The Chilly Battle 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 information 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 top of Chilly Battle tensions. When phrase leaked that Crabb had gone lacking, The Admiralty, the federal government division chargeable 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 they’d 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 demise.” 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 swimsuit was discovered by fishermen in Chichester Harbour on the south coast of England. Its lack of fingerprints and enamel 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 Nineteen Thirties, he was an skilled in underwater bomb disposal. His bravery throughout World Battle 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 varied 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 as a consequence of Freedom of Info requests by the BBC, and categorized paperwork being made public below the 50-year rule, that the murky circumstances of Crabb’s ill-fated last dive started to emerge.

The declassified information confirmed that, from the beginning, the UK’s safety providers had been eager to make use of the chance of Khruschev’s go to to collect intelligence on their Chilly Battle opponents. They prompt 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 thought and made “clear that adventures of an analogous nature had been forbidden”. 

Regardless of this, MI6 recruited Crabb to undertake an “unofficial enterprise” to analyze the Russian ship Ordzhonikidze. The precise nature of his mission remains to be unclear, however the ex-MI5 officer Peter Wright prompt in his guide 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 title Bernard Smith, checked into the Sally Port resort in Portsmouth. On the night of 17 April 1956, Crabb met with a army colleague in an area pub. This colleague, whose title was deleted from the file, was a Royal Navy lieutenant commander who agreed to assist Crabb get into Portsmouth Harbour for his last 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 last dive and requested ‘if I’d be ready to help him, totally unofficially and in a strictly personal capability, in reference to a dive he was taking a day or two later’. He goes on to say below 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. “They usually 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 providers surmised that Crabb will need to 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. Just a few 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. Underneath strain from MI6 and the federal government, the Admiralty rapidly concocted the spurious story that Crabb had gone lacking throughout a check in Stokes Bay.

Data 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 demise for propaganda functions. Nationwide Archives’ Howard Davis advised the BBC in 2006 that the file “makes it completely clear that this wasn’t an Admiralty operation; they’d 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 few of the authorities’s categorized paperwork, precisely what occurred to the diver that day in 1956 remains 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 prompt 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 last dive, believed that the 47-year-old diver, who was recognized for his fondness for whiskey and cigarettes, had succumbed to oxygen poisoning or a coronary heart assault on account of his exertions whereas underwater.

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

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