A New Kind of Monster

by Timothy Appleby

  It all smacked of the “domino theory” that had defined U.S. policy in Vietnam a generation earlier—if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll be fighting them in California—and was not a view widely held among Canadian politicians, nor the country’s military leaders. The Afghanistan mission yes, the consensus went, because al-Qaeda’s nest of leaders lived there and had to be crushed. But Iraq was another matter, and not merely because Canada’s forces were already stretched to the limit in Afghanistan. Years before President Obama articulated the same argument on the campaign trail, there was apprehension in Canadian military circles that the Iraq war would divert energy and resources from, and ultimately undermine, the Afghan effort, which clearly it did.

  Williams, however, seemed to harbor no such doubts. After dwelling at length on the distinction between preventive war and preemptive war (a preemptive strike takes place quickly, in response to a sudden threat; a preventive war is planned over time), he concluded that both can be justified, even when most of the world disagrees. It was an argument that had been spelled out a year earlier in a landmark White House policy statement, “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” which laid the philosophical underpinnings for the Iraq adventure. Repeatedly Williams’s thesis approvingly quotes that declaration, along with another heavily favored source, a bellicose speech Bush had delivered to West Point military cadets in the fall of 2002.

  His paper thus emerges as enthusiastic approval for the “might is right” logic nurtured by Bush and his inner circle. Similar praise is heaped on the other event Williams offers in support of preventive military action: Israel’s much-criticized destruction of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. Absent, however, despite the author’s nine months of toil, is any fresh information or insight. Instead, sprinkled with the use of the royal “we,” Williams’s thesis essentially rehashes other authors’ material. “Preventive war is a subject that can evoke a great deal of emotion from those who choose to argue its merits or shortcomings,” he wrote in his turgid introduction.

  It is an issue that demands examination from several directions. Most pundits limit the scope of their arguments, typically addressing one or two of the several important elements. In order to more fully develop this paper’s position, we shall draw upon the inputs of a variety of writers to present both sides of various aspects of the issue, allowing a more complete assessment of the utility of preventive war …

  More troubling than the prose, however, is the tunnel vision. Before the invasion, Iraq was portrayed by neocon hawks—Williams was evidently among them—as a sinister, well-oiled battle machine that had committed mass atrocities before and, given the chance, would do so again in a heartbeat. Those who actually visited Iraq in the run-up to the war, and talked to its frightened people, saw something altogether different: a shabby, bankrupt gangster state that had been on its knees for years and, exceedingly mindful of how the Kuwait debacle had played out twelve years earlier, was now frantic to escape being pulverized once again by the United States.

  And hanging over everything in those first postwar months was the question that went to the heart of Williams’s writing project: WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction). The core rationale for the U.S. invasion was Saddam’s supposedly huge stash of these weapons, hidden somewhere in Iraq’s western deserts but now mysteriously missing in action. So where were all those chemical warheads and biological agents, alluded to by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell as he brandished a vial of fake anthrax at the United Nations? Increasingly it was becoming evident they did not exist, a fact that appears to have bothered Williams not at all as he made his case. “That evidence of these [WMD] programs has not been uncovered some nine months after the fall of Iraq to coalition forces is beyond the scope of this paper,” he wrote in a throwaway line of breathtaking alacrity. “Similarly, while aspects of the coalition action shall be used for illustrative purposes, it is not the intent of this essay to critique the Anglo-American decision to launch their attack,” he wrote, even though the thesis struggled to do exactly that.

  Returning to the missing WMD near the end of his essay, almost as if it were a footnote, Williams does acknowledge that “it would appear that there remains a great deal of progress to be made in the area of intelligence collection and analysis, given, for example, that coalition forces have proven unable to locate the WMD stockpiles they were sure existed.” Indeed, the phantom WMD had reinforced the general consensus against preventive war, Williams concedes. But he adds: “Imagine if coalition forces had quickly located the weaponry … such discoveries would have softened the reactions of many to the invasion of Iraq, leaving the door open for a less polarized discussion of the merits of preventive war.”

  The other hurdle Williams had to overcome in trying to make his case was the supposed link between Saddam’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden, architect-in-chief of the 9/11 terror attacks. A vague but oft-cited prop in the Bush rationale for the attack, the connection was never there, as most experienced Middle East observers well understood.

  Williams, in sum, displayed an intense tunnel vision that in hindsight is illuminating. The people he was chiefly writing about—Iraq’s 14 million citizens—are invisible. As with the women Williams would later stalk, molest and kill, it was as if their torment was secondary to his own needs, and irrelevant. His ivory-tower conclusion rosily summarized the post-invasion landscape thus: “Although there are likely to be turbulent periods in the near future, this writer believes that the path to international stability and a more pervasive sense of peace and co-operation between states is straighter than it was just a short time ago.”

  Whatever its failings, Williams’s thesis had the desired effect. He was promoted to lieutenant-colonel, and in June 2004 he took charge of the 437 (“Husky”) Transport Squadron at CFB Trenton, the base he would command in its entirety five years later. In August of that year, he and Harriman purchased the cottage on Cosy Cove Lane in the nearby community of Tweed.

