YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

 

I can't prove who the two fishermen pulled out of the high tide off tiny Pilsey Island (above) on 9 June, 1957.  When they hefted the corpse into the boat, the head fell off and was lost in the mud flats. The hands were already gone, whether by accident or design. So no finger prints were available.

 Margaret Player could not identify what was found at Pilsey Island, off the southern tip of the larger Thornsey Island (above, center) as her being ex-husband,  Commander Lionel “Buster” Crabb,  and neither could his current girlfriend, Patricia Rose. At the inquest a diving partner, William McLanachan, identified a scar on the left knee as Lionel’s, but later recanted.

DNA technology was still a half century in the future, but still...The diving suit matched the two piece type Lionel had been wearing. And there weren't many of those in use in 1957. The stature of the torso matched Lionel's.  The body hair matched. The clothing Lionel had been wearing under his wet suit matched the clothes on the corpse. Even the “hammer toes” of the corpse matched photographs of Lionel Crabb’s feet. 

The coroner ruled that it was Lionel Crabb and that he had been dead for several days.  But if it were Lionel Crabb he had actually been dead and under water for over a year.  So the mystery begins right there, in the tidal flats off  Pilsey Island,, 17 miles to the east of Plymouth Harbor, England, where Lionel Crabb went missing.  But what if the man who was the inspiration for the fictional hero James Bond, had pulled off yet another misdirection and double cross, all in the name of queen and country? Or money.  

Lionel Crabb (above) did not look like the movie version of James Bond, but his personality was a dead ringer for the Bond from the books. He hated to exercise. He was a chain smoker, and an aficionado of “boilermakers” (whisky with a beer chaser). He distrusted academics and experts (he would have punched Q after five minutes). And Lionel couldn’t swim three lengths of a swimming pool without collapsing out of breath. Still, a friend described him as having, “…a singular ability to endure discomfort…His lack of fear was unquestioned….(a) curmudgeonly but kindly bantam cock,…a most pleasant and lively individual. (However) His penchant for alcohol remained un-diminished.”

Lionel Crabb (above) started his adventures as a Merchant seaman. And when World War Two began he was already thirty years old, and thanks to his consumption of alcohol and cigarettes. already past his physical prime. 

He joined the Royal Navy in 1940 and eventually ended up as a bomb safety officer based on Gibraltar (above), a job requiring calm dedication to detail and not for a dare devil. But that is where the legend of Commander “Buster” Crabb really begins.  

Across the straights from Gibraltar (above), in Spanish Morocco, was a force of Italian divers who were skillfully planting limpet mines on British transports and warships in the anchorage of Gibraltar Bay,  at the southern tip of supposedly neutral Spain. Lionel became part of the team assigned to protect those ships.  

He learned to dive in the war zone, wearing the bulky “Sladen Suits” (above), often referred to as “Clammy Death.".  What are now the ubiquitous scuba gear were twenty years in the future. On his missions, Lionel also learned tp use the ancestor of the aqualung, "re-breathers" invented by the American, Doctor Lambersten.  

The British team didn’t even have swim fins, until two Italian divers were machine gunned by a sentry one night and Lionel retrieved the fins and, out of curiosity,  started using them.

Working often in the black of night,  Lionel slipped beneath the oily water of Gibraltar Bay,  to inspect warship's hulls for any sign of explosives, and if discovered to carefully remove them, bringing them to the surface and disarming them, which was the only part of the job he had actually been trained for.

In 1944 Lionel (above) was awarded the St. George Medal.  By that time he was commanding the entire unit in Gibraltar. Lionel was a pioneer in diving, even teaching himself to disarm the new German magnetic mines while underwater. After the war, in August of 1945, he was assigned to disarm mines placed by Zionists on shipping in the port of Haifa. He received another medal for his role in disarming mines and explosives in Europe left over from World War II.

And in 1949 Lionel managed to produce underwater photographs of a British cruiser’s spinning propellers while the big ship plowed through the sea at full speed within feet of him. He explored a British submarine lost in the Thames estuary (above), and helped build the outflow system for a top secret nuclear weapons factory. Lionel had become the “go-to guy” on anything involving underwater espionage, and was famous for it, not because he was a genius at it but because he was the only person doing it.

