner, Dr Fiona Wilcox, to prepare for this month's inquest into the death of Gareth Williams, a mathematician and GCHQ technician on secondment to MI6, Counsel for the Williams family said that they feared he had been murdered by someone "schooled in the black arts", possibly MI6 or some other intelligence service.

It's beyond question that not only was the scene of death systematically cleaned of evidence, possibly over a period of days, but also that the subsequent police investigation, and those of any newspapers showing a non-prurient interest, was systematically and very persistently subverted amidst a barrage of smears about the deceased and his supposed lifestyle. The smears were not trivial things: investigating officers were following theories based on Mr Williams being a gay bondage fetishist, when in fact he had a girlfriend. They managed not to be aware of the girlfriend, because in the course of recording evidence and statements volunteered by witnesses, including the girlfriend, other officers had mis-recorded her name, so she seemed to the coroner to be three different people, and also mis-recorded and evidently mis-represented what she had said. Strangely enough, this interference helps Medawar part the mists on who is behind the cover-up, and who, therefore, might reasonably be a suspect in Mr Williams' murder, for that is almost certainly what his death was.

Just like serial killers, individuals who organise a succession of cover-ups and miscarriages of justice, develop a signature. A highly distinctive signature in the matter of the cover-up would tend to suggest someone whose mastery of the black arts is self-taught, perhaps over many years, with increasing sophistication mingling with one or two tell-tale bad habits.

The first thing to note when analysing the cover-up, is that the Russian intelligence services, the FSB and the SVR, usually kill people in order to frighten others into line, and a cover-up would be self-defeating. They try not to leave evidence that would implicate any individual operative, but they usually like the world to know it was their work, hence the frequent employment of high-technology methods of murder not available to anybody else. There is evidence of a Russian surveillance operation around Mr William's flat in Alderney street. However, Mr Williams died in the interval between an SVR general going missing whilst swimming near Tartrus in Syria, and his body being found on a beach in Turkey. The building that Mr Williams' flat is in, is owned by an apparent MI6 front company "Rodinia" registered in the Caribbean, and whilst the SVR general was officially "missing", the SVR and FSB would have been watching anxiously in case he appeared at some such species of MI6 safehouse. They might even have been relieved when his death was confirmed.

The cover-up was also very well-informed, not just in the black arts of murder, but in the methods used by the Metropolitan Police Service to investigate murder. Many aspects, such as mis-recording the girlfriend's name and her testimony, required ongoing access to the police inquiry, from within the police rather than from outside or above. This would have been very problematic for the FSB and SVR, in terms of political and diplomatic risk as well as operational difficulty. It would have been tricky for MI6 and MI5, too: Medawar would expect them to try and get a target to go to a foreign country before doing them in, rather than have to risk dabbling in an UK police investigation with the power to arrest even their respective directors general. Investigations with a genuine national security aspect tend to be suppressed with D Notices and Public Interest Immunity Certificates (signed by Secretaries of State), rather than subverted, too.

Systematic mis-recording and mis-filing of evidence, witnesses statements and even the names and address of volunteering witnesses, is precisely what happened to make the Stephen Lawerence murder inquiry go so badly wrong. It's also what happened to allow the gangster Kenneth Noye, to get away with a plea of self-defence after he'd killed the police officer, John Fordham, who was investigating Noye's part in the Brinks-Mat bullion robbery. (The police simply couldn't give prosecutors enough properly-correlated evidence to rebut Noye's claim, despite the obvious convenience to Noye of killing an officer, in self-defence, who was trying to discover where Noye had hidden millions of pounds worth of gold.) Interestingly, Kenneth Noye was a friend and colleague of gangster Clifford Norris, the father of one of those very belatedly convicted for the murder of Stephen Lawerence.

Much, much more of the same technique was used to frustrate successive police investigations into the murder of the private investigator, Daniel Morgan, culminating in the collapse of the prosecution of former police officer, Jonathan Rees, and others, for this murder. Key evidence, which should have been shown to the defence (but was not necessarily of any value to the defence) went missing, and this allowed the defendants to claim they could not have a fair trial. Since they seemed to know a lot more about the missing evidence than the prosecution did, one wonders precisely by what agency did it disappear? (A remarkably similar thing happened at the trial, in Cardiff, of several former police officers accused of perverting the course of justice, leading to the false conviction of three men for the murder of a prostitute. Within weeks of their acquittal, the "destroyed" evidence was found to be safe and well in a police evidence room, but by then it was too late.)

