A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

13

The Third Man

Colonel Marcus Lipton MP, the Labour member for Brixton, was a stuffy, old-fashioned trouble-maker, who distrusted government and loathed modern music, which he believed would bring down the monarchy. ‘If pop music is going to be used to destroy our established institutions, then it must be destroyed first,’ he once declared. He specialised in asking awkward questions. No one ever accused Lipton of being subtle, but he had a firm grip on political procedure, and in particular ‘parliamentary privilege’, the ancient right of MPs to make statements in Westminster without danger of prosecution.

On Tuesday 25 October, he rose to his feet during Prime Minister’s Questions, and dropped a bombshell:

Has the Prime Minister made up his mind to cover up at all costs the dubious third man activities of Mr Harold Philby who was first secretary at the Washington embassy a little time ago, and is he determined to stifle all discussions on the very great matters which were evaded in the White Paper, which is an insult to the intelligence of the country?

This was raw meat for the press: a feeding frenzy erupted.

That afternoon, on a London Underground train heading home, Kim Philby’s eyes idly wandered to the newspaper headline on the front page of the first edition of his neighbour’s copy of the Evening Standard: ‘MP talks of “Dubious Third Man Activities of Mr Harold Philby”.’ The newspaper reported Lipton’s words verbatim. After more than two decades in hiding, Philby had been flushed into the open.

Back in Crowborough, Philby immediately called Nicholas Elliott.

‘My name is in the newspapers. I have to do something.’

Elliott was calm. ‘I agree with you. Certainly. But let’s think about it for a day, at least. Don’t do anything for a day, all right? I’ll call you tomorrow.’

Making a statement at this stage would only add fuel to an already raging fire, and ‘might prejudice the case’. If Marcus Lipton had new evidence implicating Philby, he would surely have passed it on to the authorities and MI5 would have acted on it. The MP was simply repeating what had already appeared in the American press, under cover of parliamentary privilege. Harold Macmillan, as the minister in charge of the Foreign Office and MI6, would have to make a statement, either supporting Philby, or damning him: since MI5 plainly lacked the evidence to prosecute, there was a good chance Philby might be exonerated. Elliott’s advice was to stand firm, say nothing, ride out the storm, and allow his friends in MI6 to go to work on his behalf.

‘We’ve decided that you naturally must respond,’ Elliott told him the next day. ‘But it should be done only when the parliamentary debates begin. Please bear up for two weeks.’

The Crowborough house presented a bizarre spectacle, with dozens of journalists camped out on the lawn. They followed Philby to the pub at lunchtime, and then trailed him back again, asking questions which he declined, most politely, to answer. The telephone rang incessantly. The Sunday Express posted a letter through the front door, offering £100 if Philby would take part in a public debate with Marcus Lipton. Elliott worried about the ‘additional stress for Aileen and the children’, and helped to spirit them away to stay with a relative. Philby himself took refuge with his mother in her South Kensington flat, where he disconnected the doorbell and stuffed the telephone under a pile of cushions. The press tore off the door knocker in their efforts to gain access. A journalist tried to climb in through the fire escape, terrifying the cook.

The government had promised to make a statement and hold a debate on 7 November. Elliott now set to work ensuring that when Macmillan came to speak, he would say the right thing. The man selected to brief the Foreign Secretary on this tricky issue was none other than Richard Brooman-White, Elliott’s friend from Eton and Trinity, who had helped to recruit Philby into MI6 during the war. Brooman-White had left the secret service for a career in politics, and in 1951 was elected Conservative MP for Rutherglen. Philby, Elliott and Brooman-White had been friends since 1939. When Parliament was sitting, Brooman-White lived in the top floor of Elliott’s house in Wilton Street; Elizabeth Elliott worked as his secretary; Claudia Elliott was his goddaughter; Elliott and Brooman-White even shared ownership of a racehorse. Brooman-White was the parliamentary voice of the Robber Barons, and Philby’s most vigorous defender in the House of Commons. In Philby’s words, Elliott, Brooman-White and his other allies remained ‘absolutely convinced I had been accused unfairly [and] simply could not imagine their friend could be a communist. They sincerely believed me and supported me.’

