My dad – the double agent
Graham White with wife Norma (left) and half-sister Jean Pascoe
A FORMER Luton businessman was 11 years old when he discovered that not only was his father Britain’s first double agent but he also had several half-siblings – including Hollywood film star Patricia Owens.
Graham White, 65, a geophysicist who worked for Fenning Environmental Products and lived in Wingate Road with his wife Norma, a Luton&Dunstable Hospital midwife, said his first reaction was amusement.
“As a lad, I just thought it was great. But I didn’t read too much into it,” he recalled.
His father - codenamed Snow by MI5 and Johnny O’Brien by his Berlin paymasters – features in a fascinating new book entitled Snow: The Double Life of a World War II Spy.
Co-written by espionage specialist Nigel West and Welsh author Madoc Roberts, it tells the extraordinary story of Welsh-born Arthur Graham Owens, who disappeared after the war and subsequently changed his name to White because of concerns for his family’s safety.
But Graham White’s memories are of a carefree childhood with a normal dad who did normal things - even though ‘Johnny O’Brien’ is credited with helping crack the Enigma code.
The father-of-one said: “Dad was always a bit secretive. He enjoyed the drama of people not knowing, liberating little bits of truth here and there. I would say the only side he was on was his own side.
“My mother was his second wife. She told me the story but I don’t think she was involved.
“To me he was just a bloke in the house. He was pleasant, he never hit me.
“I know he had an assignation with a German woman and had a daughter by her.” Graham, who now lives in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, joked: “I like my drink, like he did, and I followed in his footsteps by going into the radio and electronics business.”
Graham said his father’s wartime activity had only come to light with the recent release of various classified documents.
He said: “A lot of information about what happened was suppressed for years.”
Arthur Graham Owens was an inventor who got into debt trying to market a method for improving batteries.
He walked into the Germany Embassy in Belgium in 1935 and offered his services as an informant.
But he also agreed to work for MI5.
Co-author Madoc Roberts said Snow (a partial anagram of Owens) was given messages to send to Germany which were encrypted on an Enigma machine. MI5 intercepted the replies and this helped the code-breakers at Bletchley.
Graham’s father is buried in an unmarked grave in Ireland.
“Maybe it’s now time to do something about that,” he said.
> Snow: The Double Life of a World War II Spy by Nigel West and Madoc Roberts is published by Biteback.
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