Throughout the investigation into the death of Gareth Williams, every bit of progress, appeal for information, or even newspaper stories taking his death seriously, have provoked a tide of defamation against Mr Williams, all suggesting that his death was the direct result of bizarre and demeaning sexual perversions on his part. These smears have been launched predominantly through the Rupert-Murdoch-owned News International Group newspapers, and have all been attributed to "senior" police sources. They have also caused great anger and frustration to those senior police officers actually on the inquiry team.

A very similar thing has happened throughout the quarter of a century-long investigation into the disappearance and probable murder of Miss Suzy Lamplugh. Every time anyone tries to actually solve this, the "senior police source" dines with a News International Journalist and suddenly we're being told that Miss Lamplugh "may have had an affair with the sex-killer and gangster John Canaan" or some other fairy story, usually involving a burial site on the opposite side of the country to where she was last seen. Why the senior police source would not want her abduction to be solved is a matter of speculation, but might be similar to why a senior police source wouldn't want the Stephen Lawerence murder to be solved.

The commonality here, is a senior police officer, or perhaps a now-retired senior officer with a lot of loyal stooges still within the MPS, who has certain tried and trusted methods of frustrating a murder inquiry, and links to the sort of gangster who might want this to happen, and to the sort of media organization which might cheerfully publish the necessary smears and disinformation.

Now let us go on a completely different journey, and see if we end up anywhere near the same place...

What was it that made GCHQ technician turned MI6 officer, Gareth Williams, worth murdering? Obviously, most would think, his top-secret work for the intelligence agencies.

Except that, for nearly all of his intelligence work, he was a junior-middle ranking part of a team. He had, supposedly, started to take the lead on some matters, but however "brainy" he might seem to tabloid journalists, he does not seem to have been an exceptional talent by GCHQ standards. In addition, the technical experts at GCHQ and MI6 are not very visible at all to anyone outside the organizations. He had some recent contact with American counterparts, who tend to underestimate the importance and worth of any British person they meet. It's possible that a foriegn agency, such as the FSB or SVR, formed a higher opinion of him, but Medawar would expect him to disappear rather than die, if that had happened. His most recent assignments seemed to be to do with cyber crime, rather than actual intelligence work.

Since Mr Williams was recruited by GCHQ, he would seem to have been too invisible to become a murder target for the sort of seriously-determined party that could have carried off the cover-up and smear campaign. But, young as he was, his life did not start when Gareth Williams was recruited in 2000.

Thing is, before becoming a secret spy, Gareth Williams was actually famous within a small band of online games enthusiasts and an over-lapping circle of hackers. He had a reputation for being "unbeatable" at certain games and, apparently, at certain types of recreational hacking and amateur codebreaking. The crucial period in his life was between finishing a degree course at the university of Bangor in North Wales in 1996, and his recruitment by GCHQ in 2000. Because he did his first degree whilst still of school age, he was still living with his parents whilst studying at Bangor. He then went on to do a Phd at the University of Manchester, and then started, but did not complete, an advanced maths course at St Catherine's College, Cambridge.

His Phd dissertation was centered around computer games, but was not as trivial as that might sound. A lot of high-powered maths is connected to "game theory" and games are one way of determing what things are, and are not, mathematically possible. Some of the applications are of very immediate interest to organized crime, too.

With hindsight, and in the light of the BBC Panorama investigation into the activities of the News Corporation electronic security company "NDS", it would seem that Mr Williams was in greater danger of contact with "serious players" between 1997 and 2000, than at any time during his service within the protected environment of GHCQ and the (less well protected) world of MI6.

The BBC discovered that NDS (mostly through the NDS offices in Haifa) had been part of a systematic operation to drive out of business, all rivals to pay-TV satellite broadcasters owned, or associated with, their parent company, News Corporation. The BBC focused on the main UK rival to News Corporation's "BSkyB", On Digital, which was relaunched as ITV Digital, before going bust with losses of £1bn. But several other European and global broadcasters were driven from the market by similar campaigns.