The brief Brooman-White drew up for Macmillan purported to be unbiased, but ‘leaned heavily in favour of Philby’s innocence’. There was no hard evidence, Brooman-White insisted; his former colleague had lost his job simply because of a youthful dalliance with communism and an ill-advised friendship with Guy Burgess. These views chimed with Macmillan’s own instincts. An aristocratic Old Etonian, Macmillan regarded intelligence work as faintly dirty, and the row over Philby as an unnecessary spat between MI5 and MI6. He dearly wished to avoid a scandal, let alone a trial. ‘Nothing would be worse than a lot of muckraking and innuendo,’ Macmillan told the Cabinet, just five days before Lipton launched his attack. The Foreign Secretary simply wanted this embarrassing, unseemly mess to go away.

On 7 November, Macmillan rose in the House of Commons, and made a statement that might have been written by Nicholas Elliott and Richard Brooman-White, and probably was.

Mr Philby had Communist associates during and after his university days [but] no evidence has been found to show that he was responsible for warning Burgess or Maclean. While in Government service he carried out his duties ably and conscientiously. I have no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country, or to identify him with the so-called ‘third man’ if, indeed, there was one.

Richard Brooman-White followed up with a rousing defence of Philby – ‘a man whose name has been smeared’ – and a ferocious attack on Marcus Lipton as a McCarthyite witch-hunter, too cowardly to repeat his allegations outside the House of Commons and face the legal consequences.

He [Lipton] is in favour of acting on suspicion, of smearing on suspicion, by directing public suspicion on to an individual against whom nothing at all has been proved. We must leave it to his own conscience to straighten out what that may cost in personal suffering to the wife, children and friends of the person involved. The only thing that has been proved against Mr Philby is that he had Burgess staying with him and he had certain Communist friends. He may not have been very wise in his choice of friends, but what honourable member of this House could say that all his friends were people against whom no shadow of suspicion could ever be cast?

From the Labour benches came grumbling claims of another whitewash. ‘Whoever is covering up whom and on what pretext, whether because of the membership of a circle or a club, or because of good fellowship or whatever it may be, they must think again and think quickly,’ declared Frank Tomney MP, a tough northerner.

Lipton tried to fight back. ‘I will not be gagged by anybody in this House or outside in the performance of my duty,’ he blustered. ‘Say it outside!’ chorused the Tories. Lipton limply responded: ‘Even Mr Philby has not asked for it to be repeated outside.’ He then sat down, visibly sagging.

Philby now went in for the kill. Elliott had tipped him off that he would be cleared by Macmillan, but mere exoneration was not enough: he needed Lipton to retract his allegations, publicly, humiliatingly and quickly. After a telephone consultation with Elliott, he instructed his mother to inform all callers that he would be holding a press conference in Dora’s Drayton Gardens flat the next morning.

*

When Philby opened the door a few minutes before 11 a.m. on 8 November, he was greeted with gratifying proof of his new celebrity. The stairwell was packed with journalists from the world’s press. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘Do come in.’ Philby had prepared carefully. Freshly shaved and neatly barbered, he wore a well-cut pinstriped suit, a sober and authoritative tie, and his most charming smile. The journalists trooped into his mother’s sitting room, where they packed themselves around the walls. Camera flashes popped. In a conspicuous (and calculated) act of old world gallantry, Philby asked a journalist sitting in an armchair if he would mind giving up his seat to a lady journalist forced to stand in the doorway. The man leapt to his feet. The television cameras rolled.

