March 27, 2023 • 60 mins
Today's episode comes from the heart of the Cold War -- when Lionel 'Buster' Crabb disappeared on a mysterious spying mission, his relatives and colleagues refused to believe the official story. Over time, this story changed. As investigators attempted to separate fact from fiction, they found themselves stonewalled, tangled within a web of rumor, speculation and conspiracy. So what really happened to Commander Crabb?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay, so Matt, you and I had to step in
before we play this week's classic episode because the title,
the title sounds a little more Spongebobby, I think than
it should have. That's exactly what it sounds like. It's
an animated, made up character, Commander Crab. We're gonna do
a whole Netflix series on Commander Crab later. But no,
(00:22):
this is an actual human being and well a story.
We got a real story to tell you. Yeah, Lionel
Buster Crab disappears in the heart of the Cold War
on a mysterious spying mission, and no one knows what
really happened. From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies,
(00:43):
history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(01:04):
and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel. They call me Ben. You are you?
And that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
This episode is going to be a dive into a
mystery that remains controversial in the modern day, Literally a
dive into one. Yeah. The story we're covering today has
(01:24):
been the inspiration for several works of popular fiction. Ian
Fleming's nineteen sixty one James Bond novel, which then became
the movie Thunderball. It was inspired by it. And there's
a nineteen fifty eight film called The Silent Enemy, which
is really great and has nothing to do with Fartsnoel,
but it was based directly, well as close as you
(01:47):
can get a Hollywood film to be based directly on
something occurring. And we know, maybe you've probably read the
title for this episode, we know that the name Commander
Crab sounds okay, let's just say it. It sounds kind
of like it would be the name of a cartoon character.
I kept bringing it up to my wife, like, yeah,
I gotta do some more Commander Crab research, and she's like,
(02:08):
what are you saying. It makes me think of mister
Crabs from SpongeBob, Like if he had some secret life
as a covert deep cover agent, but I don't think
he would do a very good job. He's a little
too mouthy. Well, that might be part of his public persona,
you know, that might be the thin veneer over a
very dangerous cartoon crabs real personality, that tough exoskeleton that
(02:34):
you know comes with being a crab unless you're soft
shell oh and delicious. Yeah, you know, soft shell crab
is not is not bad. I've been I've been doing
some experiments with crab recipes. Not for everyone though, it
is not for everyone. That is true. And another thing
that was not for everyone, speaking of segu is the
(02:55):
concept of the Cold War. That is, that is the backdrop,
that is the world in which today's story, today's cover
up conspiracy theory takes place. You've heard the phrase cold
war before. It describes this global post World War two
tension between the clashing ideologies, clashing economies, and clashing cultures
(03:19):
of the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc. Yes, who's
gonna hold sway? Like, who's gonna be the dominant force
for all of those things? Now that we've the dust
has cleared away from all the battles. Yeah, who's going
to become the hedgemon, the power above all other powers.
The Eastern Bloc was comprised of the USSR and various
(03:41):
Soviet satellite states, so Russia and all of the states
that you here entering into really tense NATO conversations in
the current day. The Western Bloc was comprised of the
US along with NATO allies and a few other countries
sprinkled in and this conflict, this simmering tension, arguably it
(04:05):
existed beforehand in an earlier incarnation of what was known
as The Great Game, which we have a pretty good
episode on as well. And this conflict, this Cold War conflict,
meant that while these countries were not officially at war
since slightly before the end of World War Two. Consider
(04:29):
World War two an enemy of my enemy as my
friend's situation. Yes, right, It's almost like there was a
brief quieting of pre existing tensions between the UK and
the US and Russia. It's like, we don't like each other,
but we're going to hang because we don't like that
other guy way way way yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Like, look,
(04:52):
we're never going to be friends, but this guy is
a real pill. Yeah. So, in the absence of all
out war of any kind or physical conflicts that are
just occurring on a regular basis, what you're dealing with
generally are covert operations, operations that are gathering intelligence, just
making sure you know what that other team is doing
(05:15):
while you're over here doing your thing on your side
of the world. Yeah, exactly. During the Cold War, both
sides committed heinous and legal acts. There was also a
golden age of state secrecy and spycraft. I think I
brought this up before, but on a work trip last year,
I got to go to the Spy Museum in DC
(05:36):
and there's a whole section with little gadgets and stuff
in the evolution of these gadgets from this period. And
it's stuff like microphones hidden in pens and like, you know,
ways of hiding micro dots in pieces of paper that
had like really really tiny messages that have to be
put into a magnifying machine to really read. But you
could like get pages and pages of information to this
(05:58):
tiny little disc of plastic that could be like inserted
in between pages, and all kinds of tape recorders and
got Some of that stuff was so clunky too. They
had to go in these giant suitcases and they had
remote controls that would like go up their sleeves and
they could activate it. I mean, now, it's like all
the stuff they had back then week I could do
on my iPhone with the SAP, you know. And the
truth of the matter is that even today, in twenty seventeen,
(06:22):
a lot of the spies, a lot of the operatives
who are on either side of this conflict. When they
were caught, they were just left out in the cold.
I think that was also the phrase that was used
to refer to that. So we will never know how
many of these people existed, how many survived to maybe
even to the modern day, if they were operating in
the eighties, how many just disappeared in the dark ripped
(06:44):
out appendix of your history book. Yeah, I mean it's
an image, right, right, and the whole ideas you can't
expose the rest of whatever larger operation you're doing if
you've got an operative that gets caught. And if you'd
like to learn more about the Cold War in general,
you can check out some of our earlier episodes and
videos on the subject, especially the subjects of proxy wars right,
(07:06):
which arguably the Middle East is embroiled in today. Correct.
With that in mind, let's zoom in a little bit.
Let's go a bit of a sharper focus to a
course quote taken. Spycraft requires a very specific set of skills.
That's pretty good. Wow, good job, Matt. Yeah, the Golden Voice, Frederick,
(07:28):
and some operatives will specialize in certain environments, right, You
might have someone who can physically look like the average
member of another country, right or region, and who can
fluently speak those languages. Yeah, like a business person who
just exists incognito somewhere right. And this is crucial because,
(07:55):
for instance, if you have two operatives, one of whom
speaks fluent Haitian French and looks like they could blend
in and Haiti and one of whom speaks fluent Cantonese
then and looks like they could hang out in South China,
then of course you know roughly where those operatives are
probably going to be based. If you Yeah, if you're
(08:17):
a person with any brain, right, I know we're over something.
But yeah, there are some operators who specialize in underwater
or maritime or oceanic environments, and one of the names
for those people is frogmen. You know, that always brings
(08:39):
to mind for me, maybe you guys too. The opening
sequence of Johnny Quest, where there are these dudes and
like skin tight, you know, green diving suits and they
have like those full kind of like masks that go
over their eyes and nose and big flippers and they've
got spear guns, and Race Bannon kicks one of them
in the head Yeah, I do remember that. That's what
(09:00):
I always think of when I hear frogmen. Wow, I
mean it's not it's not far off of the frogmen is.
A frogman is a individual trained in what they would
call tactical diving, so exactly that you know, you named
two very important things. You named diving equipment, and you
named weapons. As you might imagine, this is mostly a
(09:22):
discipline for military and police forces. Yeah, a lot of
times there will be explosives experts that are frogmen, because
one of the things you do a lot of times
in that line of work is sabotaging other ships or
even like you know, places where ships are launched, even
probably or like ports and the infrastructure that's underwater that
(09:43):
you could attach explosives to and cause really horrible structural
damage that could really jack things up for the enemy. Yeah.
And another thing that's more recent with frogmen, this was
really surprising to me. It's spying on underwater of network cables,
(10:03):
so like huge fiber optic cables and splicing in and
getting information out deep underwater, like tapping into themselves now
with a device, that's pretty cool. The spine of the Internet.
It's no joke either, because depending on the geography of
those cables. Cutting one, and when we say cables, we're
not talking about the kind of cable you might have
(10:23):
a Time Warner gigantic infopipes essentially, and cutting one could
deplete internet supply in an entire country, right, it could
cut it off. The etymology is a little bit uncertain.
It first came as a stage name, really the Fearless
Frogman from play in the eighteen seventies, and later a
(10:47):
guy named John Spence who was an enlisted member of
the US Navy said that people called him Frogman because
he was training in a green waterproof suit. Dude, that
is really cool, and he was just to see to say,
you guys and see, just to remind yourselves, there's the
Johnny Quest frogmen. They're in these green suits and they've
got their tanks on and their masks and like the
(11:07):
traditional goggles you see. I just think that is like
the quintessential frogman in my ten year old brain. Yeah,
and I love that they're walking on land with their
flippers on and everything, and their their goggles still attached. Well,
they have just emerged, surprised Johnny on the deck of
a ship. No, those are their real that's their real face.
They're built for frogging. That's fair frog frog person, Oh,
(11:30):
Johnny quest So one of the sorry, one of the
One of the other things that frogmen would tend to do,
especially during World War two times, along with technology being developed,
were underwater travel and different kinds of transportation and weapons.
There are these things they called chariots. Well, chariot was
(11:50):
a type of these things, but they're really manned torpedoes.
That sounds like a really bad idea, doesn't It doesn't it.
It's the kind of idea that the person and who
doesn't have to actually perform it, yeah, comes up with, yes,
all right, guys, we got this thing. It's great, you're
gonna love it. We'll see. Okay. So in my head,
(12:10):
and I didn't do a deep dive into chariots or right,
but in my mind, it was a way to get
these frogmen, who you know, have a limited amount of
oxygen these operatives to travel a lot faster underwater with
you know, without that. Really that's it, just to travel
a lot faster underwater something get further distances. But tell
(12:32):
me more, I mean, these things were a rig two. Well,
you see this thing, I think the explosives thing came
a little bit later as like, well, why Joe, we
we've got these boy who's going out there? What well
points to eight knots. Why don't we put a warhead
at the end of that thing? You know with some
British some royal admiral was just like, I think we
should do it, and then chain and then the divers
(12:54):
were like wait what yeah, because that technology probably existed
before and just to accelerate their speed, you know, the work.
It could be exploratory, but the primary differentiation between your
average every day Jane or Joe diver diver person is
(13:15):
that being being trained in tactical diving work means that
these people will be trained in, as you said, matthe
use of explosives, the use of surveillance techniques, for instance,
stealth diving. We have a lot of former and current
members of the military who listen to this show, and
(13:38):
we would like to hear from you on this because
from what we understand, typically military organizations tend to describe
these operators as combat divers or combat swimmers or other
similar terms, and the phrase frogman seems to often be
used as an informal appellation. You know, so let us
(14:01):
let us know. I don't want to stir the pot
too much here. Yeah, I don't want to make too
big of a splash here, but I would I would
want to know, is in your experience, if you have
military experience, is the term frogman a just an informal thing?
