Alex Marunchak
29 August 2010
The Sunday Life
Exclusive dead spook's Ulster links
Murdered MI6 spy Gareth Williams visited the top secret spying base at Palace Barracks in Holywood on two separate occasions to help staff decode dissident republican secret messages.
The maths genius, who worked at the British government's eavesdropping post GCHQ in Cheltenham, had been on secondment to MI6 for the past year and was due to return on Friday, September 3.
But he had also been attached to MI5 for two six-month periods prior to that and was flown over to Northern Ireland to brief six agents working on decoding taped and recorded messages picked up by sophisticated phone and radio-microphone taps.
He landed at Belfast International Airport at Aldergrove and was picked up by car and taken to the MI5 building at Palace Barracks which houses 300 agents and is the official back-up facility for the secret service.
If its headquarters at Thames House, in London's Westminster, are ever attacked then sophisticated computers will automatically switch over to Holywood so it can carry on working without interruption.
Williams, 31, liaised closely with America's CIA and also flew to its rival secret service organisation, the National Security Agency, and worked at its headquarters near Baltimore.
It is the largest intelligence-gathering agency in the world and dwarfs Britain's own GCHQ which employs 5,500 agents.
It has provided MI5 with vital information about the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, the political wing of the Real IRA.
It also supplies the Belfast offices of MI5 with vital information about links between dissident republicans and supporters in the United States.
GCHQ man Williams supervised the collated evidence of coded RIRA messages among members of the group for MI5 files in Belfast.
Among the projects overseen by Williams was work surrounding decoding conversations among suspects linked to the Massereene Barracks attack on March 7 last year.
GCHQ intercepted vital coded messages made on mobile telephones about the gunmen who attacked soldiers waiting for a pizza delivery.
Two died in the shooting -- Royal Engineer Regiment sappers Mark Quinsey and Patrick Azimkar -- and another two other squaddies were injured together with a pair of pizza deliverymen.
Prominent republican Colin Duffy, 41, is charged over the murders along with 44-year-old Brian Shivers.
Last week the body of keen cyclist Williams was found in a sportsbag at an MI6 'safe house' in Alderney Street, Westminster, just 200 yards from Parliament and half a mile from the MI6 HQ.
There have been reports that the dead MI6 agent, who lived alone and did not have a partner, was a gay cross-dresser and may have been murdered by a homosexual lover.
But so far a pathologist has been unable to discover the cause of Williams death. Further tests are taking place to see if he was poisoned or drugged.
His body lay undiscovered for two weeks until police were alerted.
So far police sources said there were no signs that Williams had been shot, strangled, stabbed or beaten to death.
Former MI6 officer Harry Ferguson said the organisation originally wanted to suppress all details about Williams' work and background and merely to refer to him as a 'civil servant'.
He said: "One of the concerns is that staff can be protected while working inside the MI6 building but there is a risk they could be followed home.
"It is the sort of thing a small terror network would be capable of doing."
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