How The Times reported the story in 1956

The Soviets reveal Commander Crabb had been sighted near their ships

Prime Minister Anthony Eden refuses to reveal further details

Eden under pressure in the Commons

One of the most enduring mysteries of the Cold War – who killed Commander Lionel "Buster" Crabb? – may finally have been solved.

A retired Russian frogman claimed that he cut the British diver's throat in Portsmouth harbour when he caught him placing a mine on the hull of a ship that had brought Nikita Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders to Britain in April 1956.

But the claim was dismissed by one of Commander Crabb's relatives, who said that it was unthinkable that a Royal Navy diver would have deliberately endangered a visiting ship.

According to a BBC News report, the diver, Eduard Koltsov, spoke to a Russian documentary team because he needed to tell the truth before his own death.

Mr Koltsov, who was 23 at the time, said that he was ordered to investigate suspicious activity around the ship, the cruiser Ordzhonikidze, when he spotted Commander Crabb fixing a mine to the hull.

He then showed the documentary team the dagger he claims that he used to kill the Englishman and the Red Star medal that he was later awarded secretly for his bravery.

“I saw a silhouette of a diver in a light frogman suit who was fiddling with something at the starboard, next to the ship’s ammunition stores,” Mr Koltsov told the film crew, according to the BBC. “I swam closer and saw that he was fixing a mine.”

Crabb was a pioneering Royal Navy frogman who had received the George Cross in 1944 for removing German limpet mines from merchant ships in Gibraltar harbour. He remained in the Navy after the war, rising to the rank of commander, and was later described as having helped to inspire Ian Fleming's fictional British spy James Bond.

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