Is it official like in the UK with the with
(14:21):
the Royal Frogman or And in addition to that, my
second question would be, are there any stereotypes. There's a
lot of different branches of the military have stereotypes about
uh specific organizations. So yeah, dude, please tell us all
of that. Um So, just to jump us back into
(14:44):
the Cold War era where we are, yeah, I'm feeling chilly. Yeah, excellent, excellent.
So during this time in Britain and the United Kingdom,
there were a lot of operations that were done in
Malta in a lot of these other places where there
were smaller conflicts and things, and these combat divers played
a huge role in this. A lot of it was
(15:06):
taking out minds that had been placed during the war
that they just had to get rid of, or spying
on a ship just to make sure you know what's
going on with this stuff, right, Is that an actual
research vessel or are they up to something else. Yeah,
the Royal Navy was just all over this stuff at
the time, and a lot of not some retired some
(15:28):
still active military individuals who were working during World War
Two ended up finding jobs doing these kind of things.
And today we're zooming the focus even sharper to the
individual the protagonist of our story, Commander Lionel Crab also
(15:49):
known as Buster Crab, Buster Crab. And we'll tell you
more after a word from our sponsor. Commander Lionel Crab
aka Buster Crab, that's Crab with two bees. Yes, I
was born on January twenty eighth, nineteen o nine. He
(16:11):
was a Royal Navy frogman. He was also later on
a diver for m I six. That's the British Intelligence Service.
Think of them like the CIA here in the West,
if you're familiar with that. Yeah, they've conducted numerous clandestine operations.
It's also fairly obvious this is not related to today's episode,
(16:31):
that they were aiding and embedding a ring of pedophiles
in the United Kingdom. I feel like that deans to
be said when they are brought up. Okay, wow, well yep,
full stop so so command, yeah, look it up if
you have time, and you know you didn't eat recently.
So Commander Crab received what was called the George Medal,
(16:55):
that's after King George, for removing Italian mines from the
from British warships at Malta. As we said before, so
he got a King George Medal. That's a huge deal
for his work. Then he also received an OBE or
an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for
again clearing minds, this time in Livorno. And that, by
(17:17):
the way, is a knighthood. So he got he got knighted.
So he's Sir Crab. Well yeah, and again, if we
have any listeners out there that can confirm or deny that,
please let us know, because that's what the research looked
like to us. And removing removing minds is it's a
it's always a good thing, but it's not necessarily a
(17:38):
humanitarian thing. This might not have been to protect commercial
fishermen right or commercial fishing vessels. This could have been
to ensure that other like friendly military powers were able
to traverse these these areas at Malta. Would they do
(18:00):
this like manually, like they would have to hitch it
up to some kind of chain that would then raise
it up out of these are these are big. Minds
are massive. That's a great question. I could not find
anything on like physically how they would remove the minds.
I was assuming they would blow them up. In my head,
that's what I was thinking, the way you would a
lot of times, the way you would do mindes, the
(18:22):
like land mines. There are there are ways to disable
a landmine by hand without exploding it, but I don't
want to be the person doing that. We should do
a show just on existing minds. That's great minds of
mind fields. Yeah, I would, I would say, without having
ever done mind removal in a way that I would
talk about on air, I would say that there are
(18:43):
three ways to disable a mind. Well, the first would
be rendering the equipment non functional, so accessing it, breaking
the wires right, depending on whatever the active mechanism of
the mind is at the time. The other would be
as Moll said, completely removing it. And then the other
(19:04):
would be as Matt said, blowing it up, exploding ordinance
that's out there, yeah or something. And I guess part
of that would depend upon how closely the minds were
monitored by the people who Yeah, they are crazy looking
to They're like attached to the cea floor with chains
(19:25):
and then they're you know, at the very top of
it look like something out of Hell Raiser. There are
these orbs with the spikes, and the spikes or what
trigger them right like you hit the spice. You know,
it always makes me think of that absurdly difficult. Maybe
I'm just a dummy PC game Mind Sweeper, Like it's
it's you remember that game. I remember, But I just
like it was the kind of game where like, for
the longest time I just kind of clicked it and
(19:45):
didn't really know what I was doing. I never really
understood how to play it until much later. Um, but
that you know, it's not really a fun game exactly.
I thought Mind Sweeper was great. You gotta have the
right mouse. It's true, because the right mind it's it's
key to double it's key to double click. I used
to set the difficulty on the highest you can change
(20:05):
the density of minds right or the probable density of minds,
and on the largest board. If you said it on
the highest highest density of minds, what will happen is
you'll get your first click free. It never lets you
die on the first click, and so you click in
the middle or wherever you want, and then it'll show
(20:26):
you that number shows you the number of minds that
are in the hidden cells around the one you clicked.
One time, I got to two clicks on the hardest setting.
That was my That was my rate. It was pure accident,
pure accident, and playing it now. All right, all right,
(20:47):
Well maybe the three of us, don't you know, maybe
the three of us should not specialize in mind removal. Yes,
however this guy did. It was a It was a
pretty rare set of skills. There was a specific instance
that you looked into matt where the Soviets sent emissaries
(21:10):
to Britain. Right, y was it submarine? Both? Oh? No,
it was by ship there warships. And it's pretty interesting.
Apparently this group of Soviets they were on kind of
not a victory tour, but like a propaganda tour of sorts,
where they had been to India and a couple other
places where they had been. You know, they got off
(21:32):
the ship and they were cheered and everybody was like, oh,
you guys are so great. You really beat those Nazis.
You guys are awesome. We still really like you guys,
and you're doing great things in the world. They then
they took they took a trip to Britain and it
was Secretary Nikita Krushev and the Soviet Prime Premier Nikolai Bulgannon.
(21:54):
And forgiven my pronunciation there, but they came to Britain
in April of nineteen fifty six and they docked with
their warships at Portsmouth and that is roughly, oh, I
forget it. Put seventy six miles southwest of London is
where that port is if you're looking in overall view
of the UK. They spent eight full days there in
(22:16):
Britain and their schedule included three days of talks at
Downing Street, So talking with the big wigs in Britain,
the people, the movers and the shakers and all that. Yeah,
and that's talking opposition party as well as you know,
the party that's in power. You know, all the a
lot of MP's probably and influential business people. They had
(22:36):
a dinner with the Prime Minister at the time, who
was Anthony Eden. Twice they did that. They visited him
at checkers and I don't know what that is this
is not the fast food Checkers. I honestly I didn't
write down what that was. I just saw it and
I was like, okay, that sounds fun. This episode brought
(22:56):
to you by Checkers, but its spelled the Cold War
fast food. Yes, but it's spelled c h e q
U e rs, so that's how they'd spell it. Yeah.
In Britain. Meanwhile, the CIA, the MI six and Naval
intelligence are in the middle of this mission placing divers
(23:19):
under the Soviet warships where they're docked at Portsmouth. Yeah,
and the whole idea is they that whole concept of
we need to know exactly what these guys are doing
where possibly they're going next, what they're doing while they're
port while they're docked there, or they're ported there, like
are they doing any weird stuff with underwater divers checking
out our ports? So you know, it makes sense from
(23:42):
a strategic standpoint, and that's what they were doing. Okay.
Side note, I just I can't let it ride. Although
I thought, or I thought us calling a Checkers a
fast food is pretty good. You gotta eat that worked
really well. The actual thing is short for Checkers Court.
That's the country house of the UK Prime Minister. So
(24:05):
they went visited at his house like it's like the
British Camp David kind of thing. It's treat I went
to check his all right. So let's drill down even
further to a specific day, April nineteenth, nineteen fifty six.
So on this date, Lionel bust A Crab was on
(24:26):
a mission to spy on a Soviet warship that was
docked in Portsmouth Harbor. I am not going to even
attempt to pronounce the name, but just so you guys
are on my side, that misspell for you. It's O
R d z H O N I K I d
z E. Do with that what you will. Yeah, yeah,
(24:47):
thanks for taking one for the team. Um. And it
was roughly seventy six miles southwest of London. Yeah, and
he was on a dive in the harbor and by
all accounts was monitoring the hull ship. After his dive,
he was never seen resurfacing and he never made any
further contact with his handlers. For all intents and purposes,
(25:11):
Commander Crab had vanished. Yeah, so he's got his You know,
when you go on a mission like this, you've got
handlers people who are setting up your mission, walking you
through it. You've seen twenty four. It's kind of like
that in a way. There's somebody who's always on the line,
who's setting things up for you and giving you intelligence
(25:32):
as you're gathering more intelligence. And there's a tight time
frame as well. I think that's very important too. So
when he failed to comply with that time frame, the
British Admiralties stated that he was killed while looking on
an experimental mind in Stokes Bay, a few miles away
(25:54):
from Portsmith Hallbo. Yeah. They said he was killed in
an experimental mind, hadn't even been in near the ships.
Yeah yeah, and that essentially he had killed himself in
an accident. But here's the thing. The Soviet Union apparently
exposed this as as disinformation when they reported that there
(26:15):
was indeed at least one frogman that had been spotted
servicing right near their ship when it was doctor reported there.
