A New Kind of Monster (11 page)

This might have been the moment he'd been waiting for since his repeated viewings of
Top Gun
at university. In much the same way police training works, the exercises involved deploying against a simulated enemy. The squadron also had a couple of T-33s, a 1950s single-engine plane that resembles a missile and which played the role of intruder. The two types of planes feigned combat, the Challenger trying to disrupt the enemy's communications system as the planes soared and swooped around each other.

Williams and Harriman spent three uneventful years in the community, which they later told friends they viewed as a backwater. But for both, it was also a stepping stone. Harriman's work with Nova Scotia's nutrition program opened the door to her job with the Heart and Stroke Foundation, while for Williams, opportunity beckoned in the form of a spot with the highly prestigious 412 Squadron in Ottawa, known as the VIP squadron.

In those days, the CC-144 Challenger in which he had circled and swooped in the skies above Shearwater performed double duty. As well as being a reconnaissance and electronic-warfare plane, it was a people mover and business jet, and the plane of choice for 412 Squadron. Then as now, the squadron provided transport for important government officials, high-ranking military members and foreign dignitaries visiting Canada. As well, the squadron provides support for Canadian Forces missions at home and abroad, including medevac flights. Though technically under the command of 8 Wing/CFB Trenton, the squadron is based in Ottawa, and for the next six years, still a captain, Williams's primary task was to fly assorted VIPs back and forth. He later said it was a job and a responsibility he really enjoyed. Plaques from appreciative clients—Governor General Roméo LeBlanc, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps—hung on the walls of his upstairs office in the shiny new house in Orleans, an east Ottawa suburb, that he and Harriman purchased in August 1995 for $165,000.

The house was at the end of Wilkie Drive in Fallingbrook, one of Orleans's newer districts, a tidy middle-class enclave of parks and curved streets, home to commuters and their families and to many members of the military and the RCMP, active and retired. It's a very civil, friendly sort of place, where neighbors live separate
lives but gladly help out when someone needs an errand run or a car jump-started. George White moved to Wilkie Drive at around the same time as Williams and Harriman, and as a retired air force mechanic with a son in the military, he might have expected some sort of deeper bond to develop. But it never did.

“We met very easily, and because we were both air force we had a common background, we knew what to discuss and what not to discuss,” White says. “We talked a lot about the technical stuff. I understood the systems—the engines, the hydraulics, the air conditioning, and the functionality of all that. So it would be casual technical talk—landing speed, takeoff speed, cruise speed, duration, fuel flow, that kind of stuff. We both understood all the acronyms. Russ, of course, was flying VIPs in the Challenger, and he was sharp, very thorough. No matter whether it was cleaning and washing his car or flying an airplane, he had a mental checklist and everything was to perfection.

“But always, always, he was so guarded in all his conversations. He never once slipped or opened up. He would smile but he wouldn't joke. You'd never hear a joke from him. I can still picture him standing there talking. He would hesitate and look you right in the eye and give you a definitive answer.”

Harriman and Williams kept their house on Wilkie Drive for fourteen years, the longest he lived anywhere in his life, and the two became familiar figures to their immediate neighbors. Their cars—Harriman drove a BMW, Williams his Nissan Pathfinder—would pull up in the driveway at day's end, and the couple were invariably pleasant to their neighbors, who were always glad to see them. Sometimes after one of his daily runs a perspiring Williams would grab a Gatorade, amble over and exchange a few words with whoever was around. Occasionally the couple would take Williams's much-prized bow rider for a spin together; he would fish, she would read.

Pleasant as they always were with their neighbors, however, Williams and Harriman kept very much to themselves. Visitors to the couple's home were few and far between, and not once in all those years were any of the Wilkie Gang (as the half dozen residents clustered near the top end of the street called themselves) invited inside for a drink or a meal. Living directly across the street was retired government employee and bus driver Shirley Fraser, who had a key to their house and would stop in when they were away, which was often, to keep an eye on things and feed Curio, their peculiarly bad-tempered cat. Fraser talked to Harriman enough to know a few things about her: that she was a keen golfer, would often go to a nearby gym and was fond of antique furniture. But the chitchat only went so far. “You never heard a word about what she was doing at work,” Fraser says. “All I knew was that she worked for the Heart and Stroke Foundation. They were both very, very private.”

Shock waves rolled up and down Wilkie Drive when Williams was arrested. Fraser wept when she heard he was accused of murder and sexual assault, and she initially assumed some dreadful mistake had been made. “It's one of those things you just can't fathom.” A few weeks later, as happened in Tweed, Williams's former neighbors were further shaken when he was charged with scores of fetish-driven break-ins.

George White was just as amazed. Less than a year earlier, in July 2009, he had been invited to the handover ceremony at 8 Wing/CFB Trenton, where Williams formally took charge of the sprawling base. “I talked to Russ's secretary [who had been assigned to him] in Trenton just prior to him getting there, and she wanted to know all about him. ‘What's he like?' I said I had nothing bad to say about Russ. I praised him and said he's a wonderful man to work with, I've never seen him other than being friendly. You're going to love this guy—he's
today's base commander, not yesterday's, he's a new generation, cordial, friendly.

