he British government has again hidden the files on the death of Lionel “Buster” Crabb, the daredevil naval frogman, who was a legend in both W.W.II and the cold war. These files should have become available to the public in 1986, but have been criminally hidden until 2057, to hide the government negligence and incompetence.

Buster Crabb went missing in 1956, while examining the hull of the Soviet ship, the Ordzhonikidze.

Related article: BBC: Secret spy diver report revealed

The visit from Soviet leader Krushchev and Foreign minister Bulganin, was listed as a goodwill visit, but was actually a recognition and a buck up call to all the socialist sympathisers in Britain, and a warning to Britain over the coming Suez crisis.

The labour leader Hugh Gaitskell was seen by Foreign minister Bulganin, as not as easy to manipulate as his wily successor Harold Wilson.

Lionel Crabb was put in charge of a wartime diving team in 1942, but thought he ought to learn to dive himself if he was to be of real use.

The Italians had achieved some big success’s with underwater bombs in Gibraltar, Sinking British shipping, Crabb saved much British shipping with diving 12 hour days, diffusing underwater mines and captured many in underwater sabotage.

He was noted for his fair treatment of captured divers, and he achieved as much adulation among foreign divers as his own, this meant a lot of information came back in respect of how he treated what he regarded as just men serving their government, just as he was.

The saying that ; ”you catch more flies with honey that you do with vinegar”. Would be a valuable lesson today with places like Guantanamo Bay.

The end of Crabb came as he was approached by 2 men from the admiralty. To see how the Soviet ship the Ordzhonikidze could turn sideways so well in Portsmouth dock,  Crabb had great success in the examination of the hull of the Sverdlov, even entering up inside a hatch in the underside of the Soviet ship, to make notes.

This magnificent escapade was copied in a later James Bond film.

Crabb, who was unprepared and somewhat unfit, agreed to a look at the bottom of the ship, and was never seen again.

Journalists have written 10 books on Crabb’s heroism, and kept up the pressure on the British authorities for so long as to what happened, that recently his fellow diver Sydney Knowles, was pressured into claiming that he defected to the Russians who captured him as he looked at the ships undersides.

There is also the claim that M.I.5 killed him to stop a defection.

But this is total rubbish, and a smear on a great man.

The Soviets made the best of the mystery, and claimed he really had defected to them and was now top Russian teaching diver Lev Lvovich-korablov, and used Soviet friendly British journalists to put out faked photographs.

Crabb, although a Roman Catholic, was a super patriot, and kept postponing his wedding, because “the queen needed him” for increasingly dangerous missions.

His father was listed as “ missing in action” in W.W.1, as was his mothers brother, so for his mother to be kept in ignorance of what really happened to her son who undertook the underwater missions no one else would take, meant she never came to terms with her husband brother and son, all listed as Missing in action.

An Israeli journalist, Yigal Soma, recently interviewed a Soviet émigré to Israel, Joseph Sverkin, who claimed he was on the Ordzhonikidze, and that a diver seen swimming on the surface near the Soviet ship, was shot by an expert marksman in the head and killed.

But Crabb was swimming underwater.

The truth is very murky.