And then the story changes and it was claimed that
Commander Crab was indeed examining the Soviet ship or like
monitoring the whole but he was doing it without any
official authority. Yeah, so the story is already changing a
(26:38):
whole lot through the official sources about what exactly is
going on here. Again, it's that thing of let's not
expose our larger operation. But then something kind of crazy happens. Yeah,
about six months later, on the south coast of England,
someone discovers a body. It's headless and handless, someone's decapitated,
(27:03):
cut off the hands at the wrists, and the officials say, well,
here are the remains of Commander Crab. And we talked
a little bit about technology at the time, Like Matt
mentioned the idea of manning torpedoes, the technology of the
time forensically meant that with neither head nor hands available,
(27:26):
it was almost impossible to get a solid identification on
the body. No dental records, no fingerprints, yeah, none of
that stuff. And already the way that a body will
change if submerged in water for a long time is
that's something that we could we could make a guess at, right,
(27:47):
and maybe even the type of water, maybe even the
type of journey the body took, but that's still not
solid identification. No, And there were no identifying marks that
the examiners could find, nothing unique at least any kind
of scars, tattoos, anything like that. And Crab's former diving partner,
a fellow named Sydney Knowles, identified the body. He's the
(28:11):
one who said that's Buster. Yep, yep. So what happened,
what happened to Commander Crab? Well, we've got a little
better idea now that it's been years and years and
years since the occurrence, since we've got, you know, some
reports from the intelligence offices that we're carrying out the
(28:34):
mission in which Commander Crab met his demise. But honestly,
there are a lot of questions and we'll answer some
and pose quite a few more after a word from
our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. Okay, So jump way,
(28:57):
way way forward from nineteen fifty six to the you're
two thousand and six the future. Yes, the BBC, the
British Broadcasting Corporation, obtained via a freedom of information application
a little different from here in the United States, but
the same thing in theory. It was a formerly secret
(29:18):
document and it was an official report of Commander Crab's
final mission. So what the intelligent groups had to say
about it? Essentially, the report showed that crabs intelligence handlers
didn't follow a lot of the standard procedures that you
would when going on a mission of this sort, specifically
about protecting the secrecy of what's going on, where people are,
(29:42):
what they're doing, like the actual names of your operatives,
which is that that's a big detail. But I want
to I want a caveat that. Okay, sure, because following
standard procedures could mean almost anything. Oh yeah, and that
(30:02):
is my phrase there. So standard procedures is not what
was used in the article that was created there, but
it's they didn't follow protocols essentially that are set forth
for how you how you would maintain secrecy, which, if
we were to speculate, would be stuff along the lines
of creating a plausible alibi for the actual operatives if
(30:27):
they ever came into question. Right, we need some sort
of dummied up proof that you know, Crab was not
in Portsmouth, he was in North Sandwich on Rye, and
this is just some other guy who hasn't assumed name,
who was there at the time, who may even have
identification on him that shows he's a different person. So
(30:50):
the idea there is that through some error, whether bureaucratic
or whether whether it was a minor bureaucratic error, or
whether it was a complete poop show from the beginning. Yeah,
it started off on a bad note. They checked into
a hotel, he and his handlers with their actual names,
that was right there by the port. Like, how crazy
(31:12):
is that? Swinging a miss right? Kind of a rookie move,
I know, it just seems like it was set up
to fail from the start. It's kind of like in
not to make light of what I believe. It's clearly
a tragic death, but it's kind of like in James
Bond films. One of the biggest plot holes in James
Bond films is that guy is always using his real name,
(31:35):
and he says it all the time, constantly, way more
often than you would even you would say the name
of like someone you loved, you know for sure, And
it does seem like a lot of other characters in
those movies do use code names. Maybe it's just to
show his raw bravado that it's like, I don't need
to use code names because I got this ish on Lockdown.
(31:58):
I'm good. Also, I want to get us too far
off track. Another James Bond point. I read a pretty
fascinating study where someone had went through the films and
the books and said just how much is this guy
drinking and his liver would have been shot and srotic
(32:21):
if he was drinking like that every day, and he
would probably be falling down drunk by you know, late afternoon. Yeah,
at least I spy better than I've had a so
more like blitzed James blitzed, Yeah, exactly. So uh so, Yeah,
(32:44):
it was it was clear then that now that we
have that specific there, the had woefully woefully misjudge the
sequence of events, Yes, exactly. And then well here's the
other thing. When it was clear that he had gone missing.
(33:06):
You know, we're not sure where he is, but he's
definitely not on the mission anymore, and he hasn't resurfaced.
His team shows not to carry out a full search because,
as we said before, they were they were afraid of
alerting the crew of the cruiser that they were looking
at um, of letting them know that, hey, we're doing this.
Because those guys Nikita Krushev, they're they're on a diplomatic mission.
(33:29):
There's not supposed to be any spine going on right here.
This is supposed to be a here, shake my hand,
welcome to my country. Let's discuss things, you know, Krushev is,
by the way, the Soviet official who was famously alleged
to have pounded his shoe in international meetings and told
(33:50):
the US that he was going to crush them. Yes,
alleged that probably didn't happen. There, there's let's just a
jump on that, Ben. Sure, there is an article you
can find. Oh man, what is it called. It's like
the the disaster Dinner or the fiasco Dinner. I forget
exactly how they phrased it, but it's all about a
(34:12):
specific meeting with I believe the Labor Party that took
place during this trip, and how upset and angry Kruschev
was at certain things, and the threats that he made.
It's it's fascinating fiasco dinner, I think, fiasco dinner. Yeah. So,
as soon as they've found out in real time, not
(34:36):
counting the not counting the deceptive and completely false, deceitful
pr stories, before they even started half cooking those up
or half baking those, they said, we're not going to
carry out a search. Yeah, he's that guy's gone. Yeah,
(34:58):
we don't know who he was, he's gone. The Prime
Minister himself, Anthony Eaton, had no idea not only that
the mission failed, but had no idea that there was
a mission for more than a little more than two
weeks after. Yeah, you'd think he'd be pretty grumpy. Yeah,
but I think that idea is protecting him because he's
(35:19):
actually in the room with all these guys, you know,
and you don't you don't want any kind of tell
on his part if he knows. Is it plausible deniability?
I mean, we see that happening in the US all
the time, with the practice of compartmentalized intelligence. You know,
I believe multiple presidents have been shut down for during
(35:41):
their during their honeymoon phase with the American electorate. They say,
we're going to find out what really happened to JFK,
and we're going to find out what really what what's
really going on with all these allegations of UFOs and stuff,
And then you just see like the yeah, you get
into that dark room and sorry, when the actual unelected
(36:03):
government officials that are instead appointed right or promoted into
these positions are often the ones who will control access
to that intelligence. And I think I think you guys
raise a great point where where the Prime Minister probably
probably doesn't know, but I'm just so skeptical about that
(36:25):
stuff when they say that they really don't know. I
know it can occur, and they might not know about
a specific mission. Surely there was an inkling, right, Surely
there was a program, right, and it had to come
up and at least a budget meeting where someone's like, hey,
we're getting a lot of swimming equipment. You guys get
(36:48):
in a pool. What's going on anyway? Reason number seventy four,
why I'm not Prime Minister. So what happened with the
diving partner? Well, yes, if you remember that, fellow mister
Sidney Knowles. He the next year after this two thousand
and six whole thing, in two thousand and seven, he
did an interview with the BBC's show called Inside Out,
(37:11):
and he stated that he had only identified the body
of Commander Crab because he was quote under pressure to
do so, and he suggested that that Buster may have
been murdered on orders by British intelligence, like it was
an inside job to get rid of Crab, which is
(37:32):
insane in its implications. Right, Maybe he knew something that
he wasn't supposed to, or he was going to do
something that somebody didn't like. Well, Inside Out he goes
Sidney goes into it a little further, and we've got
an excerpt that we're going to read from that, all right,
So I'm just going to paraphrase this a little bit.
(37:53):
So Sydney said that Crab was varied bitter, and that
he was also mixing with a pro Soviet group of
people who dragged Sydney along to parties they were attended
by the likes of double agents like Anthony Blunt. And
here's here's a pretty tasty quote. He said, it's either
(38:14):
suicide or bloody Russia. Yeah, And that's what Crab told Sydney, like,
if I'm either going to commit suicide or I'm gonna
go to Russia, like I'm gonna I'm gonna defect effect
yeah h yeah. So Sidney really believed that at this
point Crab was going to defect. So Sidney alerted the
(38:35):
intelligence services and my five, and he refused to dive
with Crab on this second Russian ship mission, the one
that he was on on April nineteenth, which you know,
that was the whole Portsmouth one We've been talking about
this whole time. But previously he had gone on a
secret mission with Crab let's see to the Russian warship
(38:57):
Sverdlov on its visit Portsmith. So he had been there
before with Crab and none of them before, but he
had decided it was a bad idea to go on
this one. And he believes that although he wasn't there,
Buster Krab did not dive alone. Specifically, Sydney Knowles said
Buster told him they'd given him a new buddy Diver,
(39:20):
and then Crab never returned, leading Sydney to believe Crab
was murdered. We buried the lead slightly when we mentioned
one person here, Anthony Blunt, yes, as one of the
pro Soviet people that Sydney Knowles believes took Crab to
these parties. Right, Sir Anthony Blunt was for a long
(39:44):
time an art historian, a professor and a writer. And
it wasn't until nineteen sixty four, when he was offered
immunity for prosecution, that he confessed to having been a
Soviet spy for a long time. From somewhere in the
nineteen thirties to the nineteen fifties, he was a member
(40:04):
of a group called the Cambridge five Wow. So this
was an influential a tremendously influential member of UK society,
one of the type of people who would probably be
immune from the kind of scrutiny or questioning that the
Hoi polloi, the peasants and the proles would encounter. And
(40:27):
just you know, Sydney, the reason why he said, Crab
is feeling all of this. It's a reason that a
lot of us listening right now might feel a bit
bitter because he could not find a job after retiring
from his official military services. He just couldn't get work anywhere,
even though he'd put all this put in all this time. Yeah,
(40:48):
and you know, done so many heroic things and been
given awards, but he just couldn't find a job. Yeah.
I mean, so many folks you know in our country
that get out of the service liking it to almost
like the same treatment as people getting out of prison.
You're kind of ostracized a bit and are treated almost
like a societal barrial almost. It's just a total shame
(41:10):
and disrespectful. Yeah, incredibly so, especially when we consider the
lack of support. And when you say for support, we're
not talking just financial support. Economic support is important, but
so is cultural support, assimilation support, mental health support and
(41:30):
well for anyone listening outside of the country. In the
US currently, we have an organization called the Veterans Administration
whose job it is to help returning military members acclimate
to society and have a civilian life. And in many
(41:52):
this is not a political jab. It doesn't matter what
side of the false psychotomy people are finding themselves on.
In many cases, it isn't arguable that the Veterans Administration
has done a really terrible job organizationally, it's maybe a
show for a different day. The other thing about this,
(42:17):
so we said two thousand and six that FOI report
comes out, not the whole story. Still, Nope, it's not
the whole story. He gave the interview in two thousand
and seven. Then what happened next In the same year
in two thousand and seven, a retired Russian diver named
Eduard Koltsov claimed that he had murdered Crab on that
famous dive in April by slicing his throat because he
(42:38):
caught the frogman planting a mine underwater. Wow. This was
in a documentary on topic. He also produced a dagger
that he claimed he used in the murder. The implications
of this are tremendously disturbing because if Crab was on
a mission planting a mine on a ship, in a
(43:04):
diplomatic mission on a vessel like that functions diplomatic vessel,
then it's a clear active war yeah, and could be
considered a war crime. Ye. The way that this would
have changed the course of history had this occurred. And
(43:26):
what's disturbing about that is we still can't reliably if
that is true. We can't reliably suss out the motive.
Why would an intelligence agency that, as evidenced by their
continuing protection of just reprehensible criminals like these people are
good at keeping secrets, why would they do this rushed
(43:49):
job with this obvious active provocation this you know they're
there are big questions that this Koltsov story brings up.
Surviving relatives of craps do not believe Koltsov's story one bit.
They think it's another attempt by the UK to cover
up the truth. And they believe that what happened was
(44:10):
either Crab willingly defected or that he was abducted and
then brainwashed. Wow, and we know just that, like we've
seen or heard of or read the Manchurian candidate, and
we talk about allegations of this stuff with things like
(44:31):
Sirhan Sirhan rfk's assassin. The big question here is whether
or not this kind of brainwashing even works. But the
unfortunate and absolutely insane truth of it is both the
US and Russia tried it numerous ways. They were like,
(44:52):
let's give him truth serum, what about LSD, what about
sleep deprivation. Let's see if we can take cult indoctrination
tactics and apply it to people to make them do
things they would not normally do. That is a lot
to swallow out their theory of what happened to the guy?
