Sex, spies and seven suspicious deaths: The murky waters of the intelligence world - coincidence or conspiracy?

Mystery: There are still questions to be answered over the death of Gareth Williams

There was no dignity in death for Gareth Williams.



As the world now knows, the maths genius and sports fanatic’s decomposing body was found inside a red North Face bag in the bath at his flat in London, not far from ‘Legoland’, the nickname given to the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service beside the Thames.



In a bedroom at his Pimlico flat, there was £20,000 worth of women’s clothing, including shoes designed by Stella McCartney and Christian Dior, along with ladies’ wigs and an extensive range of cosmetics.



Mr Williams — seconded to MI6 after a ten-year spell as a code-breaker at the GCHQ international surveillance centre in Cheltenham —was also, apparently, a visitor to bondage sex websites and was often seen browsing for ladies’ clothes at exclusive stores in Central London.



Such salacious details about the so-called spy in the bag — most of it ‘revealed’ by intelligence officers, whose names or identities were kept secret — emerged at the inquest to find the truth about the death of the former University of Bangor student, who turned down a place at Cambridge to join the secret service.



Instead, with the reputation of the young spy forever besmirched, the inquest closed this week with no one any the wiser about what really happened at 36 Alderney Street, the secret service safe house where the North Face bag and its gruesome contents were discovered in 2010.



Ruling that it is ‘probable his death was unlawful’, the coroner Dr Fiona Wilcox also revealed it was ‘unlikely the spy’s death will ever be satisfactorily explained’.

Crime scene: Gareth Williams' body is removed from the house in Alderney Street, Pimlico, SW1 as police and forensic officers look on

Throughout the investigation, Mr Williams’ parents have maintained he was murdered by a third party, and the scene set in his flat to sow doubt on his state of mind. They refute suggestions their son was a clandestine cross-dresser.



‘To lose a son and a brother at any time is a tragedy,’ said Ian and Ellen Williams. ‘To lose a son and brother in such circumstances as have been outlined in the course of this inquest only compounds the tragedy.’



Though it will prove scant comfort to the Williams family, they are not the only ones who have found themselves in such a predicament.



They are simply joining others left bereaved and baffled after the deaths of loved ones connected to the intelligence services — deaths that, disturbingly, often involved claims of a bizarre, humiliating sexual element.



Indeed, an analysis of the 17 suspicious deaths involving suspected British agents over the past 50 years shows almost a third have involved damning allegations about their sexual proclivities, adding to the air of confusion and mystery around their unexplained deaths.



Mystery: A North Face, Base camp duffel bag, like the one that Gareth Williams was found dead in

Certainly, the ‘spy in the bag’ case has brought agonising memories for the family of Jonathan Moyle, a 28-year-old former RAF pilot-turned-journalist, whose death while investigating a huge arms deal for the intelligence service was similarly blamed on a sex game that went wrong.



He was found hanging naked inside a wardrobe with a pillow case over his head by cleaners in room 1406 of the Hotel Carrera in Santiago, Chile, in 1990.



British Foreign Office officials briefed reporters at the time that Moyle appeared to have died while involved in auto-erotic sex, which involves asphyxiation to the point of black out.



Initial reports also claimed Moyle had no links to the intelligence community. Yet his family refused to accept their son would kill himself accidentally in this sordid way.



After a lengthy legal battle, the British authorities accepted in 1998 that Moyle had ‘probably been killed unlawfully’ and were forced to apologise for the sexual smears.



Suspicious: Jonathan Moyle, left, was found naked, whilst Stephen Milligan, right, was found dead in stockings



Moreover, it later transpired Moyle had been secretly recruited to M16 while at Aberystwyth University and had been probing a secret arms deal between Chile and Iraq, just before the start of the first Gulf War in 1991.



The dead man’s mother, Diane, yesterday expressed her condolences to the family of Gareth Williams, saying the smears about her own son are being repeated in this case.



‘My heart goes out to the family of Gareth Williams. Why should they have to hear such cruel untruths being spread about his death?’ she said.



‘Perhaps some would claim it was in the national interest. But we went through exactly the same thing when Jonathan was killed two decades ago.



‘The pain those lies caused me then and now is unbearable. My son was a bright, articulate and decent fellow who was proud to serve his country and his reputation was sullied by a series of comments made by a government official at a reception.’



Mrs Moyle, a frail 81-year-old who lives in the West Country, retreated into ‘dog-walking, decorating and gardening’ after her son’s murder.



Mrs Moyle believes her son was murdered by a contact, but that the intelligence community conspired to make his death look self-inflicted

He had been investigating a company owned by arms dealer Carlos Cardoen that was modifying helicopters, possibly to carry battlefield weapons, to sell to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.



But after his body was discovered, a Foreign Office official alleged Moyle had died during an elaborate act of auto-eroticism.



Mrs Moyle’s late husband Anthony, a former teacher, who died five years ago, aged 78, refused to accept his son had killed himself deliberately or by misadventure.



For eight years, he campaigned for the truth and found Moyle was probably drugged, suffocated and injected with a lethal substance — a syringe was found at the scene — before being strung up in the wardrobe.



Mrs Moyle told the Mail: ‘I found it impossible to deal with Jonathan’s death, particularly the way in which it was written off as some sort of deviant practice because that suited someone’s ends. I am sure the Williams family feel the same.



Secret life: Gareth Williams, murdered spy, in a family picture

‘I spoke to Jonathan ten minutes before he probably died. He was in good spirits, even though he had just got back to discover his room had been ransacked.