In 1996 to 1997, NDS, represented by a former MPS Chief Superintendent, Ray Adams, went round all of the most active and talented "famous" hackers in Europe, seeking recruits for an operation that was to crack, and keep cracking, the encryption methods by which On Digital and others ensured that only paying customers could view their service. Up until the service finally went bust, leaving BSkyB with an effective monopoly, NDS kept refreshing a hacker's website "THOIC" with up to date codes for breaking the encryption used by On Digital and other potential competitors. In the end, tens of thousands of fake smartcards using the codes were sold by hackers in pubs and at car boot sales (and through online auctions), and it was often said that On Digital had more non-paying customers than ones who paid the full whack to the proper party.

Given that Mr Williams was famous within that circle of talent, at precisely that time, it's unlikely that Mr Adams neglected to try him out, However, because Mr Williams doesn't appear to have been a greedy man at all, he might not have been as receptive to the offers being made as some of the others evidently were.

At the time, NDS and Mr Adams might simply have thought they were helping the Murdoch Empire put one over on the competition, but over the subsequent decade, it would have become apparent that the pay-TV hacking campaign against News Corporation's competitors had done far more than drive On Digital out of business with a billion pound loss.

That hacking campaign had made News Corporation a major world power. Fox News had some control of the news agenda in North America (by no means unchallenged) but in the UK, Sky News and News International between them were openly mulling over who they would support, politically, and who would win general elections: they had considerable influence over who came to power and what they would do when they did. In Italy, control of Pay-TV and especially sports channels, directly determined who was the government.

In Asia, it was News Corporation who ruled the roost and determined how the emerging powers of China and Malaysia would relate to the rest of the world.

The NDS hacking campaign ended up changing the distribution of money, and power, all around the world, more dramatically than any British Intelligence operation in the same period, or frankly, since the Second World War. Moreover, it's a much narrower field, in which Mr Williams must have seemed much more important than he did in the general run of national intelligence.
And, strangely, it changed that distribution of money and power conclusively in favour of News Corporation and its many subsidiaries.

And because Mr Williams also appeared to be the only one in that field not eager to accept large amounts of cash to perform extremely dodgy actions, he might well have seemed to be dangerous, especially when some of the key players found themselves increasingly under suspicion for other crimes and cover-ups. (In reality, it was a German hacker who'd been quite happy to take their money, who was equally happy to betray all that they had done, to the BBC.)

Isn't it strange that by taking a completely different journey, Medawar finds himself looking once again at a Chief Superintendent who left the Metropolitan Police Service in 1996?

Update:
More emerges about NDS and the global political and economic impact of its multiple illegal hacking campaigns. See this link. Interestingly, this particular newspaper started to investigate the issue four years ago, which means that Mr Williams was murdered about the same time that Ray Adams might have realized the game could be up.

Gareth Williams and The (Russian) Texas Bankroll

This article in the Daily Mail suggests that before Mr Williams was murdered, he was working on a method and software to enable the intelligence services to track money being moved to and through London, by the Russian mafia.

To this article Medawar would add the following two observations:

Firstly: any chain of money-laundering transactions with the Russian Mafia at one end, tends these days to have the Israeli Mafia at the other end. The Russian Mafia's cosy relationship with the FSB and "United Russia" is mirrored by the Israeli Mafia's relationship with Mossad and many prominent members of Likud.

Secondly, and far more importantly: London is experiencing an ongoing property price boom in the middle of a global credit crunch, recession and debt crisis. This is driven by money coming from Russia. The experience of Dublin and Miami, both of which have experienced similar property bubbles, started by an influx of money from organized crime and sustained by investment lemmings, is that the organized crime figures whose cash drives the boom, know from the outset that it is unsustainable. Estate agents, bankers and politicians, never know this and always think that their own genius has created a golden paradigm, where unearned wealth will multiply permanently. Organized crime knows a shower of mugs when it sees one.