(45:13):
Is it possible, though, Is it possible that he defected?
Is it possible that he was killed by his own handlers?
Is it possible that the Russian forces killed him? And
that the two great powers involved in this decided to
prevent the dominoes that would fall if this stuff came out.
(45:39):
I've got one for you. What if he was setting
up a false flag for the Soviets to like as
like acting as a Soviet agent to set up a
mind that would explode while it's in the harbor and
make it look like it was m I six and
other intelligence services him an active war interesting to what
(46:02):
end to spark all out war, to heat the Cold
War up. I'm not saying anything about it being true,
which is something I was ruminating on last night, But
that's very interesting. I hadn't thought of that angle. It's
a surprising one, but it's not. It might be outside
the realm of plausibility, but it's not outside the realm
of possibility. And then it also brings us to a
(46:26):
really important point. A lot of times, especially now, how
does this apply to twenty seventeen right? How does it
spide our modern age? A lot of what we see
public figures, whether they are elected officials, whether they are dictators,
whether they are ministers in something. Anybody in the geopolitical
(46:49):
arena is on some level performing two different, three different
types of shows. If we think of it as being performative,
there's one show performed for the domestic population, the voters,
the average citizens, the oppressed, whomever, and that is typically
(47:09):
going to be nationalistic. It's typically going to be something
about our enemies to keep people motivated by fear right.
And then the same people have what they say on
the international sphere, and sometimes those messages might seem contradictory
to the domestic population, so they're not really broadcast the
(47:34):
stuff that whichever country you live in, the stuff that
your leader is saying when it's not being recorded to
groups of other leaders is probably not the same stuff.
With a few notable exceptions, it's probably not the same
stuff they're telling you when they want you to vote
for them, or they want you to not complain about
(47:54):
internet censorship or the oppression of minorities. And the third one,
this is so weird. I didn't learn about this for
a long time. But the third one is let's say
that Matt, you are the leader of country A, and
Noll you're the leader of country B. The populations of
country A and country B have historically hated one another, right,
(48:19):
And what happens then is that when your first round
of theater, you the leader of country A, you the
leader of country B, will tell your local populations. You know,
forget Country A. They're the worst, they smell, they're threatening us,
they're taking all the resources. All those people in country B.
(48:40):
They use way too many double A batteries. I don't
know if you guys noticed, you guys notice it. Yeah,
And let's say Let's say also that one of you
just recently got elected and eliminated, so you're espousing all
this The word you'll often hear used as provocative language
right domestically, making public statements internationally that kind of say
(49:02):
the same thing, but tilted in a way to get
other people, other countries on your side. You want countries
see through Z to like country A or be better.
But when the two of you meet on private phone
calls or in person, you become a lot more like
people trying to negotiate a car sale or people trying
(49:26):
to negotiate a transaction, which means you'll say stuff like, well,
you know, I know that we have our differences. The
previous leader, you know, I didn't like them that much either. Frankly,
I'm someone you can work with, and so here's what
I need. And it becomes sort of a quid pro
quo situation wherein the two people that publicly claim to
(49:51):
hate each other on behalf of millions of other people
get in a room together and one of them says, well,
you know, I'm I'm looking for a better gas line,
and the other one says, well, you can't get the
gas line until I can get some of these sanctions dropped,
and then you know what, I think, I think we
can work on that. And the next thing, you know,
they've shake hands. They have these content they have very
(50:15):
differing tones and there, and they're one on one interactions
where they're actually doing stuff and then the performative interactions
where they're just sort of garnering support. The recent fairly
recent irandeal comes to mind just when thinking about something
like that and getting something very complicated out of two
(50:36):
countries that make those kinds of statements, and then it
just becomes more complicated when there are multiple countries involved.
I know that's a little bit of a ramp, but
I think it is important for us to clearly establish
that what you're seeing if you if you look into
(50:56):
these sorts of events or any events that geopolitical implications,
is you're seeing different snatches of three very different conversations
and you have to kind of triangulate the truth in
between them. Now, some some world leaders, it is true,
have always had the same the same message and all
(51:16):
three conversations, and other world leaders aren't particularly into that.
You know, they're they're they get in that one on
one situation and they're like wait what you meant all
that crazy stuff you were saying. It's a weird world
in which we live, and that's one of the reasons
that we still don't know what happened to command or
(51:37):
crap yep, but we do know that the danger, the
threat of these ghost combat divers of frogmen, it still exists.
It's very much real right now, and they could be
used in the modern day to scout defenses for future missions.
(51:58):
They could take and leave equipment in places that will
be used later. They can place microphones, and you can
determine all kinds of things underwater. If you have really
good mics, you can figure out what ships are doing,
where they're going, how much fuel they're using. You can
even listen to the noises of crew, like if you're
listening to submarines, which is crazy to think about. The
(52:20):
fiber optic umbilical lines we mentioned before, those huge fiber
optic wires, they can be tapped. Navy piers can also
use wireless connection systems and those signals can be used
to be or I guess these divers can intercept those
signals if they wanted to from the water. The only
thing with that, though, you've got to break all kinds
(52:40):
of crazy encryption from the military, but you know, if
you're also a military force, you can probably do it.
And to a degree this is well, to an extreme degree,
this is changing with the use of modern technology. You'll
hear a lot of pundits and experts tell you that
the new and most important sphere of warfare and therefore
(53:06):
spycraft is information collection, right, and spycraft to a degree
has always been about information collection overwhelmingly. This doesn't mean
that the old wet work stuff, the old physically putting
a person in the room, has stopped existing. You know,
(53:26):
for instance, with Stuck's Net, the program used most likely
by the US and Israel to disrupt Iran's nuclear enrichment activities,
that virus had to physically be put into that system
because there no country is going to well. Iran at
(53:51):
least is not going to be foolish enough to have
online access to nuclear nuclear enrichment facilities. So no matter
how how far technology evolves at this point, until we
have superhuman android operatives that can until we have robots
(54:11):
that can pass for human, we're still going to have
physical people traveling into a place yep. And this means
that as we record today, nobody knows how many people
or how many missions similar to this are actively happening.
(54:33):
It ports all over the world, and just in the
middle of the sea somewhere being you know, these guys
being deployed to go check out a ship in the south,
trying to see the frogman cometh The frog man cometh, Google,
Diego Garcia, Ye have some time. That's an interesting rabbit hole.
(54:54):
And with that, for now we conclude the story of
Commander Crab. We will update it if we learn whether
any of these, any of these conclusions have become the
inarguable truth. Absolutely, but this does not end our show.
We want we want to hear from you. Do you
(55:15):
think these operations are relatively rare in the modern day?
And by these operations we mean stuff that occurs with
absolute deniability. Yes, stuff that the president of a country
or the prime minister of a country doesn't know about.
Are they rare? Are they more common? Are they less common?
(55:37):
We want to hear from you, And that reminds us
it's time for our first shout out comes from the captain.
He says, Hi, guys, I'm a big fan. A friend
of mine recently introduced your podcast to me, I was
listening to your Ghulan Movement episode, which was great. I
had no idea there was anything like that potentially involved
(55:57):
with the failed Q. You were asked about the definition
of a social movement, and I have a definition for
you from my college class on social movement rhetoric, perfect, convenient.
A social movement must meet the following criteria. It must
be an organized collectivity. It must be an uninstitutionalized collectivity.
And just you know off air who we had to
(56:19):
look up collectivity. I was thinking collective, but a collectivity
as individuals who are considered as a whole group. An
example would be a gathering of all the people in
a town moving on. It must also be large enough
and propose or oppose some kind of change. Just to
delve in a little bit for clarity, an organized collectivity
(56:42):
is fairly straightforward. A movement needs some kind of organization
to make things happen. Think social movement organizations like Black
Lives Matter or the Tea Party. As for uninstitutionalized, a
social movement, at least when it starts, is generally made
up of outsiders and thus cannot be made up of
corporations or government To be large enough. A social movement
simply needs to reach the size it needs to affect
(57:04):
the change it proposes or opposes. Finally, propose or oppose
change is fairly obvious on its face. There may be
a few different definitions, and I am pulling from my
class notes, so I cannot give you any But yeah,
that's how you define that was Isn't that nice of
the captain, Captain? Yeah, well, we in the captain made
(57:26):
it happen. That's right. It's really cool to uh, you know,
think about it that much and send us that much detail,
so we really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks,
thanks for writing to us, captain. Who's next? Well, next
we have mister B. And mister B is not a listener. Well,
he very well could be, but who knows. I think,
(57:46):
you know, I don't know. Um, he had a very
interesting Monday this past October two. Oh I know about
this guy. Okay, Yes, this is an article that was
sent to us by our freendemy, our best friend of me,
our complaint department. Yeah, Jonathan Strickland, And I'm just going
to read part of this article. It's from K to Radio.
(58:11):
Here we go, A Casper Man claiming to be from
the future, has been arrested for having too much to
drink in the present stone cold awesome headline or leading line. Yeah.
Casper police officers say at around ten thirty pm on Monday,
October two, they were dispatched to a residence on East
Second Street for a man who was stating he was
(58:32):
from the future and he was there to help people.
They found mister B, who claimed that he was from
the year twenty forty eight and he was trying to
warn the people of Casper that aliens were coming next
year and they should leave as soon as possible, the people,
not the aliens. He added that he wanted to speak
to the president of the town. Oh boy away, Yeah,
(58:58):
it's way less commitment than be president of the country.
Mister B told the police that the only way he
was able to time travel was to have aliens fill
his body with alcohol and have him stand on a
giant pad which transported him to twenty seventeen, but he
ended up in the wrong year. It was supposed to
be twenty eighteen. I think we can end it there.
(59:21):
They determined that mister B could not take care of
himself and he was causing a disturbance. So yeah, they
took him in. He had an early breath sample showing
a blood alcohol content of point one three to six,
So yeah, he was definitely filled with alcohol and trying
to time travel. But hey, who's the same mister b
wasn't a time traveler? Come on, maybe that's how aliens operate, right,
(59:44):
who's to say? And we hope he is well, we
hope his mission goes well, yeah, you know, maybe he
is prophetic. Well see what happens since right eighteen? And
of course we want to think Jonathan Strickland for Ryan
too us. Jonathan Strickland is available for any questions, comments,
(01:00:05):
or concerns about our show twenty four hours a day,
seven days a week at Jonathan Strickland at how Stuffworks
dot com. And this concludes, oh gosh, but not our
show week And that's the end of this classic episode.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
you can get into contact with us in a number
(01:00:27):
of different ways. One of the best is to give
us a call. Our number is one eight three three
stdwy TK. If you don't want to do that, you
can send us a good old fashioned email. We are
conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff they Don't Want You
to Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(01:00:50):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Okay, so Matt, you and I had to step in
before we play this week's classic episode because the title,
the title sounds a little more Spongebobby, I think than
it should have. That's exactly what it sounds like. It's
an animated, made up character, Commander Crab. We're gonna do
a whole Netflix series on Commander Crab later. But no,
(00:22):
this is an actual human being and well a story.
