The Chilly Struggle spy thriller of the ‘vanishing frogman’

In 1956, Royal Navy Commander “Buster” Crabb disappeared in murky circumstances throughout a go to to the UK by Soviet chief Nikita Khruschev. In 2006, the BBC’s Michael Buchanan learn the newly declassified recordsdata that detailed Crabb’s unofficial secret mission – and the way the federal government tried to cowl it up.

It was on 9 Could 1956, 68 years in the past this week, that UK Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden lastly succumbed to press strain and worldwide embarrassment, and ordered an enquiry into the mysterious disappearance of Royal Navy diver Commander Lionel “Buster” Crabb.

The embellished frogman had vanished throughout a goodwill go to to the UK by the Soviet management on the peak of Chilly Struggle tensions. When phrase leaked that Crabb had gone lacking, The Admiralty, the federal government division accountable for the Navy, issued a obscure assertion that the diver had been testing underwater gear at Stokes Bay on the Hampshire coast and was presumed drowned.

However the story fell aside when the visiting Russians accused their hosts of espionage. The Soviets claimed that that they had seen a frogman close to the Ordzhonikidze – the ship that had introduced the Soviet chief Nikita Khruschev to the UK – whereas it was docked in Portsmouth Harbour. Regardless of questions being requested repeatedly in Parliament, Eden refused to say extra, claiming: “It could not be within the public curiosity to reveal the circumstances by which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his loss of life.” The federal government’s stonewalling merely heightened suspicions that Crabb had been on a covert spy mission.

Fourteen months after Crabb vanished, a headless, handless physique in a diving go well with was discovered by fishermen in Chichester Harbour on the south coast of England. Its lack of fingerprints and tooth made the mutilated physique tough to establish, however a later inquest dominated that it was Crabb. The entire episode publicly embarrassed Eden and wrecked his makes an attempt to develop a extra pleasant relationship with a post-Stalin Soviet Union. 

When he disappeared in 1956, Crabb was well-known for his daring underwater exploits. Nicknamed “Buster”, after the US Olympic swimmer and actor Buster Crabbe, who had risen to fame within the Thirties, he was an skilled in underwater bomb disposal. His bravery throughout World Struggle Two had earned him the George Medal for eradicating Italian limpet mines from British warships at Malta, and an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his mine clearance work at Livorno in Italy. His wartime amphibious adventures would later be fictionalised in a 1958 movie, The Silent Enemy, with Crabb being performed by Laurence Harvey. And even after he was formally demobbed in 1947, he continued diving for the army in numerous capacities, together with investigating sunken submarines.

For many years following the frogman’s disappearance, the UK authorities staunchly maintained its silence on the incident. It could solely be from 2006 onwards, when resulting from Freedom of Info requests by the BBC, and categorized paperwork being made public beneath the 50-year rule, that the murky circumstances of Crabb’s ill-fated closing dive started to emerge.

The declassified recordsdata confirmed that, from the beginning, the UK’s safety companies had been eager to make use of the chance of Khruschev’s go to to collect intelligence on their Chilly Struggle opponents. They steered hiding microphones in Claridge’s resort, which the Soviet management meant to make use of as their headquarters throughout their keep. However the prime minister expressly dominated out the concept and made “clear that adventures of an analogous nature had been forbidden”. 

Regardless of this, MI6 recruited Crabb to undertake an “unofficial enterprise” to research the Russian ship Ordzhonikidze. The precise nature of his mission continues to be unclear, however the ex-MI5 officer Peter Wright steered in his ebook Spycatcher (1987) that it was to look at and {photograph} the ship’s superior propeller design.

Two days earlier than the mission, Crabb and one other MI6 agent, who glided by the identify Bernard Smith, checked into the Sally Port resort in Portsmouth. On the night of 17 April 1956, Crabb met with a army colleague in a neighborhood pub. This colleague, whose identify was deleted from the file, was a Royal Navy lieutenant commander who agreed to assist Crabb get into Portsmouth Harbour for his closing dive. In 2006, the BBC’s Michael Buchanan acquired the prospect to look at the beforehand categorized sworn assertion by “the final man to see Crabb alive”.

“He says he was approached by the commander a few days earlier than his closing dive and requested ‘if I’d be ready to help him, completely unofficially and in a strictly non-public capability, in reference to a dive he was taking a day or two later’. He goes on to say beneath no account was this man to contact any accountable naval authority,” stated Buchanan.

Simply earlier than 07:00 on 19 April, the unnamed lieutenant commander went with Crabb to Portsmouth Harbour, and helped him costume and verify his gear. Crabb then swam out to the Russian vessel, and was by no means seen alive once more. The Royal Navy made no try to search for the lacking frogman for worry of alerting the Ordzhonikidze’s crew. “The paperwork additional reveal that no search and rescue efforts had been made for Crabb because it was not a bonafide operation,” stated Buchanan. “And so they detailed the in depth efforts made by [the Admiralty] to make sure they weren’t implicated in a botched mission they knew nothing about.”

The intelligence companies surmised that Crabb should have both been captured by the Soviets, been destroyed by Russian “countermeasures”, or suffered a “pure mishap”. Smith, the MI6 agent, eliminated Crabb’s belongings and checked out of the Sally Port resort. A number of days later, the police eliminated the pages with their particulars from the Sally Port’s register, which solely served to gasoline suspicions of a covert mission. Below strain from MI6 and the federal government, the Admiralty unexpectedly concocted the spurious story that Crabb had gone lacking throughout a check in Stokes Bay.

Information of conferences present the panic on the highest ranges of presidency. Officers feared that if a physique was discovered, the Soviets might use Crabb’s loss of life for propaganda functions. Nationwide Archives’ Howard Davis instructed the BBC in 2006 that the file “makes it completely clear that this wasn’t an Admiralty operation; that they had nothing to do with it and we see them attempting to assemble a narrative that they’ll plausibly inform to face the inevitable questions from the press”.

However regardless of the discharge of a number of the authorities’s categorized paperwork, precisely what occurred to the diver that day in 1956 continues to be unknown. In 1990, Joseph Zwerkin, a former Soviet naval intelligence agent, claimed {that a} Soviet sniper on the Ordzhonikidze’s deck had noticed the diver within the water and shot him. In 2007, a 74-year-old former Russian frogman, Eduard Koltsov, claimed that he slashed Crabb’s throat in an underwater struggle after catching him attaching a mine to Ordzhonikidze.

It has additionally been steered that as Crabb was an affiliate of Sir Anthony Blunt, who was unmasked as a Soviet spy in 1979, he might even have defected. Nicholas Elliott, a former senior MI6 agent who was rumoured to be concerned in Crabb’s closing dive, believed that the 47-year-old diver, who was identified for his fondness for whiskey and cigarettes, had succumbed to oxygen poisoning or a coronary heart assault because of his exertions whereas underwater.

It could be a while earlier than extra particulars of Crabb’s destiny come to mild. Whereas some papers regarding the affair have been launched into the general public area, others have had their categorized standing prolonged by the federal government and should not scheduled for launch till 2057.

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