What followed was a dramatic tour de force, a display of cool public dishonesty that few politicians or lawyers could match. There was no trace of a stammer, no hint of nerves or embarrassment. Philby looked the world in the eye with a steady gaze, and lied his head off. Footage of Philby’s famous press conference is still used as a training tool by MI6, a master class in mendacity.

Philby first read a prepared statement, explaining that he had not spoken out before because, having signed the Official Secrets Act, he could not legally disclose information derived from his position as a government official. ‘The efficiency of our security services can only be reduced by publicity given to their organisation, personnel and techniques,’ he intoned, sounding exactly like a Whitehall mandarin upholding the ancient rules of British secrecy. Edwin Newman, an American journalist with NBC, was delegated to ask the questions:

If there was a third man, were you in fact the third man?

No, I was not.

Do you think there was one?

No comment.

Mr Philby, you yourself were asked to resign from the Foreign Office a few months after Burgess and Maclean disappeared. The Foreign Secretary said in the past you had communist associations. That is why you were asked to resign?

I was asked to resign because of an imprudent association.

That is your association with Burgess?

Correct.

What about the alleged communist associations? Can you say anything about them?

The last time I spoke to a communist, knowing him to be a communist, was some time in 1934.

That implies that you have spoken to communists unknowingly and not known about it.

Well, I spoke to Burgess last in April or May, 1951.

He gave you no idea that he was a communist at all?

Never.

Would you still regard Burgess, who lived with you for a while in Washington, as a friend of yours? How do you feel about him now?

I consider his action deplorable . . .

And here Philby paused, for just a beat: a man, it seemed, wrestling with his own conflicted feelings, his duty, conscience and personal loyalty, and the pain of betrayal by a dear friend.

. . . on the subject of friendship, I’d prefer to say as little as possible, because it’s very complicated.

As for Lipton, Philby invited his accuser to repeat his allegations outside the House of Commons, or else hand over whatever information he had to the proper authorities.

The press conference came to an end. Philby, ever the generous host, served the assembled journalists beer and sherry in his mother’s dining room. ‘I see you understand the habits of the press very well,’ joked an American reporter. The resulting press coverage contained no suggestion that Philby was anything other than an honest, upright government official, brought down by his friendship with a secret communist, and now definitively absolved. The Soviet intelligence officer Yuri Modin watched the press conference on the evening news, and marvelled at Philby’s ‘breathtaking’ performance: ‘Kim played his cards with consummate cunning. We concluded, just as he had, that the British government had no serious evidence against him.’

Marcus Lipton had no choice but to retreat in ignominy, formally withdrawing his accusations, which he ‘deeply regretted’.

‘My evidence was insubstantial,’ the MP admitted. ‘When it came to a showdown my legal advisers counselled me to retract.’ Philby issued a clipped and gracious statement: ‘Colonel Lipton has done the right thing. So far as I am concerned, the incident is now closed.’

Philby’s triumph was complete. Elliott was ‘overjoyed’ at Philby’s victory and the prospect of bringing him back into the firm. The Robber Barons would now actively ‘seek his reemployment by his old service’, which in turn raised the prospect, for Philby, of ‘further service to the Soviet cause’.

Elliott had rehabilitated his old friend, just as his own career was about to take a most almighty dive.

*

In the dawn light of 19 April 1956, a peculiar figure in a rubber diving suit and flippers waddled sideways down the King’s Stairs at Portsmouth Harbour, and clambered into a waiting dinghy. The man was no more than five feet five inches tall. On his head he wore a woolly balaclava with a diving cap on top, and on his back a tank with enough oxygen for a ninety-minute dive. He was a decorated war hero, Britain’s most famous frogman, and his name was Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb.