Some time before the bubble reaches bursting point, organized crime will stop pouring its money into London, except for a relative trickle on high-prestige projects to keep the estate agents feeling good. The lemmings will keep investing for a while longer. During this period, organized crime will either quietly sell nearly all the property it has bought, borrow hugely against it, or, very naughtily, do both at once. There will be a sudden and massive reversal of the money flow accompanied by great woe, because far more will flow out, due to fraudulent loans, than ever flowed in. Meanwhile, some other city, possibly in China or Argentina, will experience a massive influx of "investment" and the local politicians there will think they've hit the jackpot through their own brilliance.

It is a sophisticated variant of the "Texas Bankroll" scam, whereby genuine notes are peeled off a huge roll of money in a bar, to buy drinks all round, gamble with, the roll's owner gracefully losing and paying up with only mild complaints. Then a really big transaction or gamble will be proposed with what's left of the roll. Only, the "winner" will find himself holding a roll of writing paper with just one fifty dollar bill on the outside. Just about all the real cash or items of value in the bar will have already left, in the saddle bags of the generous stranger who came in with the Texas Bankroll.

The Greek debt crisis isn't the main danger to the British economy at the moment. The biggest danger is that the Russian mafia is about to do to Britain's economy, and especially London, precisely what Greece's own mafia have already done to their own economy and Athens.

If Gareth Williams was tracing the transactions involved in this, there was an obvious danger of his alerting politicians and financial regulators before the scam was complete. He was a lone Spartan in the pass, and he deserves a lot better than systematic efforts by unidentified "police" sources to smear him as a pervert.

The Obvious, The Smear and the Ecological Evidence

Contrast today's article in The Daily Telegraph about the unexplained death of Gareth Williams, with this one, in the Mail on Sunday. The former dares to face the possibility that Mr Williams was murdered by a foreign government (or a drugs cartel?) the latter tries to concoct a way in which the death could have been both innocent and grossly demeaning at the same time.

The Mail article is rather odd, but the "death by auto-eroticism" line has been peddled before, not only with regard to the MP Stephen Milligan and Jonathan Moyles, the air defence expert, but also with the veteran intelligence courier, James Rusbridger, who publicly questioned this as a cause of Mr Moyle's death, only to be found dead in grossly demeaning circumstances himself. Mr Moyles definitely was murdered, and Mr Rusbridger might well have been, because there were unexplained movements of strangers to and from his (extremely remote) cottage shortly before his body was found.

We are also required to believe that one of the score of sonar experts to die during the Stingray and Spearfish torpedo programmes, committed suicide by placing a noose around his neck, with the other end of the rope tied to a tree, sitting in his car and driving it at speed towards the Avon Gorge. Some of his colleagues supposedly committed suicide nearby in cars soaked in petrol, and so on and so on. Spectacular, but all of them rather easily murder, too.

The article on Mr Rusbridger's death is very, very pertinent to the death of Gareth Williams, even though Mr Williams was an unusually young university student at the time, because Mr Rusbridger had been publicly concerned about the birth of the GSM-tapping technology which Mr Williams was to perfect a generation later.

And it's an apposite coincidence that all of these issues should revisit the headlines again when the new Downing Street Director of Communications, Mr Andrew Coulson, is under investigation by both police and parliamentary committees over mobile phone hacking, carried out when he was the editor of the News of the World and thus an employee of Mr Rupert Murdoch.


The convergence of these two stories tells us that phone tapping technology is one thing, but what really matters is who uses it, and whether they do so with good or evil intent. Nobody is suggesting that Mr Coulson was trying to save the world, although Mr Williams evidently was.

Meanwhile, the "official" line, that Dr David Kelly bled to death from a small wound, now depends on the concept that all the blood soaked into the ground before experienced paramedics arrived at the scene and immediately remarked on the absence of blood and other things which seemed strange to them, such as the water bottle by Dr Kelly's hand being neatly upright. In their experience, dying people make involuntary movements and knock nearby objects over.

It's been seven years. If several pints of human blood soaked into the ground from a single wound, then the soil at the spot where Dr Kelly's body was found, will display a quite different mineral and nutrient balance to a soil sample taken from under any neighbouring tree. (To eliminate variables, on the equivalent side, getting pretty much the same amount of sun and rain, as this was on the edge of reasonably dense woodland.) If there is no appreciable difference between the two samples, it's extremely unlikely that pints of blood entered the ground and decomposed at that spot. The soil in and around Roman Gladiatorial Arenas still shows the nutritional benefit of all the spilt blood, after eighteen centuries.

