The headless Frogman
A Soviet cruiser, a mole in MI6, an early morning dive into freezing water at Portsmouth Naval Base, a clumsy coverup, and the headless body of the diver.
Admiral Ushakov, a Sverdlov-class cruiser like Ordzhonikidze
On 18 April 1956, two Soviet destroyers — Sovershenny and Smotryaschy — escorted the cruiser Ordzhonikidze into Portsmouth Naval Base, where it was berthed on South Railway Jetty, the VIP berth. Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev and Premier Nikolai Bulganin had travelled on it to Britain for talks in London with Prime Minister Anthony Eden.
The Royal Navy had been particularly keen to gain a better understanding of the capabilities of Sverdlov-class cruisers, and this visit was a mouth-watering opportunity for spooks in the British establishment.
MI6 decided to get a closer look. An MI6 officer had a brief chat about their plan with the Foreign Office advisor assigned to MI6 for oversight. The FO advisor got the impression that MI6 would secure permission from the government. The MI6 officer assumed that the brief chat was all the permission they would need.
MI5 bugged the hotel rooms where the Soviet delegation would be staying. For their trouble, MI5 received audio recordings of monologues delivered by Khrushchev to his valet about his appearance and clothes. A very vain man, Khrushchev spent hours in front of the mirror, preening.
Buster Crabb
One day earlier, Lionel Crabb and Bernard Smith had checked into the Sally Port Hotel in Old Portsmouth. They met with Chief Constable A C West of the local police that day. During that meeting the Chief Constable assigned Superintendent Jack Lamport as Crabb’s police liaison officer in Portsmouth.
Sally Port Hotel, Portsmouth
Later in the afternoon of 17 April 1956, Crabb had tea with the Commander of HMS Vernon, a stone frigate of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth which operated the Torpedo School and had, during world war two, taken on responsibility for mine disposal and the development of countermeasures. Incidentally, Crabb had been a Mine and Bomb Disposal officer in the Royal Navy from October 1942.
Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb
Crabb was in terrible shape and could only swim three lengths of the swimming pool at the time thanks to chain smoking and heavy drinking, but he learnt diving in order to search for underwater explosives that Italian Navy frogmen would place on hulls of Allied warships anchored off Gibraltar. He would go on to command a diving team, be awarded a George Medal, undertake several covert diving missions, serve as ‘Diving Trials Officer’ at HMS Vernon, and achieve the rank of Commander in 1952. He had also, on more than one occasion, performed underwater photography for the Navy.
The Dive
In the evening on 17 April 1956, he met Lieutenant George ‘Franky’ Franklin, HMS Vernon’s diving officer at a pub, and asked him to act as his diving tender and dresser. He was going to undertake a hush-hush dive in a private capacity, he told Franklin, and under no circumstances was he to inform any Naval authority about it. Franklin later appropriated a launch from HMS Deepwater. That evening Crabb downed at least five double whiskys.
By the afternoon of 18 April 1956, the Ordzhonikidze had reached Portsmouth. Franklin and Crabb set off in the launch later that afternoon and Crabb made his first dive, entering the water at 1730 hrs less than a hundred yards from where the Soviet cruiser was berthed. The dive was aborted after 20 minutes when he became trapped in the jetty pilings.
Franklin and Crabb returned the next morning. Crabb was supposed to swim a hundred-odd metres to the cruiser in extremely cold and dirty water with zero visibility, then swim underneath it, explore and photograph her propellers, keel, and rudder, and then return. All this at an average depth of thirty feet. Crabb dived just before seven. He had 90 minutes of air.
But when he didn’t resurface by 9:15am, Franklin followed the instructions Crabb had given him and took the launch back to HMS Vernon. He informed Bernard Smith about what had happened, and that was that. Since this was a dive undertaken in private capacity, nobody in the Royal Navy was informed and no rescue attempts were made. Smith gathered their belongings and left for London. The matter was to be hushed up.
The Cover Up
A policeman was later sent to the hotel to warn the owner to keep his mouth shut. The policeman also ripped pages from the hostel register. The ripping of the registration pages caught the press’s attention. Since Commander Lionel Crabb had been a well-known hero, one of Britain’s foremost navy divers, the press dug deeper.
Meanwhile on the night of 19 April 1956, at a dinner hosted by James Thomas, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Rear Admiral V. F. Kotov mentioned to Thomas that three sailors of the Sovershenny had spotted a diver near the bow of the Ordzhonikidze at 7:30am that morning, swimming at the surface. He hoped that the diver was all right because it appeared that he was in some distress before he dived below the surface. The Soviets were assured that the incident would be investigated. Then the Admiralty tried to cover it up, feeding a story to the press about Crabb having gone missing while taking part in underwater trials more than five kilometres away in Stokes Bay.
The Soviets lodged a diplomatic protest and released a statement about the diver spotted swimming near their cruiser. Pravda went to town denouncing:
A shameful operation of underwater espionage directed against those who come to the country on a friendly visit.
The press put two and two together and began claiming that Crabb had been captured by the Soviet Union.
... soon after anchoring, the Ordzhonikidze had taken the precaution of putting a crew of its own frogmen over the side. Had the Russian frogmen met their British counterpart in the quiet deep? Had Buster Crabb been killed then and there, or kidnapped and carried off to Russia? At week's end, the mystery of Frogman Crabb's fate remained as deep and impenetrable as the waters that surrounded so much of his life.
—Time Magazine
The Body
On 9 June 1957, more than a year after the incident, a headless body was found floating off Pilsey Island, about eighteen kilometres away from Portsmouth Naval Base. It was wearing a frogman suit of the kind worn by Crabb but could not be positively identified because in addition to its head, the body was also missing its hands. Crabb’s ex-wife was unsure if it was him. His girlfriend was certain that it wasn’t. But one of Crabb’s friends, Sydney Knowles, claimed that he was able to identify it as Crabb’s based on a scar on the left knee.
Frogman Spy, a book published in 1960, claimed that Crabb had been captured alive by the Soviets and taken back to Moscow. The body discovered in 1957 was someone else’s and had been dropped there by the Soviets to help conceal Crabb’s true fate. The book stated, based on Russian documents that the author claimed to have seen, that Crabb served as a diving officer in the Soviet navy.
Another author who wrote a fictionalised account based on Frogman Spy later claimed to have been contacted by Sydney Knowles. The author reported that Knowles confessed to having been coerced into identifying the body as Crabb’s. According to Knowles, Crabb intended to defect. MI5 found out about it and had him killed during the dive.
Soviet Frogman
In 2007 a former Soviet frogman named Eduard Koltsov made a startling revelation. He claimed that he had been ordered to dive beneath the ship and lie in wait for spying frogmen that day in Portsmouth after the Soviets received a tip-off from a mole in MI6. If this is true, then the mole was most likely Kim Philby.
I saw a silhouette of a diver in a light frogman suit who was fiddling with something at the starboard, next to the ship's ammunition stores.
When he spotted Crabb he was worried that the British diver was planting a mine. Koltsov swam up from below him, grabbed his legs and pulled him down, slashed his air tubes, then cut his throat and pushed the body away into the undercurrents.
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Postscript
It appears that the Belgian cartoonist Hergé drew the frogman in The Red Sea Sharks, the nineteenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin taking inspiration from a photograph of Commander Crabb diving (Hat Tip: Avani Singh Tanwar who noticed this connection).
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