In the distance, through the drifting mist, loomed the faint shapes of three Soviet warships, newly arrived in Britain on a goodwill mission and berthed alongside the Southern Railway Jetty. An oarsman rowed the boat out some eighty yards offshore. Crabb adjusted his air tank, picked up a new experimental camera issued by the Admiralty Research Department, and extinguished the last of the cigarettes he had smoked continuously since waking. His task was to swim underneath the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, explore and photograph her keel, propellers and rudder, and then return. It would be a long, cold swim, alone, in extremely cold and dirty water, with almost zero visibility at a depth of about thirty feet. The job might have daunted a much younger and healthier man. For a forty-seven-year-old, unfit, chain-smoking depressive, who had been extremely drunk a few hours earlier, it was close to suicidal.

The mission, codenamed ‘Operation Claret’, bore all the hallmarks of a Nicholas Elliott escapade: it was daring, imaginative, unconventional and completely unauthorised.

Seven months earlier, Nikita Khrushchev had announced that he would visit Britain for the first time, accompanied by his premier, Nikolai Bulganin. The First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party would travel aboard the latest Russian cruiser, the Ordzhonikidze, escorted by two destroyers. The Soviet leader would then be taken by special train to London, and dine at Number Ten with the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. The visit was hailed by diplomats as an important thaw in the Cold War. The spies saw other opportunities.

The Soviets were rumoured to have developed a new type of propeller, as well as enhanced underwater sonar technology to evade submarines. With the arms race running at full tilt, MI6 and Naval Intelligence wanted to find out more. There was also an element of tit for tat. British warships had recently docked in Leningrad, and ‘frogmen had popped up all over the place’, in Elliott’s words. Anything the Soviets could do, MI6 could do better, and more secretly.

The intelligence services sprang into action. MI5 set about bugging the Soviet leader’s suite at Claridge’s Hotel, and installed a listening device in the telephone. The Naval Intelligence Department urged that the investigation of the undersides of the Soviet vessels be undertaken as ‘a matter of high intelligence priority’. Elliott, the London station chief for MI6, was charged with exploiting this golden opportunity for espionage. As he put it, with typical ribaldry: ‘We wanted a closer look at those Russian ladies’ bottoms.’ He knew just the man for the job.

Lionel Crabb earned his nickname from the American actor, athlete and pin-up Buster Crabbe, who had played Flash Gordon in the film series and won a gold medal for swimming at the 1932 Olympics. In almost every way, the English Buster Crabb was entirely unlike his namesake, being English, tiny, and a poor swimmer (without flippers, he could barely complete three lengths of a swimming pool). With his long nose, bright eyes and miniature frame, he might have been an aquatic garden gnome. He was, however, spectacularly brave, and supremely resilient. Born to a poor family in South London, he first served in the Merchant Navy and then joined the Royal Navy after the outbreak of war, training as a diver. In 1942 he was dispatched to Gibraltar, to take part in the escalating underwater battle around the Rock, where Italian frogmen, using manned torpedoes and limpet mines, were sinking thousands of tons of Allied shipping. Crabb and his fellow divers set out to stop them, with remarkable success, blowing up enemy divers with depth charges, intercepting torpedoes and peeling mines off the hulls of ships. When war ended, Crabb cleared mines from the ports of Venice and Livorno, and when the militant Zionist group Irgun began attacking British ships with underwater explosives, he was called in to defuse them. The risks were staggering, but Crabb survived and was duly awarded the George Medal for ‘undaunted devotion to duty’. He became, briefly, a celebrity. Small boys mobbed him, and he frequently appeared in the newspapers. Long after demobilisation, Crabb continued to do odd, secret or particularly dangerous underwater jobs for the Navy.

