Lionel Crabb

Crabb moved to a civilian job and used his diving skills to explore the wreck of a Spanish galleon from the 1588 Armada, off Tobermory on the Isle of Mull.

He then located a suitable site for a discharge pipe for the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston.

He later returned to work for the Royal Navy.

Lieutenant-Commander Lionel Kenneth Phillip Crabb, (28 January 1909 – presumed dead 19 April 1956), known as Buster Crabb, was a Royal Navy frogman and diver who vanished during a reconnaissance mission for MI6 around a Soviet cruiser berthed at Portsmouth Dockyard in 1956.

Lionel Crabb was born in 1909 to Hugh Alexander Crabb and Beatrice (née Goodall) of Streatham, south-west London.

They were a poor family; Hugh Crabb was a commercial traveller for a firm of photographic merchants.

In his youth Crabb held many jobs but after two years training for a career at sea in the school ship HMS Conway he joined the merchant navy and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve before the Second World War.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Crabb was first an army gunner.

Then, in 1941, he joined the Royal Navy.

The next year he was sent to Gibraltar where he worked in a mine and bomb disposal unit to remove the Italian limpet mines that enemy divers had attached to the hulls of Allied ships.

Initially, Crabb's job was to disarm mines that British divers removed, but eventually he decided to learn to dive.

He was one of a group of underwater clearance divers who checked for limpet mines in Gibraltar harbour during the period of Italian frogman and manned torpedo attacks by the Decima Flottiglia MAS.

They dived with oxygen rebreathers, Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus, which until then had not been used much if at all for swimming down from the surface.

At first they swam by breaststroke without swimfins.

On 8 December 1942, during one such attack, two of the Italian frogmen, Lieutenant Visintini and Petty Officer Magro, died, probably killed by small explosive charges thrown from harbour-defence patrol boats, a tactic said to have been introduced by Crabb.

Their bodies were recovered, and their swimfins and Scuba sets were taken and from then on used by Sydney Knowles and Crabb.

Crabb was awarded the George Medal for his efforts and was promoted to lieutenant commander.

In 1943 he became Principal Diving Officer for Northern Italy, and was assigned to clear mines in the ports of Livorno and Venice; he was later created an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for these services.

He was also an investigating diver in the suspicious death of General Sikorski of the Polish Army, whose B-24 Liberator aircraft crashed into the sea off Gibraltar in 1943.

By this time, he had gained the nickname "Buster", after the American actor and swimmer Buster Crabbe.

After the war, Crabb was stationed in Palestine and led an underwater explosives disposal team that removed mines placed by Jewish divers from the Palyam, the maritime force of the Palmach elite Jewish fighting force during the years of Mandatory Palestine.

After 1947, he was demobilised from the military.

He twice dived to investigate sunken Royal Navy submarines — HMS Truculent (P315) in January 1950 and HMS Affray (P421) in 1951 — to find out whether there were any survivors.

Both efforts proved fruitless.

In 1952, Crabb married Margaret Elaine Player, the daughter of Henry Charles Brackenbury Williamson and the former wife of Ernest Albert Player.

The couple separated in 1953 and divorced about two years later.

In 1955, Crabb took frogman Sydney Knowles with him to investigate the hull of a Soviet Sverdlov-class cruiser to evaluate its superior manoeuvrability.

According to Knowles, they found a circular opening at the ship's bow and inside it a large propeller that could be directed to give thrust to the bow.

That same year, in March, Crabb was made to retire due to his age, but a year later he was recruited by MI6.

By that time, Crabb's heavy drinking and smoking had taken its toll on his health, and he was not the diver that he had been in World War II.

MI6 recruited Crabb in 1956 to investigate the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze that had brought head of state Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin on a diplomatic mission to Britain.

On 19 April 1956, Crabb dived into Portsmouth Harbour and his MI6 controller never saw him again.

Years later, a Russian who had been on board Ordzhonikidze claimed that the Soviets were expecting him that night (after being tipped off about the British operation by a mole) and that he dived into the dark and dirty waters beneath the Ordzhonikidze, hunted down Crabb, and slit his air hose and his throat with a knife.

Crabb's companion in the Sally Port Hotel took all his belongings and even the page of the hotel register on which they had written their names.

Ten days later British newspapers published stories about Crabb's disappearance in an underwater mission.

MI6 tried to cover up this espionage mission.

On 29 April, under instructions from Rear Admiral John Inglis, the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Admiralty announced that Crabb had vanished when he had taken part in trials of secret underwater apparatus in Stokes Bay on the Solent.

The Soviets answered by releasing a statement stating that the crew of Ordzhonikidze had seen a frogman near the cruiser on 19 April.

It was reported by Radio Moscow that the Kremlin had sent an official note to the United Kingdom concerning what Pravda described as “shameful espionage”.

According to Peter Wright in his book Spycatcher (1987), Crabb was sent to investigate Ordzhonikidze's propeller, a new design that Naval Intelligence wanted to examine.