Dan Snow's History Hit - The Mystery of the Frogman Lionel Crabb

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

On the night of the 19th of April, 1956, the decorated navy diver Lionel Crabb went missing. A veteran of the Second World War, Crabb had been sent on a secret mission by MI6 to investigate a Soviet cruiser in Portsmouth Harbour. After pulling on his diving gear and checking his oxygen supply, Crabb slipped into the dark waters, never to be seen alive again. Was he killed by the Soviets? Was he killed by the Brits? Or can this all be chalked up to a bewildering accident? To this day, the government refuse to declassify the crucial files relating to his death. Dan is joined by Giles Milton, a writer and host of the podcast Cover Up: Ministry of Secrets, to untangle this mysterious web and find out what really happened to the frogman Lionel Crabb.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Today we're talking about the man who might have been Bond, James Bond. To be fair, if you ask any Brit, any Brit with an interest in history, they all seem to have a different candidate for the person that they think Ian Fleming based Bond on. My wife's family thinks it was their grandad, and they're not alone. There's a lot of grandads out there who allegedly gave Fleming the idea for Bond. But anyway, this one is one of the lead candidates. He's a man called Lionel Crabb, Buster Crabb. He's a Royal Navy diver who performed acts of daring do during the Second World War. Ferocious underwater struggles with elite Axis frogmen.

Terrifying stuff. But he disappeared on the 19th of April 1956, apparently on a mission for British secret services to investigate a Soviet naval cruiser in Portsmouth Harbour. No one has ever satisfactorily explained what happened that night. Was he killed by the Soviets? Was he killed by the Brits who were worried he might defect? Was he killed in an accident like that bit in Tintin where the anchor drops into the water and whacks that frogman in the head? Well now, Giles Milton, great friend of this podcast,

been on many times before, wonderful best-selling author, hugely prolific historian, he has got a new podcast series. It's called Cover-Up ministry of secrets and he unravels a true story what he thinks happened to buster crab it's a bit of a mission it's not an easy thing to unravel because the government files concerning the case are not scheduled to be open until 2057 when you think of the stuff that they have released, it really does make you wonder what the heck's in that file, I'll tell you. But Charles Milton thinks he's worked it out. So enjoy this podcast, and then make sure you go and listen to Cover Up, Ministry of Secrets. Anyway, that's

all from me, Snow, Dan Snow. Enjoy. Giles, thank you very much for coming on the podcast with this exciting mystery story. This is a crazy story. It's one of the, I think, the great and last unsolved mysteries of the Cold War. A celebrated wartime hero who vanishes without trace one day in 1956 is never seen again. What happened to him? It's just a great, great mystery that no one has ever been able to solve. And I suppose what's absolutely fascinating about this mystery is that more than 70 years on, government today is still covering up the truth of what happened. They will not release the crucial file that reveals everything. So I go in search of what might possibly have happened to Lionel Crabb, this celebrated wartime hero.

Well, let's talk about his childhood first. Born in 1909, he grew up in a pretty rough part of town. He was not a privileged kid. No, this was a very humble background. His dad had been killed in the First World War. He left the family penniless. And really, he had not much of a future ahead of him. Left school at 14, sort of ran away into the Merchant Navy. And that might have been that. But the war, when the war came along, it was to save him. It was to make him.

He was to become this great hero. Like so many people in the war, I think the chance of getting into the action really was going to transform his life. And did he join up before the war? He wanted to sign up and his eyesight was not great. He was short. He was not your ideal sort of physical wartime hero, but he ends up being signed up into a new diving unit, which is operating out of Gibraltar. Now, at this point in the war, so 1942, there is a fantastic running battle taking place between the British and the

Italians, centred on the port of Gibraltar. Of course, Gibraltar is immensely important. It's the gateway to the Mediterranean. You've got Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa taking place. So all the shipping, warships and also merchant vessels are coming into Gibraltar harbour. So it's an obvious target for the enemy. The Italians form an elite brigade, the Gamma Brigade, part of the Italian 10th Flotilla, and their raison d'etre, if you like, is to sink as many British ships as possible. They do this by using these elite diving units, going underwater, they place mines onto the undersides of ships and bang, the mine blows up, the ship sinks. So Lionel Crabbe is put in charge of his own elite team, which is basically to try and outwit the Italians. And you have this, for the months that follow,

