Eden orders an enquiry into the disappearance of Commander ‘Buster’ Crabb: 9 May 1956 Posted on: 9 May 2016 It would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death.1 Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb in 1944 (Imperial War Museum)
Mystery of the missing frogman Sixty years ago today, on 9 May 1956 the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, wrote to Sir Edward Bridges, former Cabinet Secretary, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury and Head of the Home Civil Service, and charged him with carrying out an enquiry into the circumstances in which a retired Naval Commander, Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb, had on 19 April carried out an intelligence operation against Russian warships in Portsmouth Harbour—a diving mission from which he had not returned. Eden wanted to know on what authority the operation had been carried out, and why its failure had not been reported to ministers until 4 May. On 9 May the Prime Minister also answered, in three uninformative sentences, a Parliamentary Question that had in fact been put to the First Lord of the Admiralty, refusing all requests for amplification. Neither the note to Bridges nor the Parliamentary statement reveals fully the fury felt by Eden over this episode. He had specifically forbidden intelligence operations during the visit to the UK of Soviet leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev, respectively Premier and First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was a goodwill visit, offering the opportunity for productive talks at a time of relative thaw in Anglo-Soviet relations. But to the UK’s intelligence agencies, it offered a rare opportunity for intelligence procurement. Although Eden had already vetoed the idea of placing microphones in Claridges Hotel (‘I am sorry but we cannot do anything of this kind on this occasion’), 2 an operation mounted by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), tasked by Naval Intelligence, without the knowledge or approval of ministers, had gone wrong disastrously and very publicly: by 9 May the press were already running a series of sensational stories.
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