‘KILLED TO PROTECT RUSSIAN MOLE’
DRAMATIC NEW CLAIM LINKS ANGLESEY SPY’S 2010 DEATH TO SKRIPALS’ POISONING
A KGB defector has claimed an Anglesey spy was poisoned because he discovered the identity of a Russian mole at GCHQ.
Boris Karpichkov, 59, will tell counter-terrorism detectives this week that the death of Gareth Williams in 2010 is linked to the poisoning of father and daughter Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury last month.
Mr Williams, 31, a former pupil at Ysgol Uwchradd Bodedern, was a codebreaker at Britain’s GCHQ eavesdropping centre on secondment to MI6 when he was found dead inside a locked red holdall in the bath of his London flat.
At the time his bizarre death was dismissed as a sex game that had gone wrong.
But Mr Karpichkov, who defected to the UK 20 years ago, claims that Mr Williams was murdered with an untraceable poison.
The former spy told the Sunday People: “Russian security services are the connection between the two cases.”
He claims he received information from a source in Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, SVR, that Williams was murdered because he knew the identity of a Russian mole codenamed Orion in GCHQ at Cheltenham, Glos.
The Russians hoped to recruit Williams as a double agent in an operation codenamed Sweetie by threatening to reveal the spy’s fondness for cross-dressing.
He had £20,000 of women’s clothes stashed in his flat.
Mr Karpichkov said: “Williams had no intention of letting the Russians blackmail him.
“But he was foolish enough to say that he knew the person who tipped them off.”
He added: “The SVR had no alternative but to kill him to protect their agent inside GCHQ.”
Williams and Orion had become friends while at the Government listening post, having joined at around the same time.
But Orion was too important to the Russians to risk exposure.
His spymaster in Britain, an undercover agent posing as a rich East European businessman codenamed Lukas, attempted to blackmail Mr Williams, according to Mr Karpichkov.
When that failed, Lukas tried to make amends by turning up at his flat with a bottle of wine.
Mr Williams accepted a glass but it was spiked with drugs and he passed out.
A special ops squad known as The Cleaners arrived to fin- ish the job with a plant-based poison made from belladonna, aconite and black henbane mixed with other chemicals.
The killer cocktail was designed to leave no trace at post mortem, Mr Karpichkov claimed.
Around the time of Mr Williams’ death the former KGB man had been monitoring and noting the numbers of Russian diplomatic cars which began sweeping through Pimlico from July 2010, fearing he was their target.
Russian spymasters put him under a death sentence when he escaped to Britain 20 years ago carrying two suitcases full of secrets.
Mr Karpichkov spotted the last Russian car in the area on August 15, the day before police think Williams died in his topfloor flat in Alderney Street.
It was only after Williams’s death that Mr Karpichkov realised the cars were there not for him but for the MI6 man.
Mr Karpichkov says an SVR clean-up team later returned to Mr Williams’s flat through a skylight to remove remaining incriminating evidence.
No fingerprints, palm-prints or footprints were found. Nor were any traces of Williams’s DNA discovered on the rim of the bath, the bag zip or the padlock. A key to the padlock was inside the bag, underneath his body.
Although an inquest said the death was “likely to have been criminally meditated”, a subsequent police investigation decided it was an accident.
But Mr Karpichkov said: “Williams was put in the bag so the body could be taken away later. But something must have gone wrong. SVR or FSB killers always try to dispose of bodies so their murders are harder to investigate.
“Russian security services claim they stopped killing in the 1950s. But I know the KGB, and then the FSB and SVR carried on killing and do so today and their trademark is poison.”
The Russians have been poisoning their enemies since the October Revolution in 1917.
A 1964 CIA report declassfied in 1993 says: “Even in cases where the Soviet hand is obvious, investigation often produces only fragmentary information due to KGB ability to camouflage its trail.”
But they bungled the attempt to kill the Skripals – and the trail could now be leading back to Mr Williams.