  At the time, 437 possessed five CC-150 Polaris Airbuses: one configured for prime ministerial use, with a stateroom, a bathroom and other conveniences; two used for carrying people, with a capacity of 197 passengers apiece; and two multifunctional planes designed to haul both people and cargo, called combies. Including civilians, 437 Squadron deployed about eighty people, and troop movements were the staple, with a steady flow back and forth between the Middle East, Bosnia and Afghanistan, the main focus. And as usual, the professional and pleasant new squadron leader gave no hint whatever of his dark side.

  Retired air force sergeant and loadmaster Lucy Critch, now a Canada Post employee in Newfoundland, spent twenty-three years with the Canadian Forces, more than a year of it under Williams’s command at 437. She remembers him fondly, with nothing but affection and respect. “He was funny, he liked to laugh and was beloved by everyone in the squadron, definitely someone often described as a nice guy.” As loadmaster—akin to a purser on commercial flights—Critch flew half a dozen times or so with her boss, who called her Lu. On quick trips to, for example, Croatia, he would cheerfully wander through Zagreb at day’s end with the rest of the crew looking for a bite to eat or a quick drink. “Call me Russ,” he would often say to them, though no one did.

  Critch remembers a court-martial in which Williams took a role, and she was struck by the fairness he showed. But the most compelling thing about him, she says, were his many acts of kindness and consideration, large and small. She recalls vividly a silent-auction fundraiser she once organized for a married cousin in Newfoundland who needed major surgery and had to relocate to Toronto with her husband while they waited for the operation, leaving their young daughter behind. Critch asked Williams, her boss, if she could auction off some of the assorted gifts and keepsakes members of 437 Squadron and other squadrons had picked up overseas. “Of course,” Critch remembers him saying, “you have my blessing, and what can I do? Would you like some of my hand-tied fishing flies? I tie them myself.” The nex
t day Williams brought in half a dozen of the flies, signed and mounted on a piece of paper with the squadron logo. Critch’s husband made the winning bid for them.

  Another time, a junior officer Critch still knows well developed serious kidney problems and had to abandon her career with the armed forces after less than ten years’ service. The military wanted to pay her off with a lump-sum settlement, but she preferred a small pension instead. Williams went to bat for her and secured the pension.

  When Critch learned of his arrest, she was so disbelieving that she rushed upstairs to check the name on the fish-flies memento. Then she woke up her husband to tell him that the police had made some dreadful mistake.

  In the summer of 2005, Garrett Lawless met Russell Williams for the first time. He’d just been posted to 437 Squadron as a pilot, and as all new arrivals did, he stopped by his new commander’s office for a brief chat. “He asked me if I had kids, I said not yet, then he asked if I planned to have kids, and I said maybe, to which he responded that he definitely wasn’t. Other than that, the conversation was quite vanilla. He discussed the importance of the mission I would be carrying out, how he would support me in any way possible to become a better pilot and/or officer, and that he also expected me to make every effort to be the best of each that I could be. My initial impression exactly matched his reputation. He was a consummate professional with exacting standards for himself and those that worked for him.”

  Lawless got to know Williams well during his spell at 437, and was glad to see him come back to CFB Trenton four years later to take command of the whole base. Yet agreeable as he always was, off the job Williams could be stiff and socially inept. “It’s not so funny anymore, but I used to make fun of him behind his back. I used to call him the cyborg because we would be at these mess functions, at Christmas dinner or whatever, and you would see him in a group. Someone would make a joke and everybody would start laughing and he would start laughing as well. But he looked like he never saw what the joke was, and it would be like, ‘Oh, I must be seen laughing, ha ha ha.’ He just seemed awkward. He was more at ease when he was talking about things like Swiss mechanical watches, which he loved, or anything to do with airplanes. It was the one thing outside work that we talked about, because we were passionate about it: Swiss mechanical watches. He had two Breitlings, I had one. We would always ask each other what watch we were wearing. I could feel the internal mechanism spin, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s normal, you’ll grow to love it.’ ”

  Despite what took place later, when Williams was arrested and armchair experts began referring to him as a “psychopath,” Lawless remains as sure as he can be that the warmth he encountered was not a facade. “He wasn’t emotionally detached, he always seemed very friendly and very interested, and if you went up to him he’d give you a big firm handshake. This [Williams’s downfall] would be easier if you could think of him as some cold person, but he wasn’t. He seemed very genuine—very controlled, but in an admirable way. You’d look at him and say, ‘That’s the guy that’s never going to get flustered.’

  “I saw him in stressful situations and he always approached them very logically. Scheduling difficulties, for instance. Say we had a mission and the prime minister said he needed the plane on this date, we now had to figure out a way to rearrange it. Not a life-and-death thing, but we are going to have to tell the prime minister he can’t have the airplane. And [Williams] would just come in and sit, with his chin in his hands, look at it and say, ‘Try this, this and this.’ That might not work, so he’d say, ‘Try this and this.’ And eventually it would work.