Elliott had got to know Crabb during the war, and considered him ‘a most engaging man of the highest integrity . . . as well as being the best frogman in the country, probably in the world’. He cut a remarkable figure in civilian life, wearing beige tweeds, a monocle and a pork pie hat, and carrying a Spanish swordstick with a silver knob carved into the shape of a crab. But there was another, darker side to this ‘kindly bantam cock’. Crabb suffered from deep depressions, and had a weakness for gambling, alcohol and barmaids. When taking a woman out to dinner he liked to dress up in his frogman outfit; unsurprisingly, this seldom had the desired effect, and his emotional life was a mess. In 1956 he was in the process of getting divorced after a marriage that had lasted only a few months. He worked, variously, as a model, undertaker and art salesman, but like many men who had seen vivid wartime action, he found peace a pallid disappointment. He was also feeling his age. When Elliott contacted him, Buster Crabb was working at Espresso Furnishings in Seymour Place, selling tables to cafés. Crabb accepted the mission without hesitation. He wanted, he said, ‘to get m’ feet wet again, get m’ gills back’. Money was not discussed. Instead, Elliott joked that if the investigation of the Ordzhonikidze proved successful, Crabb could be assured of ‘supplies of whisky for many years’. Others were doubtful that Crabb was up to the task. John Henry, the MI6 technical officer, pointed out that the diver seemed to be ‘heading for a heart attack’. But Elliott insisted that ‘Crabb was still the most experienced frogman in England, and totally trustworthy . . . He begged to do the job for patriotic as well as personal motives.’ Ted Davies, a former sailor who headed MI6’s naval liaison unit, was assigned as his case officer.

Operation Claret proceeded with the sort of smoothness that suggested no one in authority was paying adequate attention. Michael Williams, a Foreign Office official recently posted to oversee MI6, was handed a list of possible operations for the Soviet visit. ‘The dicey operations [are] at the beginning of the file and the safer ones at the back,’ he was told. Williams was distracted by the death of his father that morning. A short while later he handed the file back without comment. MI6 assumed this amounted to Foreign Office approval; Williams assumed someone senior to him must already have given the go-ahead; the Admiralty assumed that MI6 was responsible, since it was carrying out the mission; and MI6 assumed the Admiralty was in the driving seat, since it had asked for the information in the first place. And the Prime Minister assumed that no spies were doing anything, because that was exactly what he had ordered them to do.

Back in September, when the Khrushchev trip was first mooted, Anthony Eden stated categorically: ‘These ships are our guests and, however we think others would behave, we should take no action which involves the slightest risk of detection.’ Eden shared Macmillan’s distaste for spying, and was not about to have the adventurers of MI6 spoiling this moment of delicate international diplomacy. When Elliott was later quizzed about who had signed off on the operation, and in what capacity, his shrugging reply was most revealing. ‘We don’t have a chain of command. We work like a club.’

A week before the Soviet delegation arrived, Anthony Eden learned that plans were being hatched for underwater surveillance of the Ordzhonikidze, and put his foot down even more firmly. ‘I am sorry, but we cannot do anything of this kind on this occasion,’ he wrote. Elliott would later insist that the ‘operation was mounted after receiving a written assurance of the Navy’s interest and in the firm belief that government clearance had been given’. He either did not know about the Prime Minister’s veto or, more likely, didn’t care.

Kim Philby, meanwhile, was in Ireland. Immediately after the triumphant press conference, William Allen, a friend who had been press counsellor at the British embassy in Turkey, offered him a job writing a centenary history of his family firm, David Allen & Sons, a large printing and poster company. Allen was an Old Etonian, and it is possible that Elliott had a hand in arranging what was, in effect, a ‘working holiday’. Allen was also a fascist sympathiser, a close friend of Oswald Mosley and as far removed from his guest, politically, as it was possible to be. This did not stop Philby from spending several months living at Allen’s expense in the family home in County Waterford, writing a very boring book about printing, ink and paper. He returned to Britain just as Operation Claret was being uncorked. Philby knew ‘Crabbie’ well. As head of the Iberian section of Section V, he had been involved in Crabb’s wartime exploits off Gibraltar. Elliott would surely have been unable to resist telling Philby that he had brought the great frogman, their old comrade in arms, out of retirement in order to pay an underwater call on the visiting Soviet delegation.

