COLD WAR

 

I don’t believe most Americans have ever heard of Igor Gouzenko (above), but he actually had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Empire than Ronald Reagan. Igor was one of those little nobodies whose lives defy the “Great Man” theory of history. Simply because Igor and his wife wanted what all new parents want, a better life for their children, the best laid evil plans of Joseph Stalin eventually collapsed.

Igor dreamed of becoming an architect, and while studying in Moscow he met and married Svetlana (Anna) Gouseva.  But Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941 (above), put an end to all personal  dreams in Russia.  After basic training in the Red Army, Igor received a year of training as a cipher clerk.

In May of 1943, the 24 year old Lieutenant was reassigned to the Soviet Embassy on Charlotte Street in Ottawa, Canada (above), to work coding and decoding messages for “spymaster” Colonel Nicolai Zabotin.

As an officer in the GRU - Soviet Military Intelligence, - Colonel Nicolai Zabotin  (above) was aware of how much he depended on the talents of  the young Igor, which is why Zabotin obtained permission for Igor’s pregnant wife, Svetlana, to join him in Ottawa in October of 1943.  It was a not a boon the Stalinist security structure usually granted.

And to accommodate the wife of his favorite code clerk,  Zabotin even gave them an apartment,  at 511 Somerset Street in Ottawa (above).  The couple were stunned. "In Moscow," Igor would later say, "a place that size would have been shared by four or five families." And it was while living in such relative opulence, in June of 1944,  the loving couple welcomed a bouncing baby boy.

In September of 1944 the NKGB - the infamous Peoples' Commissariat of Internal Affairs (above) -  ordered the happy couple and their 3 month old son to return home to Soviet Russia.  Because he had two more years  left of a standard tour of duty,  Igor believed he was suspected of some violation, or perhaps had made some overlooked mistake in writing home to his parents.  

And even if he could defend himself, he feared that because he knew so much about Soviet espionage in Canada and the United States, he would likely be imprisoned in a Siberian gulag (above) to keep him quiet. 

And if he were lucky enough to be allowed to return to Canada, his son and wife, who was now carrying their second child,  would not be permitted to join him The families of agents overseas were effective hostages, should an agent contemplate making a dash for freedom. 

Lieutenant  Gouzenko  appealed to Colonel Zabotin, who granted him a year’s extension. But as that extension began to run out in August of 1945, Igor decided to run out, too. He began to stuff  what would eventually be 109 top secret cables and documents under his shirt and wear them home. 

Then, shortly after 8:00 pm on  5 September, 1945,  just days after Japan formally surrendered  bringing the Second World War to an end, Igor walked out of the embassy for the last time.

Unsure of just what to do next,  Igor asked his next door neighbor, an officer in the Canadian Air Force,  for advice. He suggested they should approach the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And that was what Igor immediately did, showing up at the headquarters with his family.  But end of war celebrations were still going on,  and the few people on duty had no idea what to do with their would-be Russian defectors. True, Igor had plenty of documents which indicated some sort of Soviet spy ring operating in Canada and the U.S.. But at the time the Russians were Canadian allies. The RCMP weren't even sure they should be looking at this stuff. They told Igor and his family they should come back tomorrow.

That night, while Igor and his family huddled, terrified, in the dark, on the floor of their apartment, there was an ominous pounding on their front door. They returned to the RCMP first thing the next morning. The officers asked some questions, and wrote down the answers, but then sent them home yet again. 

That night their neighbor allowed the exhausted couple and their infant to sleep in his apartment. They heard more pounding on their door across the hall. It seemed likely that Colonel Zabotin had finally noticed the 109 documents that were missing from Igor’s desk. After another fruitless visit to the bewildered RCMP, Igor spent the day walking about the Canadian capital trying to find someone in some government agency who was interested in a desperate young man who had the code names and covers of an entire Soviet spy ring in their midst. He even applied for Canadian citizenship. Nobody was interested in his story. 