If the official explanation were true, Medawar would expect to see differences in ground level herbiage each spring by now. If it's too dark for wildflowers, even in the spring when the woodland canopy is still open, then, by definition, the soil will be part of an underground fungal network extending across the woodland (always the case with established broad-leaved woodland in England.) The underground threads of fungi will reflect what happened. If there's enough light for grass to grow, it will be lusher, greener and probably broader-bladed than other grass getting the same amount of sun nearby.

"The Earth shall reveal the blood shed upon her face, and make all murders plain." Especially if they happened somewhere else.

Another Expert Falls

An awful lot of what has been published in the press about the murder of Gareth Williams, has not been theory, speculation or valid comment: it has been a downright lie, utterly unfounded in any fact. Much has been suggested, by "intelligence sources" to journalists who really ought to have known better than to believe, still less print, most of it.

Medawar will ignore anything to do with Mr Williams' personal life, still less his hypothetical sex life, as irrelevant, and the suggestion that he "might have been suicidal" is a vicious mockery in light of the fact that his body was found locked inside a large sports holdall, in a bath, filled with an unknown fluid. Although libel and slander actions cannot be undertaken on behalf of the deceased, any attempt to conceal or alter the circumstances in which a body has been found, prior to a coroner's jury returning a verdict, can be prosecuted as perverting the course of justice.

This doesn't mean that the case cannot be discussed (if criminal charges were laid, that might be a different matter) -and it's unlikely that anyone could be prosecuted for speculation. But "security sources" have told the press, with the intention of their telling the public, things which they know to be untrue, with the deliberate intention of changing how the circumstances of Mr Williams's death will be perceived, by press, public and any jury, as yet to be empaneled. The sources in question most definitely can be prosecuted for that, and jailed for a significant amount of time.

Here, then, is Medawar's analysis, sticking strictly to well tested facts from the public domain, and what has been said by the police investigating the case, rather than any third party.

Gareth Williams was a mathematician and encryption expert, working for MI6 and GCHQ, to intercept and analyse the communications of some of the world's most dangerous governments, criminal organisations and individuals. The probability that he might be murdered for any personal reason is certainly no higher than that for any other member of the public, and given that he was of above average intelligence, extremely self-disciplined, and apparently content with wholesome pleasures such as cycling in competition and, more recreationally, with his father, the probability that he would be murdered for any reason to do with his personal life is almost certainly lower than average. Most ordinary citizens in the UK don't get murdered in their whole lives, not even once.

It may be a truism (but not rigorously true) that when the average citizen is murdered, it's something to do with their personal life, but Mr Williams was not an average citizen in that respect. In fact, even most personal murders have something to do with the victim's work, because that's such a large part of what the person does.

The only semi-rational reason for supposing that there might be something "personal" about the murder of Mr Williams, would be if there was something extreme about the level of cruelty involved in his death. But serial killers can be cruel, too -and it's an unfounded myth that professional killers are not. Sometimes, extreme cruelty may be part of the client's specification for the murder, in which case third party sadism will be applied with clinical efficiency, as in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, using roughly $3M worth of industrial polonium. The killers may have been professionals, but the client's specification was both psychotically cruel and financially extravagant.

Professionals may also apply extreme cruelty because the reason they became professional killers in the first place, was that they had psychotic tendencies which could safely be given full rein. It's another myth that such people would somehow never be employed by an intelligence agency: psychotic sadists are almost always pathological liars and they can get in anywhere, social or professional. Indeed, if intelligence agencies are selecting candidates for their skill in infiltration, as well as physical violence, the odds that they will find themselves selecting pathological liars, who tend strongly towards sadism, are pretty high.

What was particularly sadistic about this murder?