The day before the Soviet mini flotilla was due to arrive, Buster Crabb and Ted Davies took the train to Portsmouth and checked in to the Sally Port Hotel. Davies, somewhat unimaginatively, signed in as ‘Smith’, but added ‘attached Foreign Office’; Crabb signed the hotel register in his own name. He then contacted a friend, Lieutenant George Franklin, the diving instructor from the training ship HMS Vernon, who had agreed, unofficially, to help him prepare for the dive and supply additional equipment. The next day Crabb watched through powerful binoculars as the Soviet warships cruised into port. Then he went on a bender. Crabb had many friends in Portsmouth, and they all wanted to buy him a drink. During his prolonged pub crawl, Crabb was heard to boast that he was being paid sixty guineas to go ‘down to take a dekko at the Russian bottoms’. The night before the dive, Crabb drank five double whiskies, with a similar number of beer ‘chasers’.

The next morning, Franklin helped him into his two-piece Pirelli diving suit, purchased from Heinke of Chichester, handed him his flippers, and adjusted the valves on his air tank. Two uniformed policemen escorted them through the docks, and down the King’s Stairs. Franklin rowed the boat, while Crabb sat smoking in the stern. At around 7 a.m., Crabb checked his gear for the last time, and slipped backwards over the gunwale with a gentle splash, leaving behind a trail of bubbles in the murky water. Twenty minutes later, he reappeared, a little breathless, and asked Franklin to attach ‘an extra pound of weight’. Then he was gone.

Aboard the Ordzhonikidze, the Soviets were waiting.

What happened next has been a matter of conjecture, imaginative guesswork and a great deal of pure fantasy ever since.

In 2007, a seventy-year-old retired Soviet sailor named Eduard Koltsov came forward with this account. Koltsov claimed to have been trained as a combat frogman by the Soviet navy, as part of a team known as the ‘Barracudas’. In 1956, he was twenty-two and stationed aboard the Ordzhonikidze. On the morning of 19 April he was ordered to dive beneath the ship and patrol for any spying frogmen: at around 8 a.m., on the starboard side of the hull, he spotted a diver carrying what he took to be a limpet mine. At first the swimmer seemed so small that Koltsov thought it was a boy. Swimming up behind him, and believing the ship was in imminent danger, Koltsov says he drew a knife, severed the frogman’s air tubes, and then cut his throat. The body then floated to the harbour bottom. Koltsov said he had been awarded a Soviet medal for this action, and even produced the knife with which he claimed to have killed Lionel Crabb.

Koltsov’s claim is no more, or less, plausible than the myriad other theories that still cluster around the strange case of Commander Crabb, a story so encrusted with myth that it will never be fully solved. But one part of Koltsov’s story has a clear ring of truth: ‘A tip-off from a British spy meant that he had been lying in wait.’ There now seems little doubt that the Soviet delegation was fully prepared for Crabb’s underwater visit. Three Soviet sailors saw the frogman pop up between two of the ships, before diving again. That was the last time Buster Crabb was seen alive.

As the sun came up over Portsmouth harbour with no sign of Crabb, George Franklin came to the appalled realisation that something terrible had happened. He rowed back to the steps, and told Ted Davies that Crabb had vanished. Under normal circumstances, rescue teams would have been sent to scour the harbour at once in the hope of finding the missing frogman alive, but to do so would have alerted the Soviets to what was going on. Davies hurtled back to the Sally Port Hotel, packed up his own belongings and those of Crabb, and rushed back to London. The news of Crabb’s disappearance sent a flood of panic through the upper reaches of British intelligence. ‘There will be blood all over the floor,’ predicted one MI5 officer, before resorting to cricketing metaphor, as Englishmen do in times of stress: ‘We’ll all be for the pavilion.’

