FROGMAN SPY

The Incredible Case of Commander Crabb, long waterlogged in deep doubts and wild rumors, has its ""verbatim"" resolution here through the Russian Secret Dossier, smuggled out from behind the Iron Curtain by secret agents to Britain in 1959. The author, a member of the Manchester Guardian staff, insists that it is definitive evidence. In any case, it is fascinating, as was the enduring enigma of the freelance frogman Cragg who disappeared in the British harbour at Portsmouth in 1956, the day after the Russian warships brought Bulganin and Khrushchev to England. Many reports followed, speculations, disclosures, denials, and in 1957 the case again assumed tremendous interest with the washed up body of a headless frogman. While no positive identification was ever made, he was finally buried as Commander Crabb. Here the long Russian Dossier is reproduced, from the intensive watch kept on Crabb from the beginning, to his capture, to the long weeks of interrogations- ""physical exercise""- starvation. Only, however, with the news that the country he never betrayed had disowned him, did he agree to take up a new life as Len Lvovich Korablov and enlist for ten years in the Red Navy- while the body of his old identity (a dead man in his clothes) was submerged and planted for discovery by the British. . . . It is an extraordinary case, quite a contrast to the current headliner, and many should want to read about it.