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 bizarre and enduring espionage mysteries of the Cold War deepened yesterday when a retired Russian sailor came forward to claim that he had killed Buster Crabb, the naval war hero who died while spying on a Soviet ship docked in Portsmouth harbour in 1956.

The headless body of Commander Lionel “Buster” Crabb was washed up on the Sussex shore 14 months after a secret mission – to inspect the hull of the Soviet cruiser that had brought Nikita Khrushchev, the Russian President, on a state visit to Britain – went horribly wrong.

For more than half a century, MI6 has refused to explain what Crabb was doing, how he died and why a middle-aged, unhealthy veteran was chosen for a highly dangerous and diplomatically disastrous mission.

Eduard Koltsov has now given an interview to a Russian documentary team in which he claims that he was ordered to dive beneath the ship and investigate after a frogman was spotted in the water. Mr Koltsov claims that he cut Crabb’s throat after finding him attaching a limpet mine to the hull, according to a BBC report.

Mr Koltsov, who was then 23, was said to have shown the documentary-makers the dagger that he used to kill 47-year-old Crabb. “I saw a silhouette of a diver who was fiddling with something at the starboard, next to the ship’s ammunition stores. I swam closer and saw that he was fixing a mine,” he said.

Members of Crabb’s family expressed doubts that the former naval commander would have been sent to blow up the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, an act that would almost certainly have ignited war with the Soviet Union. “I simply don’t believe it,” said Lomond Handley, a relative of Crabb who has spent many years trying to unravel the affair.

The precise nature of Crabb’s mission has never been explained. What is certain, from documents released last year, is that British officials went to extraordinary lengths to try to cover it up. The former Royal Navy frogman was apparently recruited by MI6 to examine the cruiser for mine-laying hatches and sonar equipment, in direct defiance of orders from Downing Street.

During the Second World War, Crabb specialised in removing German limpet mines from Allied shipping, and was awarded the George Medal for bravery in 1944. He was nicknamed “Buster” after Buster Crabbe, the American Olympic swimmer and actor.

An eccentric figure on land, Crabb sported a monocle and carried a swordstick with a handle carved in the shape of a crab. But by 1956, he was past his prime. Far from being a James Bond character, he was by then middle-aged, drinking and smoking heavily, and in poor health.

The Crabb affair, one of the oddest and most unwise missions in espionage history, was a diplomatic disaster, prompting Soviet anger, the early retirement of the MI6 director John Sinclair, and a flood of speculation that continues today.

The official line from the Admiralty was that Crabb had died while “specially employed in connection with trials of certain underwater apparatus”. Sir Anthony Eden, then the Prime Minister, was questioned in the Commons and merely compounded the mystery by saying that any disclosure of the circumstances surrounding Crabb’s death would “not be in the public interest”.

He added that Crabb had acted “without the authority or the knowledge of Her Majesty’s ministers”, an indication that MI6 had ignored Eden’s instructions not to spy on the visiting Russians. At the time, it was reported that a Soviet seaman had spotted a frogman close to the ship, but government press officers were instructed to mount a cover-up.

The coroner could not determine a cause of death, prompting a wave of conspiracy theories: some claimed the frogman had been decapitated by the propellers of the Ordzhonikidze, others that he had been brainwashed or murdered by the Russians. Some suggested he had defected, having been recruited as a communist spy by Anthony Blunt.

Nicholas Elliott, a former MI6 officer who had been involved in the mission, claimed in his memoirs that Crabb “almost certainly died of respiratory trouble, being a heavy smoker and not in the best of health, or because some fault developed in his equipment”.

This year the Ministry of Defence disclosed that, in 1955, navy divers had successfully carried out an unauthorised espionage operation to inspect sonar equipment on a Soviet cruiser in Portsmouth.

Crabb has often been cited as one of the models for James Bond. Ian Fleming knew Elliott and was fascinated by the Crabb affair, but there is no evidence that Crabb was the original Bond: James Bond, for a start, is always successful, whereas Crabb, self-evidently, was not.

Fleming did use the incident as inspiration for Thunderball, in which Bond sets out to investigate the hull of the Disco Volante. Unlike Crabb, however, Bond returns intact.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Swine flu vaccine for all as drug rushed through
• Artificial sperm and the race to build a baby
• BBC jets out stars to tout for prizes