A corpse lies on the mortuary table.
The head and hands are missing and the torso has been badly mutilated.
To whom does it belong?
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| Lionel: was his the headless corpse? |
The identity of the cadaver - found in the sea near Chichester in the summer of 1957 - was to prove a mystery to police. It remains one of the great mysteries of the Cold War.
The story begins on April 19, 1956, when a man named Lionel Crabb dived into Portsmouth harbour on a highly secretive mission.
Crabb was an agent working for MI6 and the apparent target of his mission was a Soviet cruiser at anchor in the harbour. The cruiser - Ordzhonikidze - had brought Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev on a diplomatic visit to Britain.
The ship’s presence in British waters presented military intelligence with a unique opportunity to study the capability of Soviet weaponry.
MI6 was particularly interested in discovering more about the newly designed propeller that had been installed on the cruiser.
But was that the real reason why they sent Crabb into the chill waters of Porstmouth harbour?
The only certainty is that Crabb - who had many years of experience as a diver - was never seen alive again. He was declared missing - presumed dead - after his dive.
It was not long before questions began to be asked about Crabb’s mysterious disappearance.
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| Khrushchev: happy to be in England |
The British establishment worked frantically behind the scenes, doing everything it could to cover up the espionage mission. On April 29 - 10 days after the dive - the Admiralty announced that Crabb had inexplicably vanished while taking part in secret trials of underwater weaponry.
But this was hotly disputed by the Soviets, who released a statement to the effect that the Ordzhonikidze’s crew had spotted a diver close to the cruiser on April 19. This diver was believed to be Crabb.
With precious little accurate information to hand, British newspapers began to speculate. They reported rumours that Khrushchev’s crew had captured Crabb and taken him to the Soviet Union for interrogation.
The prime minister, Anthony Eden, fuelled speculation by publicly announcing that it was not in the public interest to disclose any information about the disappearance of Lionel Crabb.
And there the story might have ended, were it not for the fact that on 9 June, 1957 - more than a year later - a body was found floating in the waters of Chichester Harbour. Identification was never going to be easy for the corpse was missing its head and hands. Was it that of Lionel Crabb?
Crabb's ex-wife was unable to identify the body, and nor was his girlfriend Pat Rose. But there was a third person on hand for purposes of identification.
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| Ordzhonikidze - what nice propellors |
Sydney Knowles was a close friend of Crabb and also his sometime diving partner. He was now asked to identify the corpse.
It was in a terrible state of decomposition, for much of the torso had been eaten away. But the lower half was reasonably well preserved and Knowles immediately looked for the tell-tale scar just below Crabb’s left knee.
It was not there.
Yet Knowles - even though he was certain that this was not the corpse of his old friend - told the police that it was. He would later admit to the Mail on Sunday that he had been ordered by MI5 to positively identify it as Crabb’s body
Why? In order - he said - to cover up MI5’s murder of Lionel Crabb.
Crabb, it was rumored, had been intending to defect to the USSR. His diving mission had been set up by MI5 with the express purpose of killing him in order to silence him.
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| Cold War: it'll be over by Christmas! |
To this end, he had been accompanied by a second diver who murdered Crabb underwater in order to save the Secret Service from any embarrassing revelations.
But even this version of events has been hotly disputed. In a 2007 BBC interview, a Soviet frogman named Eduard Koltsov claimed that Crabb had been spotted attempting to place a mine on the hull of the Ordzhonikidze in order to blow it up.
Koltsov told the BBC that he had personally slit Crabb’s throat. He even had the dagger to prove it.
So who is telling the truth? Alas, we’ll have to wait a little longer. The mysterious disappearance of Lionel Crabb will eventually be solved, for all the relevant documents are in still in existence.
But they are not scheduled for release into the public domain until 2057.
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