We got a real story to tell you. Yeah, Lionel
Buster Crab disappears in the heart of the Cold War
on a mysterious spying mission, and no one knows what
really happened. From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies,
(00:43):
history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(01:04):
and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel. They call me Ben. You are you?
And that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
This episode is going to be a dive into a
mystery that remains controversial in the modern day, Literally a
dive into one. Yeah. The story we're covering today has
(01:24):
been the inspiration for several works of popular fiction. Ian
Fleming's nineteen sixty one James Bond novel, which then became
the movie Thunderball. It was inspired by it. And there's
a nineteen fifty eight film called The Silent Enemy, which
is really great and has nothing to do with Fartsnoel,
but it was based directly, well as close as you
(01:47):
can get a Hollywood film to be based directly on
something occurring. And we know, maybe you've probably read the
title for this episode, we know that the name Commander
Crab sounds okay, let's just say it. It sounds kind
of like it would be the name of a cartoon character.
I kept bringing it up to my wife, like, yeah,
I gotta do some more Commander Crab research, and she's like,
(02:08):
what are you saying. It makes me think of mister
Crabs from SpongeBob, Like if he had some secret life
as a covert deep cover agent, but I don't think
he would do a very good job. He's a little
too mouthy. Well, that might be part of his public persona,
you know, that might be the thin veneer over a
very dangerous cartoon crabs real personality, that tough exoskeleton that
(02:34):
you know comes with being a crab unless you're soft
shell oh and delicious. Yeah, you know, soft shell crab
is not is not bad. I've been I've been doing
some experiments with crab recipes. Not for everyone though, it
is not for everyone. That is true. And another thing
that was not for everyone, speaking of segu is the
(02:55):
concept of the Cold War. That is, that is the backdrop,
that is the world in which today's story, today's cover
up conspiracy theory takes place. You've heard the phrase cold
war before. It describes this global post World War two
tension between the clashing ideologies, clashing economies, and clashing cultures
(03:19):
of the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc. Yes, who's
gonna hold sway? Like, who's gonna be the dominant force
for all of those things? Now that we've the dust
has cleared away from all the battles. Yeah, who's going
to become the hedgemon, the power above all other powers.
The Eastern Bloc was comprised of the USSR and various
(03:41):
Soviet satellite states, so Russia and all of the states
that you here entering into really tense NATO conversations in
the current day. The Western Bloc was comprised of the
US along with NATO allies and a few other countries
sprinkled in and this conflict, this simmering tension, arguably it
(04:05):
existed beforehand in an earlier incarnation of what was known
as The Great Game, which we have a pretty good
episode on as well. And this conflict, this Cold War conflict,
meant that while these countries were not officially at war
since slightly before the end of World War Two. Consider
(04:29):
World War two an enemy of my enemy as my
friend's situation. Yes, right, It's almost like there was a
brief quieting of pre existing tensions between the UK and
the US and Russia. It's like, we don't like each other,
but we're going to hang because we don't like that
other guy way way way yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Like, look,
(04:52):
we're never going to be friends, but this guy is
a real pill. Yeah. So, in the absence of all
out war of any kind or physical conflicts that are
just occurring on a regular basis, what you're dealing with
generally are covert operations, operations that are gathering intelligence, just
making sure you know what that other team is doing
(05:15):
while you're over here doing your thing on your side
of the world. Yeah, exactly. During the Cold War, both
sides committed heinous and legal acts. There was also a
golden age of state secrecy and spycraft. I think I
brought this up before, but on a work trip last year,
I got to go to the Spy Museum in DC
(05:36):
and there's a whole section with little gadgets and stuff
in the evolution of these gadgets from this period. And
it's stuff like microphones hidden in pens and like, you know,
ways of hiding micro dots in pieces of paper that
had like really really tiny messages that have to be
put into a magnifying machine to really read. But you
could like get pages and pages of information to this
(05:58):
tiny little disc of plastic that could be like inserted
in between pages, and all kinds of tape recorders and
got Some of that stuff was so clunky too. They
had to go in these giant suitcases and they had
remote controls that would like go up their sleeves and
they could activate it. I mean, now, it's like all
the stuff they had back then week I could do
on my iPhone with the SAP, you know. And the
truth of the matter is that even today, in twenty seventeen,
(06:22):
a lot of the spies, a lot of the operatives
who are on either side of this conflict. When they
were caught, they were just left out in the cold.
I think that was also the phrase that was used
to refer to that. So we will never know how
many of these people existed, how many survived to maybe
even to the modern day, if they were operating in
the eighties, how many just disappeared in the dark ripped
(06:44):
out appendix of your history book. Yeah, I mean it's
an image, right, right, and the whole ideas you can't
expose the rest of whatever larger operation you're doing if
you've got an operative that gets caught. And if you'd
like to learn more about the Cold War in general,
you can check out some of our earlier episodes and
videos on the subject, especially the subjects of proxy wars right,
(07:06):
which arguably the Middle East is embroiled in today. Correct.
With that in mind, let's zoom in a little bit.
Let's go a bit of a sharper focus to a
course quote taken. Spycraft requires a very specific set of skills.
That's pretty good. Wow, good job, Matt. Yeah, the Golden Voice, Frederick,
(07:28):
and some operatives will specialize in certain environments, right, You
might have someone who can physically look like the average
member of another country, right or region, and who can
fluently speak those languages. Yeah, like a business person who
just exists incognito somewhere right. And this is crucial because,
(07:55):
for instance, if you have two operatives, one of whom
speaks fluent Haitian French and looks like they could blend
in and Haiti and one of whom speaks fluent Cantonese
then and looks like they could hang out in South China,
then of course you know roughly where those operatives are
probably going to be based. If you Yeah, if you're
(08:17):
a person with any brain, right, I know we're over something.
But yeah, there are some operators who specialize in underwater
or maritime or oceanic environments, and one of the names
for those people is frogmen. You know, that always brings
(08:39):
to mind for me, maybe you guys too. The opening
sequence of Johnny Quest, where there are these dudes and
like skin tight, you know, green diving suits and they
have like those full kind of like masks that go
over their eyes and nose and big flippers and they've
got spear guns, and Race Bannon kicks one of them
in the head Yeah, I do remember that. That's what
(09:00):
I always think of when I hear frogmen. Wow, I
mean it's not it's not far off of the frogmen is.
A frogman is a individual trained in what they would
call tactical diving, so exactly that you know, you named
two very important things. You named diving equipment, and you
named weapons. As you might imagine, this is mostly a
(09:22):
discipline for military and police forces. Yeah, a lot of
times there will be explosives experts that are frogmen, because
one of the things you do a lot of times
in that line of work is sabotaging other ships or
even like you know, places where ships are launched, even
probably or like ports and the infrastructure that's underwater that
(09:43):
you could attach explosives to and cause really horrible structural
damage that could really jack things up for the enemy. Yeah.
And another thing that's more recent with frogmen, this was
really surprising to me. It's spying on underwater of network cables,
(10:03):
so like huge fiber optic cables and splicing in and
getting information out deep underwater, like tapping into themselves now
with a device, that's pretty cool. The spine of the Internet.
It's no joke either, because depending on the geography of
those cables. Cutting one, and when we say cables, we're
not talking about the kind of cable you might have
(10:23):
a Time Warner gigantic infopipes essentially, and cutting one could
deplete internet supply in an entire country, right, it could
cut it off. The etymology is a little bit uncertain.
It first came as a stage name, really the Fearless
Frogman from play in the eighteen seventies, and later a
(10:47):
guy named John Spence who was an enlisted member of
the US Navy said that people called him Frogman because
he was training in a green waterproof suit. Dude, that
is really cool, and he was just to see to say,
you guys and see, just to remind yourselves, there's the
Johnny Quest frogmen. They're in these green suits and they've
got their tanks on and their masks and like the
(11:07):
traditional goggles you see. I just think that is like
the quintessential frogman in my ten year old brain. Yeah,
and I love that they're walking on land with their
flippers on and everything, and their their goggles still attached. Well,
they have just emerged, surprised Johnny on the deck of
a ship. No, those are their real that's their real face.
They're built for frogging. That's fair frog frog person, Oh,
(11:30):
Johnny quest So one of the sorry, one of the
One of the other things that frogmen would tend to do,
especially during World War two times, along with technology being developed,
were underwater travel and different kinds of transportation and weapons.
There are these things they called chariots. Well, chariot was
(11:50):
a type of these things, but they're really manned torpedoes.
That sounds like a really bad idea, doesn't It doesn't it.
It's the kind of idea that the person and who
doesn't have to actually perform it, yeah, comes up with, yes,
all right, guys, we got this thing. It's great, you're
gonna love it. We'll see. Okay. So in my head,
(12:10):
and I didn't do a deep dive into chariots or right,
but in my mind, it was a way to get
these frogmen, who you know, have a limited amount of
oxygen these operatives to travel a lot faster underwater with
you know, without that. Really that's it, just to travel
a lot faster underwater something get further distances. But tell
(12:32):
me more, I mean, these things were a rig two. Well,
you see this thing, I think the explosives thing came
a little bit later as like, well, why Joe, we
we've got these boy who's going out there? What well
points to eight knots. Why don't we put a warhead
at the end of that thing? You know with some
British some royal admiral was just like, I think we
should do it, and then chain and then the divers
(12:54):
were like wait what yeah, because that technology probably existed
before and just to accelerate their speed, you know, the work.
It could be exploratory, but the primary differentiation between your
average every day Jane or Joe diver diver person is
(13:15):
that being being trained in tactical diving work means that
these people will be trained in, as you said, matthe
use of explosives, the use of surveillance techniques, for instance,
stealth diving. We have a lot of former and current
members of the military who listen to this show, and
(13:38):
we would like to hear from you on this because
from what we understand, typically military organizations tend to describe
these operators as combat divers or combat swimmers or other
similar terms, and the phrase frogman seems to often be
used as an informal appellation. You know, so let us
(14:01):
let us know. I don't want to stir the pot
too much here. Yeah, I don't want to make too
big of a splash here, but I would I would
want to know, is in your experience, if you have
military experience, is the term frogman a just an informal thing?
