Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
Aboard the
Ordzhonikidze,
the Soviets were waiting.
What happened next has been a matter of conjecture, imaginative guesswork and a great deal of pure fantasy ever since.
In 2007, a seventy-year-old retired Soviet sailor named Eduard Koltsov came forward with this account. Koltsov claimed to have been trained as a combat frogman by the Soviet navy, as part of a team known as the ‘Barracudas’. In 1956, he was twenty-two and stationed aboard the
Ordzhonikidze.
On the morning of 19 April he was ordered to dive beneath the ship and patrol for any spying frogmen: at around 8 a.m., on the starboard side of the hull, he spotted a diver carrying what he took to be a limpet mine. At first the swimmer seemed so small that Koltsov thought it was a boy. Swimming up behind him, and believing the ship was in imminent danger, Koltsov says he drew a knife, severed the frogman’s air tubes, and then cut his throat. The body then floated to the harbour bottom. Koltsov said he had been awarded a Soviet medal for this action, and even produced the knife with which he claimed to have killed Lionel Crabb.
Koltsov’s claim is no more, or less, plausible than the myriad other theories that still cluster around the strange case of Commander Crabb, a story so encrusted with myth that it will never be fully solved. But one part of Koltsov’s story has a clear ring of truth: ‘A tip-off from a British spy meant that he had been lying in wait.’ There now seems little doubt that the Soviet delegation was fully prepared for Crabb’s underwater visit. Three Soviet sailors saw the frogman pop up between two of the ships, before diving again. That was the last time Buster Crabb was seen alive.
As the sun came up over Portsmouth harbour with no sign of Crabb, George Franklin came to the appalled realisation that something terrible had happened. He rowed back to the steps, and told Ted Davies that Crabb had vanished. Under normal circumstances, rescue teams would have been sent to scour the harbour at once in the hope of finding the missing frogman alive, but to do so would have alerted the Soviets to what was going on. Davies hurtled back to the Sally Port Hotel, packed up his own belongings and those of Crabb, and rushed back to London. The news of Crabb’s disappearance sent a flood of panic through the upper reaches of British intelligence. ‘There will be blood all over the floor,’ predicted one MI5 officer, before resorting to cricketing metaphor, as Englishmen do in times of stress: ‘We’ll all be for the pavilion.’
A classic cover-up ensued, as MI5, MI6 and Naval Intelligence conspired to conceal the truth from their political bosses, the visiting Soviet delegation, and the public. An official lie was prepared, stating that Crabb had been ‘specially employed in connection with trials of certain underwater apparatus’ and had not returned from a test dive in Stokes Bay, about three miles from Portsmouth; he was now missing and ‘presumed drowned’. A police officer was despatched to the Sally Port Hotel, where he tore out the incriminating pages from the hotel register. The hotel owner was told it was all hush-hush, and warned to keep his mouth shut. But Dick White of MI5 knew what was coming. ‘I’m afraid it rather looks to me as if the lid will come off before too long,’ he predicted grimly. Crabb’s family and friends were becoming alarmed; the press was sniffing around, and the Soviets were determined to extract maximum diplomatic capital from the situation.
The evening after Crabb’s disappearance, Anthony Eden hosted a dinner in London for the Soviet leader, attended by ministers and members of the Royal Family. In the course of the banquet Nikita Khrushchev mentioned the
Ordzhonikidze
and made an apparently jocular reference to ‘missing or lost property’. Khrushchev was given to obscure utterances: everyone smiled, and no one had a clue what he was talking about. The next night Rear Admiral V. F. Kotov, the commander of the Soviet ship, attended a formal dinner hosted by the Portsmouth naval authorities. Over coffee he told his British counterpart that three days earlier, sailors aboard the destroyer
Sovershenny
, moored alongside the cruiser, had spotted a diver on the surface. With disingenuous concern, the Soviet admiral noted that the frogman seemed to be ‘in trouble’ and ‘he hoped he was all right’. The British admiral categorically denied that any diving operations had taken place that day.
The carefully timed Soviet inquiry made it impossible to keep the truth from the Prime Minister any longer. When Anthony Eden discovered that his direct orders had been ignored, a covert operation had been launched, a famous frogman was missing and probably dead, and the Soviets knew all about it, he hit the roof. The Prime Minister demanded to know who had authorised the dive, and why its failure had been concealed from him for four days. The press was now in frothing pursuit, Crabb’s family wanted answers, and the discovery that the hotel register had been doctored added momentum to what was already a galloping news story. On 5 May, the Soviets weighed in again with a formal diplomatic protest, demanding a full explanation for ‘such an unusual occurrence as the carrying out of secret diving operations alongside Soviet warships visiting the British Naval Base at Portsmouth’. The squirming diplomatic reply expressed ‘regret about this incident’, but continued to insist that Crabb’s approach to the destroyers was ‘completely unauthorised’. Disgracefully, a draft response drawn up by the Foreign Office, but never issued, tried to blame Crabb for his own death, claiming he had ‘paid no attention when recalled by his assistant’ and concluding ‘it can only be assumed that in a spirit of adventure he was determined on his own initiative to inspect the Russian ships . . . he died while diving on his unauthorised expedition’.
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.
14
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 useful: 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.
In the summer of 1956, Elliott asked Astor for a favour: would he take on Philby as a freelance correspondent in Beirut? The newspaper editor was happy to help. With the Suez crisis building, journalists were flocking to the Middle East. Philby had a proven track record, and he had written for the
Observer
before. Through his father, who was now living in the Lebanese capital, he would have access to important people in the region. Astor contacted Donald Tyerman, the editor of the
Economist
, who was also looking for a Beirut stringer, and a deal was struck: the
Observer
and
Economist
would share Philby’s services, and pay him £3,000 a year plus travel and expenses. At the same time, Elliott arranged that Philby would resume working for MI6, no longer as an officer, but as an agent, gathering information for British intelligence in one of the world’s most sensitive areas. He would be paid a retainer through Godfrey ‘Paul’ Paulson, chief of the Beirut MI6 station and a close friend of Nick Elliott, who had been at Westminster with Philby. Elliott insisted that Philby was ‘being re-engaged for reasons of simple justice’, but also because he would be a useful asset, with long experience of the game: ‘The country could ill afford to be without Philby’s abilities.’ Astor later claimed, implausibly, that he had no idea Philby would be working for MI6 while reporting for his newspaper. The grey area between implicit and explicit was Elliott’s natural terrain. George Kennedy Young, by now chief of Middle East operations, waved the deal through. ‘Nick did all the negotiations,’ said Young. ‘I simply approved them.’