  “And he was a really, really good pilot. Take the Airbus. Most people take about a year to get comfortable with it. But I was given my training by the guy that gave him his training, and he said to me, ‘Russ Williams, he came into the simulator and the first day, as expected, he didn’t know anything. The second day he was a little bit better. And by the third day, it was like, What the hell did this guy do? Because he seems to know the airplane as well as I do.’

  “Within six months Russ could handle that airplane as good or better than anybody on the squadron, and there were people who had been flying it for seven years. I would look at Russ Williams and it was just, ‘That guy’s better than me.’ He was deeply impressive in his ability as a pilot, just an excellent officer. If you wanted to model yourself on somebody, he was perfect.”

  After Williams’s arrest, questions also arose about how he had found not only the time but the energy to lead his double life for more than two years. Lawless says his stamina was extraordinary. “I’ve never seen him tired. We did most of our flights at night, we would land back here in Trenton at three or four in the morning, and he would go almost straight to work and do all his [commanding officer] duties.”

  His temper, too, was almost always under control. “The only anecdote I’ve ever heard about him getting angry was when he flew the Challenger one time and somebody farted in the cockpit. And that’s a little strange. You’re stuck in a small, confined space with people, and the joke is, you say ‘Howdy,’ to warn the guys. But he got really angry, he thought it was disgusting.”

  Nor was Williams’s authority ever challenged. “Nobody I ever came across would have dared be insubordinate to him. Not because they were afraid of being crucified but because he was such a picture of professionalism. Everybody felt in awe of him. I wouldn’t call it charisma, more like professional authority. Everybody just knew this guy was better than them.”

  In that same year, 2005, came a curiously revealing episode that sheds light on another side of Williams’s complex personality: his near-neurotic modesty, which seemed to prevent him from claiming personal credit for anything.

  In May, the Queen made her twenty-second visit to Canada, marking the 100th anniversary of Saskatchewan and Alberta joining Confederation. Protocol called for the host country to collect Her Majesty, as well as Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, from the United Kingdom and then return them after the visit. So Williams took the controls of one of the squadron’s CC-150 Polaris Airbuses and together with a military and civilian retinue of seventeen he headed to London. A posed photo of the crew in Trenton’s CF newspaper Contact shows him proudly standing in the center of the crew on the tarmac before their departure, with the hulking Polaris, dubbed Flight Royal One, in the background.

  The weather was lousy, it rained a lot, but the big crowds were enthusiastic and the week-long royal visit to various stops in Saskatchewan and Alberta went off without a hitch. For most pilots, it might have been the trip of a lifetime, certainly a big feather in their cap. And along with all the congratulations, Williams received a framed, signed photograph of the monarch, thanking him personally. He hung it in his upstairs office at the house on Wilkie Drive, together with his other plaques, and a few months later his old university friend Jeff Farquhar stopped by—one of the very few people who ever visited and stayed over. Farquhar noticed the photograph and remarked on it. Williams just shrugged—no big deal. He changed the subject. “I can’t [emphasize] enough how ridiculously modest he had become,” Farquhar says today. “I am sure much of it had to do with secrecy regarding security [arrangements], but he just never bragged about anything, even after the fact.”

  And then, for Lieutenant-Colonel Williams, there surfaced a mission that really did call for secrecy. In late 2005, with more than six months still to go in his two-year posting as commander of 437 Transport Squadron, came the unexpected announcement that he would be wearing two hats. He would keep his position with 437 Squadron, but simultaneously he was taking charge of Camp Mirage, the quasi-clandestine air base post near Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, that served as the Canadian military’s air bridge linking Trenton to the Afghanistan war effort.

  In the fall of 2010, Camp Mirage became a very public political issue in Canada, over what looked to be an absurd squabble between the Stephen Harper government and the U.A.E. government. At issue were the landing rights in Canada of th
e U.A.E.’s two national carriers. Air Canada was complaining that the U.A.E.’s airlines were unfairly scooping up its customers on the shorter-haul flights between Canada and Europe. The two airlines’ access to Canada was restricted; in retaliation, the U.A.E. informed the Canadian military that its days in Dubai were over.

  But back in 2005, Camp Mirage did not officially exist, and was considered a highly sensitive topic. It was Williams himself who offered to take charge of the desert compound while retaining command of 437 Squadron, and the double duty looks to have been a mark of his ambition. “That was a career move, I think. He could have waited, but it’s all about getting through those gates as quick as you can,” Lawless says. “He sacrificed the last six months of his two-year tenure as CO, which are generally seen as the highlight of a career—the command of a squadron—to take concurrent command of Mirage. He could have handed it over to his deputy, but he wanted joint command.”

  Formally known as Theatre Support Element, Camp Mirage was attached to the U.A.E.’s Minhad air base, a short drive south of glittering, skyscraper-choked Dubai, and was the worst-kept military secret in the Middle East. Al Minhad served as a transit point for other Afghanistan-bound coalition troops too, and anybody who wanted to could find out exactly where Camp Mirage was; if not, Google Earth could assist. The consensus, at least in Canadian military circles, was that the vagueness about its location stemmed less from security concerns than from a reluctance to embarrass the host state, the U.A.E., which was not anxious to advertise its military ties to Western powers fighting their assorted wars in Muslim lands.