A classic cover-up ensued, as MI5, MI6 and Naval Intelligence conspired to conceal the truth from their political bosses, the visiting Soviet delegation, and the public. An official lie was prepared, stating that Crabb had been ‘specially employed in connection with trials of certain underwater apparatus’ and had not returned from a test dive in Stokes Bay, about three miles from Portsmouth; he was now missing and ‘presumed drowned’. A police officer was despatched to the Sally Port Hotel, where he tore out the incriminating pages from the hotel register. The hotel owner was told it was all hush-hush, and warned to keep his mouth shut. But Dick White of MI5 knew what was coming. ‘I’m afraid it rather looks to me as if the lid will come off before too long,’ he predicted grimly. Crabb’s family and friends were becoming alarmed; the press was sniffing around, and the Soviets were determined to extract maximum diplomatic capital from the situation.

The evening after Crabb’s disappearance, Anthony Eden hosted a dinner in London for the Soviet leader, attended by ministers and members of the Royal Family. In the course of the banquet Nikita Khrushchev mentioned the Ordzhonikidze and made an apparently jocular reference to ‘missing or lost property’. Khrushchev was given to obscure utterances: everyone smiled, and no one had a clue what he was talking about. The next night Rear Admiral V. F. Kotov, the commander of the Soviet ship, attended a formal dinner hosted by the Portsmouth naval authorities. Over coffee he told his British counterpart that three days earlier, sailors aboard the destroyer Sovershenny, moored alongside the cruiser, had spotted a diver on the surface. With disingenuous concern, the Soviet admiral noted that the frogman seemed to be ‘in trouble’ and ‘he hoped he was all right’. The British admiral categorically denied that any diving operations had taken place that day.

The carefully timed Soviet inquiry made it impossible to keep the truth from the Prime Minister any longer. When Anthony Eden discovered that his direct orders had been ignored, a covert operation had been launched, a famous frogman was missing and probably dead, and the Soviets knew all about it, he hit the roof. The Prime Minister demanded to know who had authorised the dive, and why its failure had been concealed from him for four days. The press was now in frothing pursuit, Crabb’s family wanted answers, and the discovery that the hotel register had been doctored added momentum to what was already a galloping news story. On 5 May, the Soviets weighed in again with a formal diplomatic protest, demanding a full explanation for ‘such an unusual occurrence as the carrying out of secret diving operations alongside Soviet warships visiting the British Naval Base at Portsmouth’. The squirming diplomatic reply expressed ‘regret about this incident’, but continued to insist that Crabb’s approach to the destroyers was ‘completely unauthorised’. Disgracefully, a draft response drawn up by the Foreign Office, but never issued, tried to blame Crabb for his own death, claiming he had ‘paid no attention when recalled by his assistant’ and concluding ‘it can only be assumed that in a spirit of adventure he was determined on his own initiative to inspect the Russian ships . . . he died while diving on his unauthorised expedition’.

On 9 May, Eden made a statement in the House of Commons, through gritted teeth, in which he refused to provide details of the operation, while making it quite clear that he was not to blame.

It would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death. While it is the practice for ministers to accept responsibility, I think it is necessary in the special circumstances of this case to make it clear that what was done was done without the authority or knowledge of Her Majesty’s ministers. Appropriate disciplinary steps are being taken.

With unconcealed glee, the Soviet newspaper Pravda denounced what it called ‘a shameful operation of underwater espionage directed against those who come to the country on a friendly visit’.

Operation Claret was an unmitigated, gale-force cock-up: it embarrassed the government, offered the Soviets an open target, deepened Cold War suspicion, produced no useful intelligence, turned Eden’s diplomatic triumph to disaster, provoked renewed infighting between the secret services and led to the death of a certified war hero. A month later, Eden was still fuming, and demanding that heads should roll for this ‘misconceived and inept operation’. A twenty-three-page report on the incident, filled with bureaucratic obfuscation, was festooned with the Prime Minister’s furious jottings: ‘Ridiculous . . . Against Orders . . . This proves nothing’. The First Lord of the Admiralty offered his resignation. MI5 blamed what one officer called ‘a typical piece of MI6 adventurism, ill-conceived and badly executed’. The most prominent victim from the fallout was Sir John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair, the head of MI6. Eden ordered that his retirement be swiftly advanced, and by July 1956 he was gone, replaced by Dick White, who was moved from MI5 to take over the sister service. On arrival at MI6 headquarters, White’s new deputy, Jack Easton, warned him: ‘We’re still cloak and dagger. Fisticuffs. Too many swashbuckling green thumbs thinking we’re about to fight another second world war.’ There is no doubt who he was referring to.

