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In the dawn light of 19 April 1956, a peculiar figure in a rubber diving suit and flippers waddled sideways down the King’s Stairs at Portsmouth Harbour, and clambered into a waiting dinghy. The man was no more than five feet five inches tall. On his head he wore a woolly balaclava with a diving cap on top, and on his back a tank with enough oxygen for a ninety-minute dive. He was a decorated war hero, Britain’s most famous frogman, and his name was Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb.
In the distance, through the drifting mist, loomed the faint shapes of three Soviet warships, newly arrived in Britain on a goodwill mission and berthed alongside the Southern Railway Jetty. An oarsman rowed the boat out some eighty yards offshore. Crabb adjusted his air tank, picked up a new experimental camera issued by the Admiralty Research Department, and extinguished the last of the cigarettes he had smoked continuously since waking. His task was to swim underneath the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, explore and photograph her keel, propellers and rudder, and then return. It would be a long, cold swim, alone, in extremely cold and dirty water, with almost zero visibility at a depth of about thirty feet. The job might have daunted a much younger and healthier man. For a forty-seven-year-old, unfit, chain-smoking depressive, who had been extremely drunk a few hours earlier, it was close to suicidal.
The mission, codenamed ‘Operation Claret’, bore all the hallmarks of a Nicholas Elliott escapade: it was daring, imaginative, unconventional and completely unauthorised.
Seven months earlier, Nikita Khrushchev had announced that he would visit Britain for the first time, accompanied by his premier, Nikolai Bulganin. The First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party would travel aboard the latest Russian cruiser, the Ordzhonikidze, escorted by two destroyers. The Soviet leader would then be taken by special train to London, and dine at Number Ten with the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. The visit was hailed by diplomats as an important thaw in the Cold War. The spies saw other opportunities.
The Soviets were rumoured to have developed a new type of propeller, as well as enhanced underwater sonar technology to evade submarines. With the arms race running at full tilt, MI6 and Naval Intelligence wanted to find out more. There was also an element of tit for tat. British warships had recently docked in Leningrad, and ‘frogmen had popped up all over the place’, in Elliott’s words. Anything the Soviets could do, MI6 could do better, and more secretly.
The intelligence services sprang into action. MI5 set about bugging the Soviet leader’s suite at Claridge’s Hotel, and installed a listening device in the telephone. The Naval Intelligence Department urged that the investigation of the undersides of the Soviet vessels be undertaken as ‘a matter of high intelligence priority’. Elliott, the London station chief for MI6, was charged with exploiting this golden opportunity for espionage. As he put it, with typical ribaldry: ‘We wanted a closer look at those Russian ladies’ bottoms.’ He knew just the man for the job.
Lionel Crabb earned his nickname from the American actor, athlete and pin-up Buster Crabbe, who had played Flash Gordon in the film series and won a gold medal for swimming at the 1932 Olympics. In almost every way, the English Buster Crabb was entirely unlike his namesake, being English, tiny, and a poor swimmer (without flippers, he could barely complete three lengths of a swimming pool). With his long nose, bright eyes and miniature frame, he might have been an aquatic garden gnome. He was, however, spectacularly brave, and supremely resilient. Born to a poor family in South London, he first served in the Merchant Navy and then joined the Royal Navy after the outbreak of war, training as a diver. In 1942 he was dispatched to Gibraltar, to take part in the escalating underwater battle around the Rock, where Italian frogmen, using manned torpedoes and limpet mines, were sinking thousands of tons of Allied shipping. Crabb and his fellow divers set out to stop them, with remarkable success, blowing up enemy divers with depth charges, intercepting torpedoes and peeling mines off the hulls of ships. When war ended, Crabb cleared mines from the ports of Venice and Livorno, and when the militant Zionist group Irgun began attacking British ships with underwater explosives, he was called in to defuse them. The risks were staggering, but Crabb survived and was duly awarded the George Medal for ‘undaunted devotion to duty’. He became, briefly, a celebrity. Small boys mobbed him, and he frequently appeared in the newspapers. Long after demobilisation, Crabb continued to do odd, secret or particularly dangerous underwater jobs for the Navy.
Elliott had got to know Crabb during the war, and considered him ‘a most engaging man of the highest integrity . . . as well as being the best frogman in the country, probably in the world’. He cut a remarkable figure in civilian life, wearing beige tweeds, a monocle and a pork pie hat, and carrying a Spanish swordstick with a silver knob carved into the shape of a crab. But there was another, darker side to this ‘kindly bantam cock’. Crabb suffered from deep depressions, and had a weakness for gambling, alcohol and barmaids. When taking a woman out to dinner he liked to dress up in his frogman outfit; unsurprisingly, this seldom had the desired effect, and his emotional life was a mess. In 1956 he was in the process of getting divorced after a marriage that had lasted only a few months. He worked, variously, as a model, undertaker and art salesman, but like many men who had seen vivid wartime action, he found peace a pallid disappointment. He was also feeling his age. When Elliott contacted him, Buster Crabb was working at Espresso Furnishings in Seymour Place, selling tables to cafés. Crabb accepted the mission without hesitation. He wanted, he said, ‘to get m’ feet wet again, get m’ gills back’. Money was not discussed. Instead, Elliott joked that if the investigation of the Ordzhonikidze proved successful, Crabb could be assured of ‘supplies of whisky for many years’. Others were doubtful that Crabb was up to the task. John Henry, the MI6 technical officer, pointed out that the diver seemed to be ‘heading for a heart attack’. But Elliott insisted that ‘Crabb was still the most experienced frogman in England, and totally trustworthy . . . He begged to do the job for patriotic as well as personal motives.’ Ted Davies, a former sailor who headed MI6’s naval liaison unit, was assigned as his case officer.
Operation Claret proceeded with the sort of smoothness that suggested no one in authority was paying adequate attention. Michael Williams, a Foreign Office official recently posted to oversee MI6, was handed a list of possible operations for the Soviet visit. ‘The dicey operations [are] at the beginning of the file and the safer ones at the back,’ he was told. Williams was distracted by the death of his father that morning. A short while later he handed the file back without comment. MI6 assumed this amounted to Foreign Office approval; Williams assumed someone senior to him must already have given the go-ahead; the Admiralty assumed that MI6 was responsible, since it was carrying out the mission; and MI6 assumed the Admiralty was in the driving seat, since it had asked for the information in the first place. And the Prime Minister assumed that no spies were doing anything, because that was exactly what he had ordered them to do.
Back in September, when the Khrushchev trip was first mooted, Anthony Eden stated categorically: ‘These ships are our guests and, however we think others would behave, we should take no action which involves the slightest risk of detection.’ Eden shared Macmillan’s distaste for spying, and was not about to have the adventurers of MI6 spoiling this moment of delicate international diplomacy. When Elliott was later quizzed about who had signed off on the operation, and in what capacity, his shrugging reply was most revealing. ‘We don’t have a chain of command. We work like a club.’