you have this extraordinary game, very dangerous game of cat and mouse taking place underwater in Gibraltar harbour as the Italians try to sink the British ships and Crabbe tries to stop them. Does he actually ever interdict them as they're all swimming along, or is it a matter of finding limpet mines and making them safe? No, they're actually fighting underwater, physical fights underwater. In fact, there's a memorable scene in Thunderball. Of course, Crabbe is said to be one of the role models, the inspirations for James Bond. And there's a famous underwater scene in Thunderball, a great battle with knives and God knows what, harpoons underwater. And this is very much based on what Crabbe was doing in Gibraltar Harbour. They were literally fighting

underwater. And it has to be said, the Italians were, they were elite, they were equipped with the most up-to-date underwater equipment. Crabbe and his men, it's very sort of British, it was all very homespun, amateur sort of stuff. They had appallingly bad equipment. They were not very insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, insidious, ins. Wow, the George Medal, which is the highest honour you can win when you're not actually in the face of the enemy, although it sounds like he was half the time in the face of the enemy. He's also made a Lieutenant Commander, the famous James Bond rank, which is pretty good going for a young kid from Streatham in those days. And I think one of the interesting things about Lionel Crabb is, you know, so many of the officer class in those days, particularly in the elite units such as the diving unit, they were Eton, they were Oxbridge, they were of a certain type, private incomes,

went to the gentlemen's clubs in London when they were at home. Crabbe was not from this world at all. He was a total outsider. As I said, he came from humble background, left school at 14. This was an extraordinary opportunity, if you like, for him to break into a world which outside wartime he would never have stood a chance of even getting a look in. And he ends up as a really pretty senior officer during the Italian campaign. Yeah, the Italian campaign is absolutely fascinating for Lionel Crabbe, particularly because one of the things that the Germans had done as they were retreating upwards through Italy,

they were placing mines everywhere on all the historic buildings, palazzos, etc. And never more so than in Venice. And so Lionel Crabbe was sent with his elite team to Venice to go and defuse some of the mines the Germans had placed all along the Grand Canal. These great palazzos had been mined underwater. The Bridge of Sighs was one of the famous structures that they placed torpedo mines on. The whole thing was going to blow up. And so Crabbe is sent in with orders simply to defuse these mines. And when he got to the famous Bridge of Sighs, his men looked at these rusting torpedo mines and said, these are far too dangerous

to try and defuse underwater. They could blow at any moment. And Crabbe rather wonderfully says, I've grown very fond of Italian bridges, and goes down and diffuses his mines. And by doing that, he saves the famous bridge of size. So extraordinary adventures, very dangerous work that he was undertaking, and a real celebrated wartime hero. It's no accident that, first of all, there was a major bestseller written about him after the war, Commander Crabbe, penned by a Times journalist at the time. And then this was turned into a major blockbuster movie called The Silent Enemy, which came out in

1958. And this starred Lawrence Harvey, Dawn Adams, Sid James, if you remember from the old Carry On movies, he was in it as well. This was a major blockbuster. It premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square, and it was celebrating the life and the wartime exploits of Commander Crabbe. So this was a guy who was super famous. So when he disappears one day in April 1956, it's a big story. How interesting. So he's a celebrity in his own right. But he doesn't go straight to the 50s. He's kind of underwater. Specialism continues. Amazing how he survived all that equipment. So in the mid-1940s, after the war, he's doing stuff around Palestine, taking on the Jewish resistance fighters, trying to get the Brits out of the Palestine mandate. Doing similar kind of work, is he? Yeah, he was working there. The extreme Zionists,

anti-British were blowing up anything they could. So he goes into sort of underwater battle with them. Then he works in a lot of major rescue missions, the Truculent disaster. The Truculent was a submarine that sank in the Thames Estuary. He was sent down to carry out the rescue operation there. And all of this sort of celebrates his fame because these operations, for instance, the truculent rescue mission, was being filmed by Pathé at the time. So everyone was watching this stuff, knowing about it. He was sent off to hunt for Spanish gold on one of the galleons that sank off the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Highlands. So, you know, these were big boy's own adventures, which were very popular at the time. Then MI6 came knocking on his door, didn't they?

Yeah. Now, this is where the great mystery really begins, is that Crabb certainly knew key people in British intelligence. And you have to wonder how, given his background and everything. But I think the key person in his life was his aunt, Kitty James. And Kitty James worked for the War Office and for intelligence during the war. And she became very friendly with a certain naval intelligence officer called Ian Fleming, who, of course, was the inventor of James Bond, wrote the James Bond novels, thrillers, which then became made into the movies. of James Bond, wrote the James Bond novels, thrillers, which then became made into the movies. And through this connection with Kitty James, he gets to know some of the key people in wartime intelligence. That's Anthony Blunt, who some listeners might be familiar with, who went on

to become Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, a very famous individual. But Anthony Blunt was also working in wartime intelligence. And crucially, he was delivering huge amounts of British wartime intelligence over to the Soviets. Through Blunt, Lionel Crabbe got to know Guy Burgess, King Philby, all these key people working intelligence at the time who were also working for the Soviets. So they were double agents. So he had a very interesting entree into this world of both intelligence and counterintelligence, of espionage, of double agents, of all sorts of murky business taking place. So he's very much on during wartime and after the war, he's very much on the radar of British intelligence. And he also comes into the circle of Lord Mountbatten, who of course was running combined operations, all sorts of dodgy underhand dealings going on in the war. Crabbe is on the radar of everyone important.

