THE FROGMAN WHO VANISHED

Just before 6 o’clock on the morning of April 19, 1956, Lionel Crabb, an expert British diver, quietly left the Sally Port Inn in Portsmouth, England, accompanied by his minder, a tall, slim American going by the name of Bernard Smith. The two men made their way to HMS Vernon, a red-brick dockside compound of the Royal Navy. There, in the crisp morning mist, they met up with Lieutenant George Franklin, a Royal Navy diving officer who, two nights earlier, had agreed to act as Crabb’s helper and dresser in a clandestine mission arranged by MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Ostensibly, the plan was for Crabb to dive beneath the Soviet gun cruiser Ordzhonikidze, which was temporarily docked in Portsmouth Harbor, to photograph its keel, propellers, and rudder. The British, then embroiled in the uneasy espionage of the Cold War, were keen to understand the underwater workings of Soviet vessels and the antisubmarine warfare equipment they carried beneath their hulls.

The had arrived in Portsmouth Harbor a day earlier amid much fanfare. On board were the two most important men in the Soviet Union: Nikolai Bulganin, the pragmatic, smartly dressed premier and minister of defense, and Nikita Khrushchev, the energetic, unkempt first secretary of the Communist Party. They had come to the UK on a goodwill mission as guests of the British government. Eager to deflect attention from a crisis that was brewing ominously with Egypt in the Suez Canal region, Anthony Eden, Britain’s prime minister, was