There are appealing versions of the scenario in which a cryptographer has an amateur interest in escapology, and re-enacts Harry Houdini’s tricks. Then there is the sad one. The partly decomposed body of a British G.C.H.Q. code-breaker, assigned to work with MI6, was found in a padlocked red duffel bag in the bathtub of his own apartment, in the Pimlico section of London, in the summer of 2010. The spy’s name was Gareth Williams, and he was said to be very good at math. His body was naked, curled up; it’s not clear how he died. On Wednesday, after an inquest, two more years of police investigation, and a tally of the spies who might need anonymity before they testified (forty of them), London’s Metropolitan Police said that they had an answer, or at least were done: it looked to them like an accident.
“There are, as you say, gaps in our understanding,” Deputy Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt said. But, he said, “I think it’s unhelpful to be speculating wildly on the basis of Gareth’s employment.” Can’t we, a little, especially when no one has come up with a solution to this problem that doesn’t involve broad, if not wild, speculation? The inquest had found that the “balance of probabilities” was that the death was unlawful, and involved another person. D.A.C. Hewitt said he thought that it was “more probable” that Williams had died entirely alone, and suffocated in the heat of the bag. Probability is what a Cambridge mathematics student, bored at what his professors had left to teach him and scouted out by the secret services, might be very good at, in the abstract. But a talent for seeing and setting up puzzles can leave you trapped.
It sounds, at first hearing, like a parody—absurd: a spy found dead in a bag was just there by mistake, police say. Or like a conspiracy theory. There are red herrings on either side: none of Williams’s fingerprints where there might be, if he’d done this; none of anybody else’s, either. Enough strangers’ DNA in the apartment to make it seem like it hadn’t been deep-cleaned; none that told the police anything. The women’s designer dresses in the closet of a man who lived alone; the sister’s testimony that he’d meant them as presents for her. (His family, with whom he was close, still thinks someone killed him.) The intimations of a sex game; the romance-less bathtub. The evidence on his computer that he’d visited bondage sites—but wouldn’t everyone involved know how to do something with computers? His childhood friend said he was learning another identity; maybe he traveled to America to consult with the N.S.A. The last thing he looked at on his computer was apparently a page about cycling time tests.
Meanwhile, a contingent of contortionists, magicians, and reporters (all related professions) tried to cram themselves into bags, to see if it could be done. Some sort of managed it. (The Telegraph, on a page with videos of attempts, advises against trying it at home.)
“This has never been in a place where everyone says it is entirely impossible,” D.A.C. Hewitt said. There is no place like that; very strange things happen in the world in very normal ways (the reverse is also true). Obviously, the circumstances are suggestive. But then what is the probability that G.C.H.Q. agents would, say, be standing in the basement of a newspaper office as editors smashed five laptops’ worth of circuit boards and hard drives into small pieces?
The findings in the Williams case come a few days after John Kerry had to take time off from explaining what went wrong in the mysterious case of the Iranian nuclear negotiations—diplomats from seven countries in a hotel in Geneva—to answer questions about his belief that we just don’t know what happened to Kennedy. (“I just have a point of view.”) Another British code-breaker, Alan Turing, died more than half a century ago, by his own hand, when he bit into a poison apple. But knowing what Turing had been through, that almost seems normal; the baroque part is how cruelly his country mistreated him. We don’t know what Williams’s last day was like, or what, in the place he found himself in, might have been possible, even probable.
Photograph of Gareth Williams. Metropolitan Police/PA Wire.