In desperation that evening he walked into the newsroom of the Ottawa Journal (above) and blurted out to the night editor, “Its war. It’s Russia.” The editor suggested he go to the Department of Justice. The Gouzenkos tried, but found the offices of the Canadian Department of Justice were closed.

The calm of the next night was shattered when four burly men burst into Igor’s apartment and ransacked the place. Fortunately Igor and his little family were again sleeping on their neighbor’s furniture. But this time the neighbor called the police. The four men were detained long enough for all to be identified as employees of the Soviet embassy. But while the police officers looked the other way, the Russians escaped. The following day the embassy protested the brief detention of their staffers, and demanded the immediate return of the “criminal” Igor Gouzenko..

When Canadian Prime Minister, 70 year old William Lyon Mckenzie King (above), was told of the Soviet's demands, his first instinct was to hand Gouzenko and his family over.  But before he could act, 

Lieutenant Gourzenko and Svetlana suddenly appeared at the  office of Justice Minister with their  collection of documents. And this time somebody with a knowledge of intelligence actually looked at them. King would later claim, ""It was like a bomb on top of everything else."

On his own initiative, Under Secretary for External Affairs, Norman Robertson had the desperate Russian and his family swept up and transported to the secret  "Camp X" on Lake Ontario (above), used during the war for the training of underground intelligence and sabotage agents inserted into occupied Europe. By this time, Igor was threatening suicide. And without asking Prime Minister King, Robertson granted the family asylum. 

Prime Minister King asked the British Foreign Intelligence Service, MI-6, to evaluate Igor's information. The service sent two agents from their section 9, Kim Philby (above) and Roger Hollis, to interrogate Igor. What no one knew at the time was that both of these trusted and respected high ranking British intelligent agents were lifelong Communists, Russian moles right in the core of British Intelligence.  

It appeared as if poor Igor was about to be betrayed, branded  a fraud, and handed over to the murderous NKVD. But  just a few days into his interrogation,  the secret arrest, trial, conviction and sentencing of scientists Alan Nunn May (above) broke in the press. 

Until March Alan May had been building the Chalk River Nuclear Reactor (above) just outside of Ottawa, and handing the top secret designs directly over  to  Colonel Zabotin,   May was prominently mentioned in Gouzenko's documents.  

Even more importantly, shortly before all of this, a Soviet code book had been captured in Norway,  which allowed the decoding of hundreds of secret Soviet transmissions. While everything to do with the code book was still top secret, it all confirmed everything Igor had been telling the Canadians. After all of this, to have questioned Gourzenko's information would have merely raised questions about Philby and Hollis.  So they recommended the Canadians accept Igor as genuine and grant him asylum.

Among the 39 Soviet spies arrested because they were mentioned in Igor's documents was Fred Rose (above), a Communist Party member of the Canadian Parliament from Cartier, Quebec. He was in the perfect position to betray Canada and sway government policy in favor of the Soviet Union.   He was convicted of espionage by the secret Kellock-Tascherau Commission, and served 4 1/2 years in prison.  Stripped of his Canadian citizenship, Rose lived out the rest of his life in Warsaw, Poland, where he died in 1983. 

Colonel Zabotin (above) was returned to the Soviet Union under arrest by the NKVD, where he was convicted as an enemy of the Soviet People for allowing his trusted cipher clerk to escape. He served 4 years in a labor camp.  After that, nothing is known about his life. 

In six years Kim Philby (above, right) would retire with honors from MI6, and in 1961, just before he was unmasked as a traitor, he would defect to the Soviet Union. 

 In the meantime, the cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, became George Brown. He and Svetlana, now Anna, were moved to Clarkson, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto.  He wrote two books, and made publicity tours, always hidden inside a cloth hood (above).

The Browns lived middle class lives in Canada, raising 8 children and 16 grandchildren. Igor died in 1982, of complications of diabetes. Anna died in 2001. Their legacy was a victory for average people who just want to live their lives without becoming the playthings of ambitious egos, like Joseph Stalin. 

And that is how the cold war started.

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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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