Nicholas Elliott should have been fired, for what one colleague called a ‘one man Bay of Pigs’. Astonishingly, he survived; if not unscathed, then at least unsacked, an outcome that would have been highly unlikely in any other organisation. As Elliott had himself demonstrated, this was a club that looked after its members. With typical insouciance, he wrote: ‘A storm in a teacup was blown up by ineptitude into a major diplomatic incident which reflected unjustifiable discredit on MI6. The incompetence lay on the shoulders of the politicians, most notably Eden, in the way the matter was handled.’ Elliott remained in post as London station chief, flatly denying that he, or anyone else in the intelligence services, was to blame. For the rest of his life, Elliott defended the memory of Buster Crabb, insisting that his friend had perished in the line of duty. ‘Crabb was both brave and patriotic,’ wrote Elliott. ‘Qualities which inspired him to volunteer to do what he did.’ Crabb had proven his loyalty and that, in Elliott’s world, was all that mattered.

More than a year after Crabb’s disappearance, a fisherman spotted a decomposing body floating in the water off Pilsey Island in Chichester Harbour. The head and hands had rotted away completely, but a post mortem concluded, from distinguishing marks on the remains preserved inside the Pirelli diving suit, that the small corpse was that of Lionel Crabb. The coroner’s open verdict on the cause of death, and the absence of head and hands, left the way clear for a flood of conspiracy theory that has continued, virtually unabated, ever since: Crabb defected to the USSR; he was shot by a Soviet sniper; he had been captured and brainwashed and was working as a diving instructor for the Soviet navy; he had been deliberately planted on the Soviets as an MI6 double agent. A South African clairvoyant insisted Crabb had been sucked into a secret underwater compartment on the Ordzhonikidze, chained up and then dumped at sea. And so on. Eight years later, Marcus Lipton, the indefatigable MP, was still calling for the case to be reopened, without success. The Crabb mystery has never been fully explained, but the diminutive frogman did achieve a sort of immortality. Crabb has been cited as one of the models for James Bond. As an officer in Naval Intelligence, Ian Fleming had known him well, and the Crabb affair inspired the plot of Thunderball, in which Bond sets out to investigate the hull of the Disco Volante.

Elliott’s verdict on Crabb’s death still seems the most likely. ‘He almost certainly died of respiratory trouble, being a heavy smoker and not in the best of health, or conceivably because some fault had developed in his equipment.’ Elliott dismissed out of hand the theory that the Soviets might have killed Crabb, and the idea of betrayal never crossed his mind. But more than half a century later a Russian frogman popped up out of the murk to claim that he had killed Crabb with his own hands, following a tipoff from a British spy.

If the Soviets were forewarned of the underwater operation (which now seems probable) and if Crabb did die as a result (which seems at least possible), then there was only one person who could have passed on that information.

Kim Philby’s heart sank when Nicholas Elliott called him in July, and asked him to ‘come down to the firm’. It was barely seven months since Macmillan had cleared him of suspicion. Could it be that MI5 had already found fresh evidence? Had another defector emerged?

‘Something unpleasant again?’ asked Philby warily.

‘Maybe just the opposite,’ Elliott replied.

Despite the storm raging around him over the Crabb affair, Elliott had found time to demonstrate his own peculiarly durable brand of loyalty. He had done what he promised to do, and what no one (including Philby) had believed was possible: he had engineered Philby’s return to MI6.

See Notes on Chapter 13