Williams joined the
BBC as a News Trainee in 1986 and worked as a Producer on
Newsnight. In 1992, he directed and produced the documentary
A Journey Home with the model,
Iman, on the famine and civil war in her native Somalia. Then in 1993 he joined
Panorama as an assistant editor, reporting on the domestic and international stories of the day. His programme with Reporter,
Jane Corbin, on the
1995 massacre at Srebrenica,
War Crime: Five Days in Hell, was used as evidence at the
International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, and nominated for an
Emmy Award. In 1997, Williams directed and produced a ground breaking television series with Reporter,
Peter Taylor, on the history of the Provisional IRA and
Sinn Féin,
Provos. He then joined BBC documentaries to write and direct programmes for
Timewatch and
Reputations. His documentary,
Journey to the Killing Fields, included an interview with
Pol Pot's deputy,
Nuon Chea before his arrest on war crimes charges. The programme was nominated for a
Grierson Award. His television history of the struggle against the German U-boat during World War II,
The Battle of the Atlantic won the
Mountbatten Maritime Prize and A New York Film and Television Festival Award, and was nominated for a
Royal Television Society Award, and he wrote a best selling companion book to the series. In 2004, he produced and wrote the series,
D-Day to Berlin and the accompanying book; and in 2008 he directed a six-part drama documentary series about Stalin,
World War II: Behind Closed Doors. Williams' first historical novel,
The Interrogator was published by
John Murray in 2009, and was shortlisted for both the Crime Writers Association (CWA)
Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, and the
Ellis Peters Historical Award. His second,
To Kill A Tsar was shortlisted for the Ellis Peters Historical Award and the
Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. His 2019 novel,
Witchfinder was set inside the British intelligence services in the years following the defection of Kim Philby in 1963, and tells the story of spy catcher,
Peter Wright's misguided attempt to prove the existence of a master spy at the top of MI5 and to purge 'the Establishment' of those he suspected of communist sympathies. Based on real events, ''The Prime Minister's Affair'' is the story of an attempt to blackmail Labour's first Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, and of a conspiracy to bring down his government. ==Personal life==