Is it official like in the UK with the with
(14:21):
the Royal Frogman or And in addition to that, my
second question would be, are there any stereotypes. There's a
lot of different branches of the military have stereotypes about
uh specific organizations. So yeah, dude, please tell us all
of that. Um So, just to jump us back into
(14:44):
the Cold War era where we are, yeah, I'm feeling chilly. Yeah, excellent, excellent.
So during this time in Britain and the United Kingdom,
there were a lot of operations that were done in
Malta in a lot of these other places where there
were smaller conflicts and things, and these combat divers played
a huge role in this. A lot of it was
(15:06):
taking out minds that had been placed during the war
that they just had to get rid of, or spying
on a ship just to make sure you know what's
going on with this stuff, right, Is that an actual
research vessel or are they up to something else. Yeah,
the Royal Navy was just all over this stuff at
the time, and a lot of not some retired some
(15:28):
still active military individuals who were working during World War
Two ended up finding jobs doing these kind of things.
And today we're zooming the focus even sharper to the
individual the protagonist of our story, Commander Lionel Crab also
(15:49):
known as Buster Crab, Buster Crab. And we'll tell you
more after a word from our sponsor. Commander Lionel Crab
aka Buster Crab, that's Crab with two bees. Yes, I
was born on January twenty eighth, nineteen o nine. He
(16:11):
was a Royal Navy frogman. He was also later on
a diver for m I six. That's the British Intelligence Service.
Think of them like the CIA here in the West,
if you're familiar with that. Yeah, they've conducted numerous clandestine operations.
It's also fairly obvious this is not related to today's episode,
(16:31):
that they were aiding and embedding a ring of pedophiles
in the United Kingdom. I feel like that deans to
be said when they are brought up. Okay, wow, well yep,
full stop so so command, yeah, look it up if
you have time, and you know you didn't eat recently.
So Commander Crab received what was called the George Medal,
(16:55):
that's after King George, for removing Italian mines from the
from British warships at Malta. As we said before, so
he got a King George Medal. That's a huge deal
for his work. Then he also received an OBE or
an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for
again clearing minds, this time in Livorno. And that, by
(17:17):
the way, is a knighthood. So he got he got knighted.
So he's Sir Crab. Well yeah, and again, if we
have any listeners out there that can confirm or deny that,
please let us know, because that's what the research looked
like to us. And removing removing minds is it's a
it's always a good thing, but it's not necessarily a
(17:38):
humanitarian thing. This might not have been to protect commercial
fishermen right or commercial fishing vessels. This could have been
to ensure that other like friendly military powers were able
to traverse these these areas at Malta. Would they do
(18:00):
this like manually, like they would have to hitch it
up to some kind of chain that would then raise
it up out of these are these are big. Minds
are massive. That's a great question. I could not find
anything on like physically how they would remove the minds.
I was assuming they would blow them up. In my head,
that's what I was thinking, the way you would a
lot of times, the way you would do mindes, the
(18:22):
like land mines. There are there are ways to disable
a landmine by hand without exploding it, but I don't
want to be the person doing that. We should do
a show just on existing minds. That's great minds of
mind fields. Yeah, I would, I would say, without having
ever done mind removal in a way that I would
talk about on air, I would say that there are
(18:43):
three ways to disable a mind. Well, the first would
be rendering the equipment non functional, so accessing it, breaking
the wires right, depending on whatever the active mechanism of
the mind is at the time. The other would be
as Moll said, completely removing it. And then the other
(19:04):
would be as Matt said, blowing it up, exploding ordinance
that's out there, yeah or something. And I guess part
of that would depend upon how closely the minds were
monitored by the people who Yeah, they are crazy looking
to They're like attached to the cea floor with chains
(19:25):
and then they're you know, at the very top of
it look like something out of Hell Raiser. There are
these orbs with the spikes, and the spikes or what
trigger them right like you hit the spice. You know,
it always makes me think of that absurdly difficult. Maybe
I'm just a dummy PC game Mind Sweeper, Like it's
it's you remember that game. I remember, But I just
like it was the kind of game where like, for
the longest time I just kind of clicked it and
(19:45):
didn't really know what I was doing. I never really
understood how to play it until much later. Um, but
that you know, it's not really a fun game exactly.
I thought Mind Sweeper was great. You gotta have the
right mouse. It's true, because the right mind it's it's
key to double it's key to double click. I used
to set the difficulty on the highest you can change
(20:05):
the density of minds right or the probable density of minds,
and on the largest board. If you said it on
the highest highest density of minds, what will happen is
you'll get your first click free. It never lets you
die on the first click, and so you click in
the middle or wherever you want, and then it'll show
(20:26):
you that number shows you the number of minds that
are in the hidden cells around the one you clicked.
One time, I got to two clicks on the hardest setting.
That was my That was my rate. It was pure accident,
pure accident, and playing it now. All right, all right,
(20:47):
Well maybe the three of us, don't you know, maybe
the three of us should not specialize in mind removal. Yes,
however this guy did. It was a It was a
pretty rare set of skills. There was a specific instance
that you looked into matt where the Soviets sent emissaries
(21:10):
to Britain. Right, y was it submarine? Both? Oh? No,
it was by ship there warships. And it's pretty interesting.
Apparently this group of Soviets they were on kind of
not a victory tour, but like a propaganda tour of sorts,
where they had been to India and a couple other
places where they had been. You know, they got off
(21:32):
the ship and they were cheered and everybody was like, oh,
you guys are so great. You really beat those Nazis.
You guys are awesome. We still really like you guys,
and you're doing great things in the world. They then
they took they took a trip to Britain and it
was Secretary Nikita Krushev and the Soviet Prime Premier Nikolai Bulgannon.
(21:54):
And forgiven my pronunciation there, but they came to Britain
in April of nineteen fifty six and they docked with
their warships at Portsmouth and that is roughly, oh, I
forget it. Put seventy six miles southwest of London is
where that port is if you're looking in overall view
of the UK. They spent eight full days there in
(22:16):
Britain and their schedule included three days of talks at
Downing Street, So talking with the big wigs in Britain,
the people, the movers and the shakers and all that. Yeah,
and that's talking opposition party as well as you know,
the party that's in power. You know, all the a
lot of MP's probably and influential business people. They had
(22:36):
a dinner with the Prime Minister at the time, who
was Anthony Eden. Twice they did that. They visited him
at checkers and I don't know what that is this
is not the fast food Checkers. I honestly I didn't
write down what that was. I just saw it and
I was like, okay, that sounds fun. This episode brought
(22:56):
to you by Checkers, but its spelled the Cold War
fast food. Yes, but it's spelled c h e q
U e rs, so that's how they'd spell it. Yeah.
In Britain. Meanwhile, the CIA, the MI six and Naval
intelligence are in the middle of this mission placing divers
(23:19):
under the Soviet warships where they're docked at Portsmouth. Yeah,
and the whole idea is they that whole concept of
we need to know exactly what these guys are doing
where possibly they're going next, what they're doing while they're
port while they're docked there, or they're ported there, like
are they doing any weird stuff with underwater divers checking
out our ports? So you know, it makes sense from
(23:42):
a strategic standpoint, and that's what they were doing. Okay.
Side note, I just I can't let it ride. Although
I thought, or I thought us calling a Checkers a
fast food is pretty good. You gotta eat that worked
really well. The actual thing is short for Checkers Court.
That's the country house of the UK Prime Minister. So
(24:05):
they went visited at his house like it's like the
British Camp David kind of thing. It's treat I went
to check his all right. So let's drill down even
further to a specific day, April nineteenth, nineteen fifty six.
So on this date, Lionel bust A Crab was on
(24:26):
a mission to spy on a Soviet warship that was
docked in Portsmouth Harbor. I am not going to even
attempt to pronounce the name, but just so you guys
are on my side, that misspell for you. It's O
R d z H O N I K I d
z E. Do with that what you will. Yeah, yeah,
(24:47):
thanks for taking one for the team. Um. And it
was roughly seventy six miles southwest of London. Yeah, and
he was on a dive in the harbor and by
all accounts was monitoring the hull ship. After his dive,
he was never seen resurfacing and he never made any
further contact with his handlers. For all intents and purposes,
(25:11):
Commander Crab had vanished. Yeah, so he's got his You know,
when you go on a mission like this, you've got
handlers people who are setting up your mission, walking you
through it. You've seen twenty four. It's kind of like
that in a way. There's somebody who's always on the line,
who's setting things up for you and giving you intelligence
(25:32):
as you're gathering more intelligence. And there's a tight time
frame as well. I think that's very important too. So
when he failed to comply with that time frame, the
British Admiralties stated that he was killed while looking on
an experimental mind in Stokes Bay, a few miles away
(25:54):
from Portsmith Hallbo. Yeah. They said he was killed in
an experimental mind, hadn't even been in near the ships.
Yeah yeah, and that essentially he had killed himself in
an accident. But here's the thing. The Soviet Union apparently
exposed this as as disinformation when they reported that there
(26:15):
was indeed at least one frogman that had been spotted
servicing right near their ship when it was doctor reported there.
And then the story changes and it was claimed that
Commander Crab was indeed examining the Soviet ship or like
monitoring the whole but he was doing it without any
official authority. Yeah, so the story is already changing a
(26:38):
whole lot through the official sources about what exactly is
going on here. Again, it's that thing of let's not
expose our larger operation. But then something kind of crazy happens. Yeah,
about six months later, on the south coast of England,
someone discovers a body. It's headless and handless, someone's decapitated,
(27:03):
cut off the hands at the wrists, and the officials say, well,
here are the remains of Commander Crab. And we talked
a little bit about technology at the time, Like Matt
mentioned the idea of manning torpedoes, the technology of the
time forensically meant that with neither head nor hands available,
(27:26):
it was almost impossible to get a solid identification on
the body. No dental records, no fingerprints, yeah, none of
that stuff. And already the way that a body will
change if submerged in water for a long time is
that's something that we could we could make a guess at, right,
(27:47):
and maybe even the type of water, maybe even the
type of journey the body took, but that's still not
solid identification. No, And there were no identifying marks that
the examiners could find, nothing unique at least any kind
of scars, tattoos, anything like that. And Crab's former diving partner,
a fellow named Sydney Knowles, identified the body. He's the
(28:11):
one who said that's Buster. Yep, yep. So what happened,
what happened to Commander Crab? Well, we've got a little
better idea now that it's been years and years and
years since the occurrence, since we've got, you know, some
reports from the intelligence offices that we're carrying out the
(28:34):
mission in which Commander Crab met his demise. But honestly,
there are a lot of questions and we'll answer some
and pose quite a few more after a word from
our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. Okay, So jump way,
(28:57):
way way forward from nineteen fifty six to the you're
two thousand and six the future. Yes, the BBC, the
British Broadcasting Corporation, obtained via a freedom of information application
a little different from here in the United States, but
the same thing in theory. It was a formerly secret
(29:18):
document and it was an official report of Commander Crab's
final mission. So what the intelligent groups had to say
about it? Essentially, the report showed that crabs intelligence handlers
didn't follow a lot of the standard procedures that you
would when going on a mission of this sort, specifically
about protecting the secrecy of what's going on, where people are,
(29:42):
what they're doing, like the actual names of your operatives,
which is that that's a big detail. But I want
to I want a caveat that. Okay, sure, because following
standard procedures could mean almost anything. Oh yeah, and that
(30:02):
is my phrase there. So standard procedures is not what
was used in the article that was created there, but
it's they didn't follow protocols essentially that are set forth
for how you how you would maintain secrecy, which, if
we were to speculate, would be stuff along the lines
of creating a plausible alibi for the actual operatives if
(30:27):
they ever came into question. Right, we need some sort
of dummied up proof that you know, Crab was not
in Portsmouth, he was in North Sandwich on Rye, and
this is just some other guy who hasn't assumed name,
who was there at the time, who may even have
identification on him that shows he's a different person. So
(30:50):
the idea there is that through some error, whether bureaucratic
or whether whether it was a minor bureaucratic error, or
whether it was a complete poop show from the beginning. Yeah,
it started off on a bad note. They checked into
a hotel, he and his handlers with their actual names,
that was right there by the port. Like, how crazy
(31:12):
is that? Swinging a miss right? Kind of a rookie move,
I know, it just seems like it was set up
to fail from the start. It's kind of like in
not to make light of what I believe. It's clearly
a tragic death, but it's kind of like in James
Bond films. One of the biggest plot holes in James
Bond films is that guy is always using his real name,
(31:35):
and he says it all the time, constantly, way more
often than you would even you would say the name
of like someone you loved, you know for sure, And
it does seem like a lot of other characters in
those movies do use code names. Maybe it's just to
show his raw bravado that it's like, I don't need
to use code names because I got this ish on Lockdown.