And he gets swept up. There are tasks for him, are there? There are tasks for them. And I suppose this is where we come to his greatest, most dangerous and most mysterious mission of all, which happens in the spring of 1956. Now, this is a key moment in the Cold War. There's a very, very frosty relations between Britain and the Soviet Union at this time. And the Prime Minister at the time, Anthony Eden, really wants to try and reset relations between Great Britain and the Soviet Union. And he does something very dramatic. In the spring of 1956, he invites Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin to Britain.

This is kind of unheard of. It's an extraordinary window of opportunity, if you like, for diplomacy. And these two figures, they come to Britain on a vast Soviet warship called the Ordzhonikidze, which comes into Portsmouth Harbour in April 56. It's anchored there with two other Soviet vessels. This is a big moment. The Soviets come off their ships. They go off to London. There's a real charm offensive on the part of Anthony Eden. He brings them to Downing Street. They go and have tea with the young queen in Buckingham Palace, and they get taken off to Chequers for the weekend. So while they're in London, three Soviet warships are at anchor in the Bay of

Portsmouth. And this is the moment where Lionel Crabb receives a call from his old friends in MI6. They have a little mission for him. They'd like to know a little bit more about these state-of-the-art Soviet warships at anchor in Portsmouth Harbour. And so this is the opening of the whole story of The Mystery of Lionel Crabb. Well, you've solved the mystery, Giles,

and you've got your own podcast in which you're telling everyone about the mystery. But this is my job, is to try and get you to tell me about the mystery. So what do you think he was trying to do? I mean, first of all, we talk about him disappearing. What happened? What do we think happened? What did they think at the time happened? We really look at all the theories, what might have happened, and what could have been the most credible thing that happened to him. Now, some of the theories, well, the first one is that he defected to the Soviets, that in fact, Lionel Crabb was a communist sympathizer. Remember, I mentioned all those links he had with the various other spies that had defected to the Soviet Union. His diving

buddy, the guy he'd done all his wartime operations with in Gibraltar in Italy, Sidney Knowles, he said that Lionel Crabb had defected to the Soviets. His ex-wife, Margaret Crabb, she was absolutely convinced he'd been captured by the Soviets, that somehow when he went on his final dive, that they had seized him underwater and taken him back to the Soviet Union. And she gave many newspaper interviews to this effect, talking all about what had happened. And this is given some credence, actually, by an interview that appeared in a German newspaper, an interview with a Soviet officer, senior Soviet officer, who said, we've got Crabbe.

He's our prisoner. We're holding him in Moscow. So that's sort of theory number two, if you like. Theory number three is that he was killed by the Soviets underwater. three is that he was killed by the Soviets underwater. And we have an extraordinary interview on our podcast with a Soviet naval diver who claims to have knifed him underwater. So that's another very interesting theory. The official story put out by Whitehall at the time is that Crabbe died while conducting underwater tests, not in Portsmouth Harbour, they said. They said he died in Stokes Bay, which is some way down the coast.

So that is the official line. And that really is the line that they span from the first few days after he disappeared. They put this out and they wanted the press to report this. Then, of course, there's a simple theory that maybe he died underwater. Undermining this is that there's no evidence for this. No body was ever washed up in Portsmouth Harbour, which it inevitably would have been had he

simply drowned diving around the ship. And another very credible theory is that he was actually killed by MI5 underwater. The MI5 knew he was going to defect because his old diving buddy, Sidney Knowles, had actually informed MI5 of what he was going to defect because his old diving buddy, Sidney Knowles, had actually informed MI5 of what he was going to do. And this was going to be incredibly embarrassing. Remember, this is in the aftermath of Philby, Burgess, McLean, all of these famous individuals had defected to the Soviet Union. But the last thing that the British establishment wanted or needed was for a famous wartime hero, decorated George Medlin and all that