The published facts, suggest three possible ways in which Mr Williams might actually have died, all of which would have been painful and distressing:

1/ He was found packed into a sports holdall, which was padlocked shut. No need, other than superstition, to padlock a man who is already dead. Even a large sports holdall, would not allow a man of his stature much room to breathe, and it's not just a question of whether the bag would allow air in or not. Suffocation from excess carbon dioxide and insufficient oxygen isn't pleasant, but it's not agonising. But suffocation because one is forced into, and kept in, a position where it takes inordinate effort just to move the chest far enough to respire a bit less than enough air to keep on living, is tantamount to crucifixion: the posture may be compressed rather than extended, but one dies slowly, in the same way. The pathology would be very similar to a classic crucifixion. Medawar believes that this resembles methods of execution in some ancient cultures: more research is needed, though.

2/ When found by the police, the body in the bag was immersed in "fluid" so that it is possible that Mr Williams drowned, inside the bag. He might have been unconscious due to some sedative or muscle relaxant to get him into the bag, but the padlock, again, suggests that he was then expected to regain consciousness. This would also mean that any drug or poison would be fully metabolised before death actually occurred. This factor might be overplayed: the murderer has no particular need to fear identification of the drug unless it corroborates some other link to the killing. Many of the likely candidates are widely available and would hardly narrow down the field of suspects. Whatever killed him, he was expected to be conscious when it happened, and the bag would ensure that he could struggle much more than if he had been bound, perhaps making an entertaining video for the murderer's client, but that struggle would have been futile.

3/ If the "fluid" was intended, as police suggest, to accelerate the decay of Mr Williams' body, then it is likely that it was scalding hot when he was first put into it. (More on this below.) It may also have been kept hot, or warm, if the bath was a luxury model, so equipped, or if the murderers had recourse to portable immersion heaters, available for a variety of catering and animal husbandry applications. Scalding is not a gentle way to go, and again, classic methods of execution spring to mind.

Unless the client or commissioning party was physically present, the existence of video of Mr Williams' last moments, or quite possibly, last few hours, is a very good bet.

What Might the "Fluid" Have Been?

A grown man, immersed, in a bath. This requires rather more fluid than another man could easily carry up to a top floor flat, and more than even a team of men could carry without attracting some attention. So, even if the fluid was "not water" then either it was water based, or diluted with water from bathroom taps (and the hot tap is likely) -or some considerable effort or artifice was used to get fifteen gallons or quite possibly more of it, all the way up to the flat. It is hard to be exact when estimating how much fluid was involved, but an imperial gallon of water weighs ten pounds.

The police say that the fluid appeared to accelerate decay, they do not say that it was a strong organic solvent, an acid, or a strong alkali. (In the course of a week, these might have found their way through the bath, or the plumbing, into the flat below. An organic solvent might also have evaporated and caused a toxic fume hazard, or an almighty explosion. ) The probable candidate is surprising: biological detergent for a washing machine. A saturated solution (as much dissolved in water as will dissolve) of biological detergent, will, by enzyme action, completely strip flesh from bone on a human corpse in a week to ten days, but only if the solution is kept at something like blood heat (thirty-five to forty degrees centigrade) for several days. Whether and how this could be done, would depend on what sort of a bath it was and whether the murderers were able to operate in the flat for some time after the murder, perhaps revisiting it to remove any heating.

One hesitates to hand Fleet Street a catch phrase, but "Persil Bath Murder" probably does describe what was done.

Who Else From the Intelligence Community Was Murdered Around the Same Time?

GRU General Yuri Ivanov disappeared several days before Mr Williams appears to have died (the "fluid" means that the police don't know exactly when this was) and his dead body was discovered on a beach and reported to the Turkish police around the 15th of August. It took several days for the General's body to be identified: he had last been seen alive in Syria in the first week of August (?no-one outside Syria seems completely sure of the date?) having inspected a Russian naval base being built in that country and, reportedly, being on his way to meet his colleagues in Syrian intelligence later in the day. It seems most likely that General Ivanov died on the day he disappeared, or soon after, and his body drifted to Turkey, propelled only by wind and tide. Mr Williams may have died at more or less the same time that the General's body was found, but it's also possible that he died several days later and that the advanced state of decay was the result of the "fluid" and what may have been an optimal temperature for its enzymatic action.

