On 9 May, Eden made a statement in the House of Commons, through gritted teeth, in which he refused to provide details of the operation, while making it quite clear that he was not to blame.
It would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death. While it is the practice for ministers to accept responsibility, I think it is necessary in the special circumstances of this case to make it clear that what was done was done without the authority or knowledge of Her Majesty’s ministers. Appropriate disciplinary steps are being taken.
With unconcealed glee, the Soviet newspaper Pravda denounced what it called ‘a shameful operation of underwater espionage directed against those who come to the country on a friendly visit’.
Operation Claret was an unmitigated, gale-force cock-up: it embarrassed the government, offered the Soviets an open target, deepened Cold War suspicion, produced no useful intelligence, turned Eden’s diplomatic triumph to disaster, provoked renewed infighting between the secret services and led to the death of a certified war hero. A month later, Eden was still fuming, and demanding that heads should roll for this ‘misconceived and inept operation’. A twenty-three-page report on the incident, filled with bureaucratic obfuscation, was festooned with the Prime Minister’s furious jottings: ‘Ridiculous . . . Against Orders . . . This proves nothing’. The First Lord of the Admiralty offered his resignation. MI5 blamed what one officer called ‘a typical piece of MI6 adventurism, ill-conceived and badly executed’. The most prominent victim from the fallout was Sir John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair, the head of MI6. Eden ordered that his retirement be swiftly advanced, and by July 1956 he was gone, replaced by Dick White, who was moved from MI5 to take over the sister service. On arrival at MI6 headquarters, White’s new deputy, Jack Easton, warned him: ‘We’re still cloak and dagger. Fisticuffs. Too many swashbuckling green thumbs thinking we’re about to fight another second world war.’ There is no doubt who he was referring to.
Nicholas Elliott should have been fired, for what one colleague called a ‘one man Bay of Pigs’. Astonishingly, he survived; if not unscathed, then at least unsacked, an outcome that would have been highly unlikely in any other organisation. As Elliott had himself demonstrated, this was a club that looked after its members. With typical insouciance, he wrote: ‘A storm in a teacup was blown up by ineptitude into a major diplomatic incident which reflected unjustifiable discredit on MI6. The incompetence lay on the shoulders of the politicians, most notably Eden, in the way the matter was handled.’ Elliott remained in post as London station chief, flatly denying that he, or anyone else in the intelligence services, was to blame. For the rest of his life, Elliott defended the memory of Buster Crabb, insisting that his friend had perished in the line of duty. ‘Crabb was both brave and patriotic,’ wrote Elliott. ‘Qualities which inspired him to volunteer to do what he did.’ Crabb had proven his loyalty and that, in Elliott’s world, was all that mattered.
More than a year after Crabb’s disappearance, a fisherman spotted a decomposing body floating in the water off Pilsey Island in Chichester Harbour. The head and hands had rotted away completely, but a post mortem concluded, from distinguishing marks on the remains preserved inside the Pirelli diving suit, that the small corpse was that of Lionel Crabb. The coroner’s open verdict on the cause of death, and the absence of head and hands, left the way clear for a flood of conspiracy theory that has continued, virtually unabated, ever since: Crabb defected to the USSR; he was shot by a Soviet sniper; he had been captured and brainwashed and was working as a diving instructor for the Soviet navy; he had been deliberately planted on the Soviets as an MI6 double agent. A South African clairvoyant insisted Crabb had been sucked into a secret underwater compartment on the Ordzhonikidze, chained up and then dumped at sea. And so on. Eight years later, Marcus Lipton, the indefatigable MP, was still calling for the case to be reopened, without success. The Crabb mystery has never been fully explained, but the diminutive frogman did achieve a sort of immortality. Crabb has been cited as one of the models for James Bond. As an officer in Naval Intelligence, Ian Fleming had known him well, and the Crabb affair inspired the plot of Thunderball, in which Bond sets out to investigate the hull of the Disco Volante.
Elliott’s verdict on Crabb’s death still seems the most likely. ‘He almost certainly died of respiratory trouble, being a heavy smoker and not in the best of health, or conceivably because some fault had developed in his equipment.’ Elliott dismissed out of hand the theory that the Soviets might have killed Crabb, and the idea of betrayal never crossed his mind. But more than half a century later a Russian frogman popped up out of the murk to claim that he had killed Crabb with his own hands, following a tipoff from a British spy.
If the Soviets were forewarned of the underwater operation (which now seems probable) and if Crabb did die as a result (which seems at least possible), then there was only one person who could have passed on that information.
Kim Philby’s heart sank when Nicholas Elliott called him in July, and asked him to ‘come down to the firm’. It was barely seven months since Macmillan had cleared him of suspicion. Could it be that MI5 had already found fresh evidence? Had another defector emerged?
‘Something unpleasant again?’ asked Philby warily.
‘Maybe just the opposite,’ Elliott replied.
Despite the storm raging around him over the Crabb affair, Elliott had found time to demonstrate his own peculiarly durable brand of loyalty. He had done what he promised to do, and what no one (including Philby) had believed was possible: he had engineered Philby’s return to MI6.
See Notes on Chapter 13
14
Our Man in Beirut
Kim Philby’s return to British intelligence displayed the Old Boy network running at its smoothest: a word in an ear, a nod, a drink with one of the chaps at the club, and the machinery kicked in.
Nicholas Elliott made a point of cultivating journalists, and maintained close relations with several highly placed editors. He would host regular dinners at White’s to introduce senior journalists to C. Ian Fleming, his friend from wartime Naval Intelligence, had become foreign manager of the Kemsley newspaper group, which included the Sunday Times. ‘In those days SIS kept in touch with useful persons,’ Elliott later recalled. ‘And Ian was quite usefuclass="underline" he had important contacts in certain places, and every now and then he got hold of a useful piece of information. I would ask him if I needed someone in the City and, very occasionally, someone out in the field.’ Fleming was perfectly willing to oil the wheels of British intelligence. ‘Kemsley Press allowed many of their foreign correspondents to cooperate with MI6, and even took on MI6 operatives as foreign correspondents.’ Another helpful journalist was David Astor, the editor of the Observer. Astor later tried to play down his links with British intelligence, but he and Elliott went back a long way: a fellow Etonian, Astor had been in The Hague in 1939 ‘doing secret service stuff’ according to his cousin, the actress Joyce Grenfell, at the same time as Elliott.