24 September 2007

Frog Man



The Commander's death, if that is what it was, is in the news again.

It has taken a while, since the report about the intelligence collection operation was put under a fifty-year seal. It is a case of embarrassment to a Ministry long dead, you see, about secrets on a ship long scrapped that belonged to an empire that no longer exists.

The short story is that the Ministry of Defense has disclosed that Royal Navy divers undertook an espionage operation against a Soviet warship docked in Portsmouth in 1955. The heavily redacted report is on-line, if you want to plow through it. I did, and it was a strange visit to an old and familiar movie theater.

Commander Lionel “Buster” Crabb was the star of the mystery, and I met his ghost at intelligence basic school in Denver a long time ago. He was a roughly handsome man, with the powerful torso and legs of a working diver. His nick-name came from the B-movie star of the 1930, a former Olympic swimmer who played Flash Gordon in the movie serials. He fought the evil Ming the Merciless in outer space. The multi-part black-and-white segments featured preposterous special effects which were rather endearing in my youth, with model spaceships dangling from strings with friction sparks flying out behind.

Commander Crabb's special effects were quite spectacular. He had been an early adopter of underwater breathing devices, and was one of the first Frog Men. He had made Her Majesty's ports safe from Nazi mines, and was regarded rightly as a hero.

He resigned his commission after the war, eager for new challenges, but they did not materialize. There are those today who say he soured of the brave new world of peace, and fell in with the Oxford crowd that included Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt. By the mid-fifties, some darkly say that the Commander was broke, and looking at fundamental career choices. Maybe suicide. Perhaps defection to the Soviet Union. Of course, the living can say they want of the dead.

I did not know the Commander as anything but a Man Who Disappeared in the course of conducting our common business.

The Crabb affair really began with the Soviet ship-building program, and hinged on the death of Stalin in 1953. The autocrat had authorized an aggressive naval building program. Sverdlov was the first of the post-war cruisers, intended to place the Red Banner Fleet in a place of pride in the new world order. The class would replace the pre-war Chapayev cruisers with something modern and deadly.

The lead ship was named for Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov, close associate of Lenin and in line to replace him, in time. Instead, he died in the great influenza epidemic of 1919, at the tender age of 33.

His nautical memorial was a sleek, good-looking ship, and they will still in the Soviet inventory when I reported to Denver to learn about the great adversary. We were amazed when our instructors told us that a style review was part of the Soviet ship-building program. The US Navy produced utilitarian ships, built to cost and function, but the Russians believed that their ships should look good, as a representation of the Sate. The ship was very costly, and not really an instrument of the atomic age.   Still, in a command economy, cost is not necessarily a show stopper, and the cruiser fit both Stalin's and Navy Chief Kuznetsov's ideas about a powerful surface fleet.   Twenty ships of the class were planned.

Everything changed with Stalin's death in 1953.   Nikita Khrushchev denounced him before the Politburo, and among other things, decided to look to a low-cost navy lead by submarines. The vanquished Germans had provided excellent technology from their U-Boat fleet, and the idea of building a surface navy to challenge the Americans and the British was beyond even the most ambitious Five Year Plan.

Admiral Kuznetsov fought vigorously for the Sverdlov, and for other grand schemes, but was pushed into retirement. Admiral Sergie Gorshkov shared Khrushchev's ideas, and the Navy threw its fate with submarines.   The Sverdlov building program faced severe budget cuts, and only seventeen of the class were ever launched, and of those only fourteen completed by 1955.

Western intelligence did not know that the Soviets had chosen a dramatic new road, and there were many questions about the Sverdlov class. It was a good-looking ship, after all. The Essential Elements of Information need about the Soviet ship went into the collection manual. One of them was need for the acoustic signature of the hull and screws that could be used to guide a new class of homing torpedoes derived from captured German technology.

Getting the information required an under-hull survey, which was difficult, since the cruisers rarely left home waters. When word came that Kruschev and Nikolai Bulganin would visit Portsmouth onboard the Sverdlov-class Ordzhonikidze in April of 1956, the coordination among Naval Intelligence, MI-5 and MI-6 began. The Prime Minister could be notified later.

A call went out to Buster Crabb from Whitehall. Could he make his self-contained underwater breathing apparatus available to Her Majesty? There was a matter of security in which she was interested.

Tomorrow: The Crabb Affair

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotracom

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