Mr Williams did apparently tell his superiors that he was being followed, before he took leave to cover his intended move from London back to Cheltenham. There's no information about his actually travelling to Cheltenham in this period, but it would be strange not to, unless his London flat contained almost no possessions that needed to be transferred back to his Cheltenham flat. Indeed, sorting out his domestic arrangement for the move seems to be the purpose of the period of leave that he took. If there was no trip to Cheltenham, then it may be that his movements were already constrained by some factor, several days before his apparent time of death. This means that any timeline linking Mr Williams and General Ivanov, must start from the date the General was first missed by the GRU, rather than the date his body was found by the Turks, who didn't know who it was for another couple of weeks. The GRU may have known that he was dead, long before they knew where his body was, though.

It is possible that one death was retaliation for the other, but it's also possible that both men were targeted by some third party, or that it was just a bad month for top intelligence experts. Although General Ivanov seems to have been a much more brutal man than Mr Williams, he does seem to have been the top expert in what he did. In fact, he was the top expert in the world in the sort of thing that was done to Mr Williams. This could link them in four ways:

1/ The General might have ordered the murder of Mr Williams, or someone in MI6 or the CIA might have thought so, strongly enough to retaliate.

2/ Mr Williams may have been killed as retaliation for the murder of the General, the timelines are not clear enough to say which, if either.

3/ Someone planning to murder General Ivanov, may have feared that Mr Williams, with unknown technology and expertise at his disposal, could determine who had done it, which wouldn't be healthy for the murderer and his client if this was ever communicated to the GRU, FSB or SVR. Equally, General Ivanov must have known a lot about the world's best professional killers, and anyone planning to murder Mr Williams, might have thought that the General was the man most likely to suss them.

4/ Both of them independently posed a danger, through their differing expertise, to the same third party, and that the coincidence of timing of both murders, is due to that third party being about to make a move that they cannot afford to have compromised before D-day. This may not be the most likely possibility of the four, but, for obvious reasons, it's the one that requires the most urgent attention from the authorities in both London and Moscow.

Possible Suspects

Russian Intelligence and Security services are always suspect when someone valuable to the British Intelligence Community is found not to be alive anymore. Either for immediate operational reasons, or something more subtle.

The "something more subtle" is that, for at least three decades past, significant numbers of leading experts from or in the United Kingdom have died in strange or suspicious circumstances. Sometimes, as in the case of Timothy Hampton, David Kelly and no less than twenty-five people who worked on the Stingray and Spearfish torpedo projects, we're supposed to believe it's all suicide, sometimes, as in the case of Jonathan Moyles, we're supposed to believe in a tragic auto-erotic suffocation accident.

Mr Moyles is usually described by the press as an investigative journalist, and that's what he was doing when he died. However, as a post-graduate research student, sponsored by the MoD, he wrote a thesis "Soviet Air Attack on the United Kingdom" which basically proved, in excruciating detail, that UK air defences (since cut by about two thirds, about to be cut again) would only survive for a matter of hours against a sustained onslaught. Since nobody else had ever researched the subject as thoroughly and unemotionally as Mr Moyles, he was in fact the pre-eminent expert on UK air defences and most especially how they needed to be improved.

The net effect of all these deaths, however they happened, is that the United Kingdom is weaker for the loss of its best minds, and that the UK government, as a rule composed of people with no hard technical knowledge of any kind whatsoever, has no genuinely expert advice on which to base major decisions, and is at the mercy of vested interests offering partial advice, and predatory foreign powers.

In the past year, it has emerged that France, too, is losing swarms of experts in the same way, especially in telecommunications at the moment. Though, if the UK pattern is repeated, the cull of French experts will wander from one technical field to another as the party ordering the killings, literally turns the page. These people are not being killed for any specific thing they know, or anything they have done: they are being killed to make their countries weaker in the face of what someone else intends to do. They don't have to kill every expert in most fields, just weed out some of the best ones.

If the killings are linked to something more specific, and both Mr Williams and General Ivanov were killed because of the same thing, then it would have to be something that would be compromised by both GRU and Russian military involvement in Syria, and by the highly advanced signals interception technology being developed by Mr Williams and the MI6/GCHQ "cell" that he was part of, or perhaps leading. An invasion of Syria, by a third party, might fit the bill.