to go and defect to the Soviet Union. And so they carried out a very dirty operation and killed him underwater. So those are some of the theories that we were faced with when we were embarking on our Ministry of Secrets podcast to work out which one of these was true, or if perhaps none of them were true, what actually happened to Lionel Crabbe in April 1956. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. More coming up after this. Hello, I'm James Rogers, and over on the History Hit Warfare podcast, I bring you cutting-edge military histories from around the world.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Do you think you know what happened to him now? Do you think you know what happened to him now? So what we did is we went in search of anyone and everyone who had any contact with Lionel Crabb, who was involved in this story at the time. Much to our surprise, we found some remarkable people who were still alive. The first of them, and really this is what set us out on the story, you know how it is when you write a book, you go off and do a publicity tour and you give talks

all over the country and everything. And I was giving a talk in Droxford down in Hampshire. And at the end of this talk, I found myself sitting next to a very elderly Royal Navy diver called Commander Julian Malick. There was a meal after the talk and I was chatting to him and we somehow got onto the subject of Lionel Buster Crabbe. And he said, oh, well, I know a bit about that because I knew the man who dressed Crabbe on the morning of his final dive. A dressed Crabbe, that means he prepared Crabbe, he got him into his diving suit. He was there on the morning, this chap called Frankie Franklin. And so Commander Julian Malick, who I was talking to, told me everything that Frankie Franklin had told him about that April morning. What happened? Crab slips into the water.

He's got enough oxygen for 90 minutes. So whatever he's doing in Portsmouth Harbour, he's got 90 minutes to do it. And Frankie Franklin is waiting on board this little boat in Portsmouth Harbour at dawn. It's still quite dark. It's misty. And he's waiting. He's looking at his watch. And, you know, 60 minutes pass, 70 minutes pass, 90 minutes pass. No sign of Lionel Crabb. And so he begins to get desperate. 90 minutes, 95 minutes, 100 minutes. And he suddenly realises, to his horror, that Lionel Crabbe is not coming back. What's happened to him?

He then has to inform the local diving school. They inform the local commander, who informs the Admiralty. And suddenly this story begins to take on a life of its own, because what has happened to Britain's most celebrated wartime diver? He simply disappeared. So Julian Mallet was really the starting point for this extraordinary adventure story, if you like. As my producer, Sarah Peters, and I began to investigate the story, we found other people who are still alive. And most incredibly, I think,

was a journalist called Peter Marshall. Peter Marshall ran a news agency in Portsmouth in 1956. He's now aged 90. We found him, traced him down to Torquay, went down to interview him. And he was amazing, sharp as anything, a mind that remembered absolutely everything. And so not only did he cover the story of Khrushchev and Bulganin coming to England in 1956, this great moment in the Cold War. So he was there reporting on them coming down the gangplank and the Royal Navy band playing and then going off to London. But he is covering also the story of the disappearance of Lionel Crabb. Because what happens is a Times journalist at the time is writing this biography of Lionel Crabb. He's trying to trace Lionel Crabb. Lionel Crabb's

gone missing, as Lionel Crabb tended to do. And trace Lionel Crabb. Lionel Crabb's gone missing, as Lionel Crabb tended to do. And so he rings Peter Marshall, this now 90-year-old journalist, and says, look, I've heard he's down in Portsmouth. Can you try and find him? I need to speak to him urgently. So Peter Marshall asks some questions, finds out that Lionel Crabb was staying at the Sallyport Hotel. He goes to the Sallyport Hotel and he finds the visitor's book. He opens the visitor's book and there is a name, Lionel Crabbe, and another individual, Bernard Smith. So he goes back to his office, rings the Times, says, yeah, by the way, Lionel Crabbe's staying in the Sallyport Hotel. I found his name in the visitor's book. The Times journalist says,

go back there, take a photographer with you. I want a picture of the visitor's book with Lionel Crabb's name in it. So Peter Marshall rushes back to the Sally Port Hotel. Within an hour, he's back there with his photographer. They go to the visitor's book and the page has been removed. by a local detective inspector of the local Portsmouth police force. And so Peter Marshall is the first to realise that a cover-up has already begun, that someone in Whitehall knows that this is a story that cannot become public. And so they've begun a cover-up. The crab was never there. So this was really what got our juices going when we realised this story has got legs. And what about the government files? You're a regular visitor. You're a veteran of the National Archives. What's in there?

So, yeah, of course, one of our first points of call was to go to the National Archives. And, of course, we got everything and anything available about Lionel Crabb. We discovered some interesting things. One of the most disturbing things, I think, was that Margaret Crabb, we discovered some interesting things. One of the most disturbing things, I think, was that Margaret Crabb, so Lionel Crabb's divorced wife, who still cared about him, was desperate for news. What the hell had happened to her former husband? And we discovered some internal memos between Whitehall officials basically saying that Margaret Crabb must not know the truth.