(31:58):
I'm good. Also, I want to get us too far
off track. Another James Bond point. I read a pretty
fascinating study where someone had went through the films and
the books and said just how much is this guy
drinking and his liver would have been shot and srotic
(32:21):
if he was drinking like that every day, and he
would probably be falling down drunk by you know, late afternoon. Yeah,
at least I spy better than I've had a so
more like blitzed James blitzed, Yeah, exactly. So uh so, Yeah,
(32:44):
it was it was clear then that now that we
have that specific there, the had woefully woefully misjudge the
sequence of events, Yes, exactly. And then well here's the
other thing. When it was clear that he had gone missing.
(33:06):
You know, we're not sure where he is, but he's
definitely not on the mission anymore, and he hasn't resurfaced.
His team shows not to carry out a full search because,
as we said before, they were they were afraid of
alerting the crew of the cruiser that they were looking
at um, of letting them know that, hey, we're doing this.
Because those guys Nikita Krushev, they're they're on a diplomatic mission.
(33:29):
There's not supposed to be any spine going on right here.
This is supposed to be a here, shake my hand,
welcome to my country. Let's discuss things, you know, Krushev is,
by the way, the Soviet official who was famously alleged
to have pounded his shoe in international meetings and told
(33:50):
the US that he was going to crush them. Yes,
alleged that probably didn't happen. There, there's let's just a
jump on that, Ben. Sure, there is an article you
can find. Oh man, what is it called. It's like
the the disaster Dinner or the fiasco Dinner. I forget
exactly how they phrased it, but it's all about a
(34:12):
specific meeting with I believe the Labor Party that took
place during this trip, and how upset and angry Kruschev
was at certain things, and the threats that he made.
It's it's fascinating fiasco dinner, I think, fiasco dinner. Yeah. So,
as soon as they've found out in real time, not
(34:36):
counting the not counting the deceptive and completely false, deceitful
pr stories, before they even started half cooking those up
or half baking those, they said, we're not going to
carry out a search. Yeah, he's that guy's gone. Yeah,
(34:58):
we don't know who he was, he's gone. The Prime
Minister himself, Anthony Eaton, had no idea not only that
the mission failed, but had no idea that there was
a mission for more than a little more than two
weeks after. Yeah, you'd think he'd be pretty grumpy. Yeah,
but I think that idea is protecting him because he's
(35:19):
actually in the room with all these guys, you know,
and you don't you don't want any kind of tell
on his part if he knows. Is it plausible deniability?
I mean, we see that happening in the US all
the time, with the practice of compartmentalized intelligence. You know,
I believe multiple presidents have been shut down for during
(35:41):
their during their honeymoon phase with the American electorate. They say,
we're going to find out what really happened to JFK,
and we're going to find out what really what what's
really going on with all these allegations of UFOs and stuff,
And then you just see like the yeah, you get
into that dark room and sorry, when the actual unelected
(36:03):
government officials that are instead appointed right or promoted into
these positions are often the ones who will control access
to that intelligence. And I think I think you guys
raise a great point where where the Prime Minister probably
probably doesn't know, but I'm just so skeptical about that
(36:25):
stuff when they say that they really don't know. I
know it can occur, and they might not know about
a specific mission. Surely there was an inkling, right, Surely
there was a program, right, and it had to come
up and at least a budget meeting where someone's like, hey,
we're getting a lot of swimming equipment. You guys get
(36:48):
in a pool. What's going on anyway? Reason number seventy four,
why I'm not Prime Minister. So what happened with the
diving partner? Well, yes, if you remember that, fellow mister
Sidney Knowles. He the next year after this two thousand
and six whole thing, in two thousand and seven, he
did an interview with the BBC's show called Inside Out,
(37:11):
and he stated that he had only identified the body
of Commander Crab because he was quote under pressure to
do so, and he suggested that that Buster may have
been murdered on orders by British intelligence, like it was
an inside job to get rid of Crab, which is
(37:32):
insane in its implications. Right, Maybe he knew something that
he wasn't supposed to, or he was going to do
something that somebody didn't like. Well, Inside Out he goes
Sidney goes into it a little further, and we've got
an excerpt that we're going to read from that, all right,
So I'm just going to paraphrase this a little bit.
(37:53):
So Sydney said that Crab was varied bitter, and that
he was also mixing with a pro Soviet group of
people who dragged Sydney along to parties they were attended
by the likes of double agents like Anthony Blunt. And
here's here's a pretty tasty quote. He said, it's either
(38:14):
suicide or bloody Russia. Yeah, And that's what Crab told Sydney, like,
if I'm either going to commit suicide or I'm gonna
go to Russia, like I'm gonna I'm gonna defect effect
yeah h yeah. So Sidney really believed that at this
point Crab was going to defect. So Sidney alerted the
(38:35):
intelligence services and my five, and he refused to dive
with Crab on this second Russian ship mission, the one
that he was on on April nineteenth, which you know,
that was the whole Portsmouth one We've been talking about
this whole time. But previously he had gone on a
secret mission with Crab let's see to the Russian warship
(38:57):
Sverdlov on its visit Portsmith. So he had been there
before with Crab and none of them before, but he
had decided it was a bad idea to go on
this one. And he believes that although he wasn't there,
Buster Krab did not dive alone. Specifically, Sydney Knowles said
Buster told him they'd given him a new buddy Diver,
(39:20):
and then Crab never returned, leading Sydney to believe Crab
was murdered. We buried the lead slightly when we mentioned
one person here, Anthony Blunt, yes, as one of the
pro Soviet people that Sydney Knowles believes took Crab to
these parties. Right, Sir Anthony Blunt was for a long
(39:44):
time an art historian, a professor and a writer. And
it wasn't until nineteen sixty four, when he was offered
immunity for prosecution, that he confessed to having been a
Soviet spy for a long time. From somewhere in the
nineteen thirties to the nineteen fifties, he was a member
(40:04):
of a group called the Cambridge five Wow. So this
was an influential a tremendously influential member of UK society,
one of the type of people who would probably be
immune from the kind of scrutiny or questioning that the
Hoi polloi, the peasants and the proles would encounter. And
(40:27):
just you know, Sydney, the reason why he said, Crab
is feeling all of this. It's a reason that a
lot of us listening right now might feel a bit
bitter because he could not find a job after retiring
from his official military services. He just couldn't get work anywhere,
even though he'd put all this put in all this time. Yeah,
(40:48):
and you know, done so many heroic things and been
given awards, but he just couldn't find a job. Yeah.
I mean, so many folks you know in our country
that get out of the service liking it to almost
like the same treatment as people getting out of prison.
You're kind of ostracized a bit and are treated almost
like a societal barrial almost. It's just a total shame
(41:10):
and disrespectful. Yeah, incredibly so, especially when we consider the
lack of support. And when you say for support, we're
not talking just financial support. Economic support is important, but
so is cultural support, assimilation support, mental health support and
(41:30):
well for anyone listening outside of the country. In the
US currently, we have an organization called the Veterans Administration
whose job it is to help returning military members acclimate
to society and have a civilian life. And in many
(41:52):
this is not a political jab. It doesn't matter what
side of the false psychotomy people are finding themselves on.
In many cases, it isn't arguable that the Veterans Administration
has done a really terrible job organizationally, it's maybe a
show for a different day. The other thing about this,
(42:17):
so we said two thousand and six that FOI report
comes out, not the whole story. Still, Nope, it's not
the whole story. He gave the interview in two thousand
and seven. Then what happened next In the same year
in two thousand and seven, a retired Russian diver named
Eduard Koltsov claimed that he had murdered Crab on that
famous dive in April by slicing his throat because he
(42:38):
caught the frogman planting a mine underwater. Wow. This was
in a documentary on topic. He also produced a dagger
that he claimed he used in the murder. The implications
of this are tremendously disturbing because if Crab was on
a mission planting a mine on a ship, in a
(43:04):
diplomatic mission on a vessel like that functions diplomatic vessel,
then it's a clear active war yeah, and could be
considered a war crime. Ye. The way that this would
have changed the course of history had this occurred. And
(43:26):
what's disturbing about that is we still can't reliably if
that is true. We can't reliably suss out the motive.
Why would an intelligence agency that, as evidenced by their
continuing protection of just reprehensible criminals like these people are
good at keeping secrets, why would they do this rushed
(43:49):
job with this obvious active provocation this you know they're
there are big questions that this Koltsov story brings up.
Surviving relatives of craps do not believe Koltsov's story one bit.
They think it's another attempt by the UK to cover
up the truth. And they believe that what happened was
(44:10):
either Crab willingly defected or that he was abducted and
then brainwashed. Wow, and we know just that, like we've
seen or heard of or read the Manchurian candidate, and
we talk about allegations of this stuff with things like
(44:31):
Sirhan Sirhan rfk's assassin. The big question here is whether
or not this kind of brainwashing even works. But the
unfortunate and absolutely insane truth of it is both the
US and Russia tried it numerous ways. They were like,
(44:52):
let's give him truth serum, what about LSD, what about
sleep deprivation. Let's see if we can take cult indoctrination
tactics and apply it to people to make them do
things they would not normally do. That is a lot
to swallow out their theory of what happened to the guy?