“I put him up on a pedestal. He just wasn't one to flaunt it. When he got a promotion, I'd see his uniform and say, ‘Russ, you got a raise in pay,' And he'd say, ‘Yeah, yeah.' When he got promoted to lieutenant-colonel and took over the 437 [Transport] Squadron, I said, ‘Russ, if you keep on like this, you're going to be Chief of Defence Staff,' and he'd just nod. Russ never bragged about anything, he did things by the book, and that's why he was so successful at going up that military ladder.”

In one peculiar footnote to Williams's years on Wilkie Drive, remarkable only because he later began breaking into so many nearby homes himself, his own house was burgled. The thief gained entry by prying open a basement window at the side of the house. All that was taken, Williams said later, was his leather aircrew briefcase, containing charts, maps, airport details and emergency procedures for different types of aircraft. It would have had no value to anyone else and was later found, intact, beside a sports field not far away. Williams and Harriman installed security bars on the basement windows, and then an alarm system. What seemed slightly odd, in hindsight, was that Williams mentioned the burglary at all. Normally he never said anything about himself, least of all to complain.

“None of us knew that he had a brother,” George White said after the arrest. “He had talents none of us even knew about, like his music. Neither of them really opened up about everyday things, and looking at things in hindsight, every answer—everything—was a guarded response. He would never, never, be spontaneous in his conversation, there was no flow, everything was a really calculated response. I always thought that was because of the work he did, and the kind of training he'd had, where everything is so structured.”

Williams spent more than four years with the VIP squadron, then reached for the next rung in the air force ladder. In November 1999, he was promoted to major and appointed Director General Military Careers, the career director for military pilots of multiengine airplanes. Mostly a desk job, it entailed assessing and in large part determining the futures of the senior air force military pilots—majors, captains, lieutenants—who flew the Canadian Forces' big planes. That's when transport pilot Major Garrett Lawless, now attached to the Portage la Prairie CF training school, first heard about Williams. Later, Lawless worked directly under him, getting to know him perhaps as well as anybody did, and growing to like him very much.

“The job he had with Military Careers was to manage who's going where, and who's getting posted to what place, to make sure that the big-picture requirements of the service were being met,” Lawless says. “We all talk about his time as a career manager, when he handled everybody's files, because it was like the guy had a photographic memory. He knew intimate details of every individual pilot in the multiengine group, and that would be hundreds of files. He would also remember if people found excuses to not take postings, he would know exactly what the professional background was of basically every pilot in the group. It was very impressive how much information he just carried around in his head.

“He expected everybody to be totally dedicated to the operation, so some people who got wounded from the decisions that he made do hold some ill will for him. But you would not find anybody—save for his victims—who would have a personal issue with him. He had no tolerance for personal excuses. If someone didn't want to do something for a personal reason—their dog died, or their aunt was sick, whatever—he had no time for that. But you'll never find anybody to say his decisions were unfair.”

So after knowing Williams fairly well for several years and flying with him many times, was there anything at all, any possible clue, that in hindsight seems to hold significance? “No, I really wish there was. The emotional turmoil I went through following the revelation would have been easier if I'd been able to look back and think, ‘Oh, that's what was going on.' But there was nothing. He was always socially distant, did not engage in a lot of small talk—office gossip, joking around, that kind of stuff. Whenever you were talking to him, you would be talking about something that mattered.”

Two accomplishments distinguished Williams's time with Military Careers, both of which greatly endeared him to many of the younger officers. One was that he opened up and expedited the promotions process, which in the air force had for years lagged behind that of the army and the navy. Second, he ended the stranglehold that certain entrenched cliques had acquired on the transfers process, whereby they got continuously recycled through the plum jobs with the most sought-after aircraft.

Now, however, came a phase in his career that showed some of his limitations. In August 2003, Williams became a student once again. The Master of Defence Studies research project was part of the military's Command and Staff Course, and Williams chose as his topic the U.S. invasion of Iraq earlier that year, an attack he termed “the first political and military action of its kind.” Grandly titled “Managing an Asymmetric World—a Case for Preventive War,” the 57-page thesis he wrote would earn him the military graduate degree he needed to reach the rank of lieutenant-colonel. A project of this type, undertaken by Williams at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, is not a master's degree as such; rather, it confers on the student an
in-house credential. The results are revealing, displaying an author plainly anxious to show he was a man of the world. What comes across most strongly, however, is a mental rigidity that places a premium on raw power and muscularity—control—while selectively seeing what it chooses to see.

Five months after the Bush administration unleashed its onslaught on Iraq, a roiling global debate was under way over where the mission was headed. Iraq was on fire. With minimal resistance to the invaders, Saddam Hussein's ramshackle, vastly outgunned police state had swiftly fractured and sunk into the chaos widely predicted by the war's foes. Now a brutal insurgency was taking hold, marked by death squads, daily bombings, the plundering of billions of dollars' worth of foreign aid, the collapse of the country's infrastructure and, above all, enormous civilian suffering. Iraqis were beginning to flee their neighborhoods, cities and homeland in the hundreds of thousands.

You would not know any of this from the stiff, antiseptic essay Major Williams crafted. At age forty, Williams had never visited the Middle East. Nor had he been in combat. And nor, until now, had he posed as an authority on the pros and cons of preventive war. Williams's essay begins with a flourish, quoting in its first paragraph George W. Bush's address to the world on March 19, 2003, as the U.S. invasion was launched. Williams wrote, “The President explained that the threat posed by Iraq was too great to ignore, adding ‘We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors in the streets of our cities.' ”

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.