‘He claimed suddenly to be feeling very tired — he had been served tea by his maid beforehand, which we think was probably drugged. I can’t bear to think what happened to him after that.’



She believes her son was murdered by a contact, but that the intelligence community conspired to make his death look self-inflicted to cover up his involvement in espionage.



‘We knew it wasn’t suicide because he was a young man with everything to live for,’ says Mrs Moyle.



‘He loved his job, he was happy and positive in the phone call and excited about his wedding a few weeks later.



‘Now this other family have to go through what we went through. There are claims Gareth was gay, a transvestite or accidentally killed himself in the same sort of “game” Jonathan was not playing. There’s not a day goes by when I don’t think about Jonathan and what was done to us and to his memory.



‘A mother never gets over the death of a child. It’s a life sentence.’



Ongoing investigation: Up to 50 MI6 and GCHQ officers now face having DNA samples taken (Picture shows MI6 headquarters)

Nor has the pain lessened for the friends and colleagues of Stephen Milligan, the Conservative MP for Eastleigh and a former BBC presenter, who was found dead at his flat in Chiswick, West London, in 1994.



Even though it has never been proven, there are strong suspicions that Milligan, an Oxford graduate who was once a Sunday Times foreign correspondent, had close links to the intelligence community.



His body was discovered by Vera Taggart, his loyal secretary, who found the 45-year-old dressed only in suspenders and women’s stockings and tied to a chair at his flat in Black Lion Lane near the Thames.



With an electric cord round his neck and a plastic bag over his head, Milligan, also had, bizarrely, a segment of orange jammed in his mouth.



Evidence suggested that his death was due to a sex game gone wrong, though Andrew Neil, his former editor at the Sunday Times, was convinced he’d been murdered.



Even now, 18 years later, Mr Neil remains unconvinced that his death was an accident.



‘I asked the Insight team on the newspaper at the time to investigate Stephen’s death,’ he told me yesterday.



‘I also spoke privately to his past girlfriends to find out if there was anything about him that we didn’t know. All of them said there was nothing about his private life that would make you think the way he died was possible.’



Mystery: The body of spy Gareth Williams was found in a bag in his bathroom in Pimlico in August 2010

Now chairman of Spectator Magazines, Mr Neil added: ‘I think about Stephen’s death often. He was a great friend, and it has just never all added up to me.



‘I know there have been inquests and reports, and nobody ever really knows someone totally, but I’ve just never been completely sure. But at the same time, I don’t know what the motive would be.’



What makes suspicions even stronger is that just three weeks before Milligan’s death, in a case that was even more outlandish, an M16 agent was found hanging from a beam inside his house on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor, wearing a chemical weapons suit, black plastic mackintosh and rubber gloves.



His face covered by a gas mask, the body of James Rusbridger, who had worked as a journalist before becoming a spy, was found surrounded by pornographic photos of black women in bondage.



An inquest ruled he died ‘due to hanging, in keeping with a form of sexual strangulation’.



And the list of disturbing incidents goes on. In one of a series of unexplained deaths at GCHQ, the Government’s intelligence listening post, the computer expert Nicholas Husband was found dead wearing a woman’s nightie and bra in 1996 after he failed to turn up for work.



Fellow GCHQ official Kevin Allen, 31, a linguist, was found in 1999 with a plastic bag over his head at home in Cheltenham.



Then there was Stephen Drinkwater, 25, a clerk at the Cheltenham nerve centre, who also died by suffocation and was found dead at his parents’ home.



Coincidence or conspiracy — why are bondage, suffocation and sex so often involved in the deaths of such men?



Is it simply that espionage, by its nature, attracts risk-takers with a taste for danger?



Nicholas Anderson has rare inside knowledge: he has worked as a deep undercover spy for British intelligence. He believes spies’ deaths are often made to look self-inflicted in order to cover up any involvement with their undercover work.



Gareth Williams hated the macho, hard-drinking culture inside MI6

Now living at a secret location overseas, Mr Anderson told me he believes ‘cleaners’ — espionage experts trained in removing clues from a crime scene — had undoubtedly been into Williams’s Pimlico flat before police were alerted.



‘The presentation of his death as looking like kinky sex is the normal practice. It’s something intelligence always does.



‘Why? It’s because there’s an odd sense of the absurd, and something about it that throws most people off it in disgust.



‘I am on record that if anything ever happened to me — a straight man and a positive thinker — it would likely be made to look like suicide or that I died dressed like a woman.’



He echoed comments made by Ceri Subbe, Gareth Williams’s sister, who has said her dead brother hated the macho, hard-drinking

culture inside M16.

‘Let me tell you that HQ seemed to have a lot of characters who liked to tease us younger guys — today it would be called abusing us. Certainly I couldn’t wait to get out of there.’



Having written a book about British secret operations, Mr Anderson says the truth will probably never be known about why Mr Williams died, apart from within a tight circle of his spy bosses.



‘During his inquest, one SIS officer responded to a question by saying: “I can’t respond directly to the question because it goes to what knowledge we did or didn’t have.”



‘That summed it up and made me laugh out loud; it’s always these non-answers.’



But John Ramsey, editor of a website dedicated to intelligence matters, says the service has always attracted oddballs.



‘Most people can’t keep a secret. Yet these men and women have to live another life, while not even telling those closest to them, and that’s clearly a strikingly stressful way of living.’



However, he, too, believes the high number of spy deaths involving deviant practices is no coincidence. ‘In the old days, they used to smear someone by calling them a Walter Mitty or a dubious character.



‘But more and more it seems they use sexual matters to somehow discredit people and muddy the trail about what really happened.’