If Mr Williams was killed for something specific, rather just to reduce the pool of expertise available to the British as a nation, and this had nothing to do with General Ivanov, then the party that has actually suffered most damage at the hands of British code-breakers in the past year or two, are the American (North and South) Cocaine-trafficking cartels. Recent successes by the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, have involved officers walking into factories in West Africa with local police, pointing out exactly where false walls are concealing hidden rooms, which turn out to be full of cocaine, or computers involved with the multi-million dollars transactions essential to the trade. This is dramatic evidence that SOCA and HMRC know everything that the druggies say to each other, and can probably now backtrack on what they said a decade ago, too.

Yes, the Taliban are losing commanders because of British code-breaking, but this is something they are used to and there is no obvious way that the Taliban would blame a single person for this, and be able to identify him and find his address. One would expect any Taliban murder of a leading intelligence officer to be somewhat publicised by them, too.

The drugs cartels, though, probably know anything that American Intelligence agencies know. It's a staple Hollywood and airport thriller scenario, that renegade (or loyal, depends how paranoid the story is) agents run drugs and are involved with the cartels. What actually seems to happen and is quite evident, in fact, is that some ex-CIA agents are busy developing commercial and residential property in the very parts of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Kentucky, where the cartels and their US distributors, are buying commercial and residential property in order to launder and invest their profits. This makes it almost impossible for the former federal agents, and they may have FBI and Homeland Security people onboard as well as CIA, to be charged with any crime or conspiracy. They are building houses for sale, anyone can buy them. It's not their fault if the druggies are the only ones who can afford to do so at the moment! If a non-druggie has the money, they won't hesitate to sell him a condo or a mansion. But on balance, 80% of their profits are due to the drug-fueled property boom, in states whose real economies are weakened and made to totter by the same drugs racket.

These people may very well have been able to identify Mr Williams, who seems to have travelled to visit the NSA at Fort Meade around four times a year on average. The flat he was killed in, belongs to a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, and that's long been a favourite banking spot for the druggies and their attendant/dependent property developers.

It is possible to see how ex-CIA agents with contacts still active in US Intelligence and a compelling financial interest in the success of the cocaine trade, could have identified Mr Williams as a threat, or as the cause of grief and loss they had already suffered, and tracked him down. Whereas it's stretching credulity to the limit to suggest the Taliban or other Islamist terrorists doing the same.

The Iranian Intelligence services might have been able to do it, but it's not obvious that they ever had any reason to single Mr Williams out as an individual, or felt threatened by his work.

So the suspects have to boil down to:

1/ The Russians, for a variety of possible reasons.

2/ Someone planning to invade Syria, fairly imminently, or something very similar to that.

3/ Former American Intelligence Officers and Federal Agents who are profiting, directly or more probably indirectly, through property transactions, from the cocaine trafficking rackets which SOCA and HMRC have been busting with considerable help from GCHQ code-breakers.

Update:
Police now say:
Gareth Williams was seen out and about until the 15th of August. (Day before General Ivanov's body was found, but still some time before the Turkish Police knew who it was.)

He had been to the USA, on Holiday, up to the 11th of August. (This explains why no trip to Cheltenham. He apparently had an official second passport in a different name to ensure his personal safety when travelling.)

It begins to look more and more as if whatever comprised his personal security, happened from the United States end.

The police spokesman says he was found in an empty bath, the first officer on the scene reportedly said the bath was filled with fluid. Baths have plugs: this discrepancy may well sort itself out in the wash.

A man and woman, of "Mediterranean" appearance were seen to enter his flat some weeks before his murder. NB: this description often applies to any tanned or olive-skinned person with straight black hair and it mustn't be taken as a precise geographical origin. It could easily mean a South American person, given that many Argentinians have Italian (as well as Spanish) ancestors and many Brazilians have Portuguese ancestors.

When police entered the flat, they got the lettings agent to come with a spare key, so talk of iris recognition systems are far fetched. This means, though, that it's possible that someone could have copied the agent's key. If someone had been in while he was away before, they might have been able to enter while he was asleep and drug or overpower him. Given his physical strength, this might have been the only viable plan.

Nothing of substance in the above article is really changed by this, except that it's clearer why, if he was planning to move back to Cheltenham, he hadn't actually been there earlier in his leave.