Lionel retired from active service in 1953,  but remained in the reserves. And in October of 1955, when the new Soviet cruiser Sverdlov paid a “good will” visited to Portsmouth, Lionel Crabb and a friend, Sydney Knowles, made nighttime dives, examining and measuring the hull, in an attempt to explain the ship’s powerful maneuvering abilities.  If they learned anything it remains a state secret.

So both men seemed obvious picks to repeat that dive in April of 1956 when the new Soviet Cruiser Ordzhonikidze (above) paid similar call to Portsmouth. 

The big Soviet warship, with two destroyer escorts, was carrying Communist Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party Leader, and future premier, Nikita Khrushchev, on a state visit.  

Commander Crabb's dive this time might never have become public knowledge except,  after the visit of the Ordzhonikidze (above)  the Soviets filed an official protest, claiming a British diver was seen close to the Soviet cruiser on the night of 19 April.  

Lionel’s war record had made him the most famous diver in Britain, and the day after the Soviet protest was filed, a reporter spotted Lionel Crabb's name in the register of the Sally Port hotel in Old Portsmouth (above). for the date of 18 April  

And, the day after his name had been spotted, other reporters returned (above) to confirm the find only  to discover the page for 18 April  had been ripped out of the book,  and was now missing.  What added fuel to the story was that Commander Lionel Crabb was also missing, and no one seemed to know what had become of him.

Because of the missing page in the guest book and the the missing Commander, the story would not die. Eventually the Royal Navy claimed that Lionel Crabb had been testing new diving equipment in the Solent,  off the Isle of Wight (above) to the West of Portsmouth, when he had disappeared and was presumed to have drowned. But that story seemed so absurd it just produced even more speculation.

Many in the press now began to suggest the new British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden (above),  who had hopes of reaching a rapprochement with the Soviet leadership, and had forbidden Lionel from making this second dive inside Portsmouth harbor. But, press reports claimed,  the CIA had encouraged Lionel to make the attempt even without official British endorsement. 

What we do know as fact, is that after press speculation about Lionel's death continued, Prime Minister Anthony Eden issued a public statement on 14 May saying   “It would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death. I think it necessary, in the special circumstances of this case, to make it clear that what was done,  was done without the authority or the knowledge of Her Majesty’s Ministers. Appropriate disciplinary steps are being taken.” Shortly thereafter the head of MI6, Britain's super secret intelligence agency, was relieved. In that short denial, Eden had managed to confirm everything.

But from this point the stories and myths only multiply. In 2007 Eduard Koltsov claimed he had been a Soviet diver aboard the Cruiser Ordzhonikidze when, while on underwater patrol under the Soviet Ship in Portsmouth harbor, he spotted Lionel fixing a mine,  and had cut the spy's throat. The suggestion the British, or even the CIA, would have mined a Soviet warship while in a British port, is just absurd.

Lionel’s fiancee,  Patricia Rose. née Phoebe Pauline Bethell (above),  claimed in 1974 that Lionel had defected and was still alive, training Soviet frogmen in the Black Sea. Another version says Lionel suffered a heart attack while under water, had been rescued by Soviet divers,  but had later died under torture, and that the Soviets had dumped his body overboard after leaving the English port.  But really, none of those stories seems to make a lot of sense.

What we know for certain, thanks to confirmed information from several sources,  is that on 17 April, 1956, as the cold war was heating up,  Lionel and another unknown man checked into the Sally Port Hotel, in Portsmouth. Then, on the evening of the 18 April, Lionel entered the water from The King’s Stairs Jetty (above)...

....about 80 yards from where the three Soviet warships  were berthed (above). Lionel returned to the surface just 20 minutes later, having gotten confused in the dark among the pier’s pilings. The decision was made to try again in daylight.

Lionel returned to the jetty just after 7:00am on 19 April, and re-entered the waters of Portsmouth harbor (above). He came back up 20 minutes later complaining of a problem with his re-breathing equipment. Repairs were made, and within a few minutes Lionel went down for the third time.

But this time he did not resurface, at least not until fourteen months later when somebody's body was  pulled from the shallow tidal inlet some seventeen miles further east, up the coast off Pilsey Island (right side yellow dot). But was that really the body of Commander Lionel Crabb, or some other unknown man? We still don’t know for certain, and won’t until at least 2057, when the British government has promised to tell all they know.

Of course they had originally promised to do that in 1987, but then at the last minute they changed their minds. They could do that again.  All the curious can do is hope. As Ian Fleming said about his fiction hero based on the little bantam cock Lionel Crabb (above), You Only Live Twice. 

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