And so they decided to put out an official story, which was that Crabb had drowned while undertaking secret Royal Navy underwater tests. But Margaret Crabb was very unsatisfied with this. They offered absolutely nothing. They simply said, this is what happened. with this. They offered absolutely nothing. They simply said, this is what happened. And we found these memos really showing how they were beginning to spin the story, to give their own version of events. And I think that where things really span out of control is when this reached the House of Commons. So Anthony Eden is facing very hostile questions from the opposition Labour Party who want to know what the hell happened to Lionel Crowe. What was going on in Portsmouth

Harbour? So they ask some very, very difficult questions. And Anthony Eden gives the most extraordinary response in the House of Commons. He simply says, it would not be in the public interest for me to reveal any information whatsoever about the Lionel Crabb affair. And I think this is the point where the story began to spin out of control. Because in the absence of information, in the absence of the government allowing anything to be put into the public domain, you have the most extraordinary conspiracy theories really take on a life of their own. The newspapers are full of this story. It's front page news. They can't get enough of it because they want to know there's something dodgy going on here.

What is it? So, Giles, the rest of the files, though, in the National Archives are closed until when? So, this is the extraordinary thing. Normally, though, in the National Archives are closed until when? So this is the extraordinary thing. You know, normally sensitive, highly sensitive material may be closed for 20 years or 30 years, and then it's released into the public domain. That's simply how it works. There is one crucial file on Lionel Crabb that reveals exactly what happened and exactly who was implicated in this story. That file is held by the Cabinet Office and they refused to release it for 100 years after Lionel Crabb's disappearance. That's to say they won't release it until 2057. A 100-year embargo is absolutely extraordinary. So I, of course, immediately put in a freedom of information

request. I didn't know at the time who held this missing file, but it transpired that it was a cabinet office. I put in a request demanding, as you can do, that they release the file immediately. To my surprise, I got an answer within four weeks, which said, yes, we do hold the file, but we need more time to consider the implication of releasing it into the public domain. Another four weeks passed, I got another reply saying we need more time and another four weeks, we need more time. Every month, I got a letter from the cabinet office saying we need more time. Finally, I did get a response and they said, there's no way we are releasing this Lionel Crabb file into the public domain because it concerns

national security, which is ridiculous. I mean, 70 years have passed. There's almost no one still left alive who is implicated in the Lionel Crabb affair. So we had to then go on, really try to work out what could be so sensitive that means that this file cannot be released until 2057. What is it? And it really began to dawn on us that not only does the Lionel Crabb affair involve MI6, the CIA and the KGB, all three agencies are completely involved in this affair. But also the royal family is highly implicated in what happened to Lionel Crabbe. And this is the reason why they won't release the missing file, if you like, this crucial file until 2057. Oh my God, he was Princess Margaret's lover. Oh, brilliant. I love it, Charles. Okay. Well, listen, you're not going to tell us. So how can everybody find out that I'm desperate

now? I'm desperate. So we do reveal what took much to our surprise. Actually, I have to say, when I set out on this project, I'd already written about the story of Lionel Crabbe in a book I'd written of short sort of fascinating little footnotes from history. And I had not really been able to find much about it. It was just one of these intriguing stories. So when I set out on this sort of mission, this quest with my producer, we were not convinced we'd really be able to get to the bottom of it. We just thought this is an absolutely cracking mystery. But what happened in the course of investigating it, as I said, we found a lot of people who were implicated in the story at the time were still alive. We also interviewed some of the country's leading experts on all sorts of things like conspiracy theories. We interviewed Dr. Richard

Shepard, who investigated all the conspiracy theories of the Princess Diana when she died. And he was very much involved in the Princess Diana inquiry. He was invaluable for us in sorting out myth from truth. We interviewed a forensic hydrologist, the world's leading expert on how bodies move underwater, all sorts of things. We were trying to really get to the bottom of this. But the key person I think we managed to find was a 97 year old widow a woman who'd never spoken on record before she'd never wanted to go public about what her story from 1956 she was Portsmouth based at the time and she was absolutely fantastic in episode eight we have this exclusive interview with 97 year old Mary Julie which really corroborates, gives credence

to exactly what we are absolutely certain happened to Lionel Crabb and why Whitehall to this day will not release that crucial Lionel Crabb file. Well, that's very exciting indeed. How can people get the podcast? It's called Ministry of Secrets, and it is on every platform. It's an eight-part series, and hopefully it will have you hanging on to the edge of your seat. I'm sure it will. Thank you very much, Giles, for coming on the pod and talking about it. Thank you for having me on once again.

Great pleasure to talk with you.