(45:13):
Is it possible, though, Is it possible that he defected?
Is it possible that he was killed by his own handlers?
Is it possible that the Russian forces killed him? And
that the two great powers involved in this decided to
prevent the dominoes that would fall if this stuff came out.
(45:39):
I've got one for you. What if he was setting
up a false flag for the Soviets to like as
like acting as a Soviet agent to set up a
mind that would explode while it's in the harbor and
make it look like it was m I six and
other intelligence services him an active war interesting to what
(46:02):
end to spark all out war, to heat the Cold
War up. I'm not saying anything about it being true,
which is something I was ruminating on last night, But
that's very interesting. I hadn't thought of that angle. It's
a surprising one, but it's not. It might be outside
the realm of plausibility, but it's not outside the realm
of possibility. And then it also brings us to a
(46:26):
really important point. A lot of times, especially now, how
does this apply to twenty seventeen right? How does it
spide our modern age? A lot of what we see
public figures, whether they are elected officials, whether they are dictators,
whether they are ministers in something. Anybody in the geopolitical
(46:49):
arena is on some level performing two different, three different
types of shows. If we think of it as being performative,
there's one show performed for the domestic population, the voters,
the average citizens, the oppressed, whomever, and that is typically
(47:09):
going to be nationalistic. It's typically going to be something
about our enemies to keep people motivated by fear right.
And then the same people have what they say on
the international sphere, and sometimes those messages might seem contradictory
to the domestic population, so they're not really broadcast the
(47:34):
stuff that whichever country you live in, the stuff that
your leader is saying when it's not being recorded to
groups of other leaders is probably not the same stuff.
With a few notable exceptions, it's probably not the same
stuff they're telling you when they want you to vote
for them, or they want you to not complain about
(47:54):
internet censorship or the oppression of minorities. And the third one,
this is so weird. I didn't learn about this for
a long time. But the third one is let's say
that Matt, you are the leader of country A, and
Noll you're the leader of country B. The populations of
country A and country B have historically hated one another, right,
(48:19):
And what happens then is that when your first round
of theater, you the leader of country A, you the
leader of country B, will tell your local populations. You know,
forget Country A. They're the worst, they smell, they're threatening us,
they're taking all the resources. All those people in country B.
(48:40):
They use way too many double A batteries. I don't
know if you guys noticed, you guys notice it. Yeah,
And let's say Let's say also that one of you
just recently got elected and eliminated, so you're espousing all
this The word you'll often hear used as provocative language
right domestically, making public statements internationally that kind of say
(49:02):
the same thing, but tilted in a way to get
other people, other countries on your side. You want countries
see through Z to like country A or be better.
But when the two of you meet on private phone
calls or in person, you become a lot more like
people trying to negotiate a car sale or people trying
(49:26):
to negotiate a transaction, which means you'll say stuff like, well,
you know, I know that we have our differences. The
previous leader, you know, I didn't like them that much either. Frankly,
I'm someone you can work with, and so here's what
I need. And it becomes sort of a quid pro
quo situation wherein the two people that publicly claim to
(49:51):
hate each other on behalf of millions of other people
get in a room together and one of them says, well,
you know, I'm I'm looking for a better gas line,
and the other one says, well, you can't get the
gas line until I can get some of these sanctions dropped,
and then you know what, I think, I think we
can work on that. And the next thing, you know,
they've shake hands. They have these content they have very
(50:15):
differing tones and there, and they're one on one interactions
where they're actually doing stuff and then the performative interactions
where they're just sort of garnering support. The recent fairly
recent irandeal comes to mind just when thinking about something
like that and getting something very complicated out of two
(50:36):
countries that make those kinds of statements, and then it
just becomes more complicated when there are multiple countries involved.
I know that's a little bit of a ramp, but
I think it is important for us to clearly establish
that what you're seeing if you if you look into
(50:56):
these sorts of events or any events that geopolitical implications,
is you're seeing different snatches of three very different conversations
and you have to kind of triangulate the truth in
between them. Now, some some world leaders, it is true,
have always had the same the same message and all
(51:16):
three conversations, and other world leaders aren't particularly into that.
You know, they're they're they get in that one on
one situation and they're like wait what you meant all
that crazy stuff you were saying. It's a weird world
in which we live, and that's one of the reasons
that we still don't know what happened to command or
(51:37):
crap yep, but we do know that the danger, the
threat of these ghost combat divers of frogmen, it still exists.
It's very much real right now, and they could be
used in the modern day to scout defenses for future missions.
(51:58):
They could take and leave equipment in places that will
be used later. They can place microphones, and you can
determine all kinds of things underwater. If you have really
good mics, you can figure out what ships are doing,
where they're going, how much fuel they're using. You can
even listen to the noises of crew, like if you're
listening to submarines, which is crazy to think about. The
(52:20):
fiber optic umbilical lines we mentioned before, those huge fiber
optic wires, they can be tapped. Navy piers can also
use wireless connection systems and those signals can be used
to be or I guess these divers can intercept those
signals if they wanted to from the water. The only
thing with that, though, you've got to break all kinds
(52:40):
of crazy encryption from the military, but you know, if
you're also a military force, you can probably do it.
And to a degree this is well, to an extreme degree,
this is changing with the use of modern technology. You'll
hear a lot of pundits and experts tell you that
the new and most important sphere of warfare and therefore
(53:06):
spycraft is information collection, right, and spycraft to a degree
has always been about information collection overwhelmingly. This doesn't mean
that the old wet work stuff, the old physically putting
a person in the room, has stopped existing. You know,
(53:26):
for instance, with Stuck's Net, the program used most likely
by the US and Israel to disrupt Iran's nuclear enrichment activities,
that virus had to physically be put into that system
because there no country is going to well. Iran at
(53:51):
least is not going to be foolish enough to have
online access to nuclear nuclear enrichment facilities. So no matter
how how far technology evolves at this point, until we
have superhuman android operatives that can until we have robots
(54:11):
that can pass for human, we're still going to have
physical people traveling into a place yep. And this means
that as we record today, nobody knows how many people
or how many missions similar to this are actively happening.
(54:33):
It ports all over the world, and just in the
middle of the sea somewhere being you know, these guys
being deployed to go check out a ship in the south,
trying to see the frogman cometh The frog man cometh, Google,
Diego Garcia, Ye have some time. That's an interesting rabbit hole.
(54:54):
And with that, for now we conclude the story of
Commander Crab. We will update it if we learn whether
any of these, any of these conclusions have become the
inarguable truth. Absolutely, but this does not end our show.
We want we want to hear from you. Do you
(55:15):
think these operations are relatively rare in the modern day?
And by these operations we mean stuff that occurs with
absolute deniability. Yes, stuff that the president of a country
or the prime minister of a country doesn't know about.
Are they rare? Are they more common? Are they less common?
(55:37):
We want to hear from you, And that reminds us
it's time for our first shout out comes from the captain.
He says, Hi, guys, I'm a big fan. A friend
of mine recently introduced your podcast to me, I was
listening to your Ghulan Movement episode, which was great. I
had no idea there was anything like that potentially involved
(55:57):
with the failed Q. You were asked about the definition
of a social movement, and I have a definition for
you from my college class on social movement rhetoric, perfect, convenient.
A social movement must meet the following criteria. It must
be an organized collectivity. It must be an uninstitutionalized collectivity.
And just you know off air who we had to
(56:19):
look up collectivity. I was thinking collective, but a collectivity
as individuals who are considered as a whole group. An
example would be a gathering of all the people in
a town moving on. It must also be large enough
and propose or oppose some kind of change. Just to
delve in a little bit for clarity, an organized collectivity
(56:42):
is fairly straightforward. A movement needs some kind of organization
to make things happen. Think social movement organizations like Black
Lives Matter or the Tea Party. As for uninstitutionalized, a
social movement, at least when it starts, is generally made
up of outsiders and thus cannot be made up of
corporations or government To be large enough. A social movement
simply needs to reach the size it needs to affect
(57:04):
the change it proposes or opposes. Finally, propose or oppose
change is fairly obvious on its face. There may be
a few different definitions, and I am pulling from my
class notes, so I cannot give you any But yeah,
that's how you define that was Isn't that nice of
the captain, Captain? Yeah, well, we in the captain made
(57:26):
it happen. That's right. It's really cool to uh, you know,
think about it that much and send us that much detail,
so we really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks,
thanks for writing to us, captain. Who's next? Well, next
we have mister B. And mister B is not a listener. Well,
he very well could be, but who knows. I think,
(57:46):
you know, I don't know. Um, he had a very
interesting Monday this past October two. Oh I know about
this guy. Okay, Yes, this is an article that was
sent to us by our freendemy, our best friend of me,
our complaint department. Yeah, Jonathan Strickland, And I'm just going
to read part of this article. It's from K to Radio.
(58:11):
Here we go, A Casper Man claiming to be from
the future, has been arrested for having too much to
drink in the present stone cold awesome headline or leading line. Yeah.
Casper police officers say at around ten thirty pm on Monday,
October two, they were dispatched to a residence on East
Second Street for a man who was stating he was
(58:32):
from the future and he was there to help people.
They found mister B, who claimed that he was from
the year twenty forty eight and he was trying to
warn the people of Casper that aliens were coming next
year and they should leave as soon as possible, the people,
not the aliens. He added that he wanted to speak
to the president of the town. Oh boy away, Yeah,
(58:58):
it's way less commitment than be president of the country.
Mister B told the police that the only way he
was able to time travel was to have aliens fill
his body with alcohol and have him stand on a
giant pad which transported him to twenty seventeen, but he
ended up in the wrong year. It was supposed to
be twenty eighteen. I think we can end it there.
(59:21):
They determined that mister B could not take care of
himself and he was causing a disturbance. So yeah, they
took him in. He had an early breath sample showing
a blood alcohol content of point one three to six,
So yeah, he was definitely filled with alcohol and trying
to time travel. But hey, who's the same mister b
wasn't a time traveler? Come on, maybe that's how aliens operate, right,
(59:44):
who's to say? And we hope he is well, we
hope his mission goes well, yeah, you know, maybe he
is prophetic. Well see what happens since right eighteen? And
of course we want to think Jonathan Strickland for Ryan
too us. Jonathan Strickland is available for any questions, comments,
(01:00:05):
or concerns about our show twenty four hours a day,
seven days a week at Jonathan Strickland at how Stuffworks
dot com. And this concludes, oh gosh, but not our
show week And that's the end of this classic episode.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
you can get into contact with us in a number
(01:00:27):
of different ways. One of the best is to give
us a call. Our number is one eight three three
stdwy TK. If you don't want to do that, you
can send us a good old fashioned email. We are
conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff they Don't Want You
to Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(01:00:50):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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