Snow (35 page)

Arthur Owens, as he appeared in a 1948 portrait for his British passport, after he changed his name to White and moved to Ireland. During his career as a double agent he held many passports in various names.

The official birth certificate of Arthur Graham Owens, giving his date of birth as 14 April 1899, in Alltwen near Pontardawe, Glamorgan. Owens remained proud of his Welsh roots and exploited them to his advantage with the Abwehr who believed he headed a network of Welsh nationalist saboteurs.

Arthur Owens, formerly
codenamed
S
NOW
by MI5. He remained silent about his wartime activities, and his death was recorded soon after the first leaks emerged from the Abwehr’s records identifying him as the master spy.

Owens was fond of the high life, and is seen here in a typically jaunty pose with his family and Jaguar roadster.

Owens was an inventor, having registered several patents for his innovative battery designs in Canada. His role as a businessman proved ideal cover for his intelligence activities, and gave good access to the German
shipyards
building Hitler’s U-boat fleet.

Left, Lily Bade, who was Snow’s mysterious mistress with a German background, accompanying him on some of his missons, pictured with their child Jean. Right, Gwilym Williams, in his police constable’s uniform in Swansea. Codenamed G.W., Williams was MI5’s nominee to run S
NOW
’s spy-ring in Wales, and he accompanied S
NOW
on a mission to meet the Abwehr, posing as a political extremist.

Having convinced the Abwehr of his sincerity, large sums were passed to his bank account in New York and helped fund MI5’s wartime double-cross operations. This transfer in 1940 was typical of many.

S
NOW
’s sub-agent codenamed C
HARLIE
was a professional photographer who reduced his pictures to microdots so they could be concealed under postage stamps and mailed to the Abwehr’s cover-addresses in Germany. 

S
NOW
’s wireless transmitter was delivered to him so he could continue to
communicate
with Germany after hostilities had begun. His transmissions, encrypted in a hand cipher, would allow British cryptographers access to high-level Enigma signals.

Left, the head of MI5’s B1 (a) section, Major Tommy Argyll Robertson, known to his subordinates by his initials ‘Tar’, supervised the S
NOW
case. The architect of the entire double-cross system, he was an inspired counter-intelligence officer. Right, Captain Guy Liddell MC, the Director of MI5’s B Division and in overall command of his organisation’s counter-espionage operations; he actively supported the high-risk strategy of recruiting the enemy’s spies as double agents.

These ingenious concealment devices appeared to be a pencil and pen, but actually consisted of a detonator employing a sulphuric acid empoule and a plunger.

Left, the Hotel Duas Nacoes, largely unchanged in the centre of Lisbon, where Snow held a wartime rendezvous with his Abwehr contact, Nikolaus Ritter alias Dr Rantzau. Right, the Hotel Metropole in Lisbon where S
NOW
stayed on his final, fateful mission to Portugal to receive his instructions from the Abwehr.