November 10, 2017 • 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):
From UFOs to psychic power. Since government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events, you can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(00:24):
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
(00:44):
been the inspiration for several works of popular fiction. Ian
Fleming's nineteen sixty one James Bond novel, which then became
the movie Thunderball. Uh, 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
fart snol, but it was based directly, well as close
(01:07):
as you 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 command Er 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, what are you saying? It
(01:30):
makes me think of Mr Crabs from SpongeBob, like if
he had some secret life as a covert um 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 comes with being
(01:55):
a crab unless your soft shell delicious. Yeah, you know,
soft shell crab is not is not bad. I've been
I've been doing some experiments with crab recipes for everyone,
and it is not for everyone. That is true. H
And another thing that was not for everyone. Speaking of segways,
is the concept of the Cold War, that is, that
(02:18):
is the backdrop, that is the 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 of the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc.
(02:43):
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 hedge them on the power above
all other powers. The Eastern Bloc was comprised of the
USSR and various Soviet satellite states, so Russia and all
(03:06):
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 existed beforehand, in an earlier incarnation of what
(03:30):
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 World War two an enemy of my
(03:52):
enemy as my friend's situation, right, It's almost like there
was a brief quieting of pre exist seeing tensions between
the UK and the US and Russia, it's like we
don't like each other, but we're gonna hang because we
don't like that other guy way way way yeah yeah, yeah, Like, look,
(04:12):
we're never going to be friends, but this guy is
a real pill. So 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
(04:35):
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
(04:56):
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 and pens and like, you know,
ways of hiding micro dots in um 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
(05:18):
this tiny little disc of plastic that could be like
inserted into 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, we I could
do on my iPhone with the map, you know. And
the truth of the matter is that even today in tweventeen,
(05:42):
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 opera in
the eighties, how many just disappeared in the dark ripped
(06:05):
out appendix of your history book, Yeah right. And the
whole idea is you can't expose the rest of whatever
larger operation you're doing. If you've got an operative, it
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, which arguably the Middle
(06:27):
East is embroiled in today. With that in mind, let's
zoom in a little bit. Let's get a bit of
a sharper focus to of course, quote taken, spycraft requires
a very specific set of skills. Wow, good job, Matt. Yeah,
the golden voice. Uh. And some operatives will specialize in
(06:51):
certain environments. Right. You might have someone who can physically
look like the average member of another country a region,
and who can fluently speak those languages, like a business
person who just exists incognito somewhere. Right. And this this
(07:13):
is crucial because, 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,
(07:37):
if you're 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 frogman. You know,
(07:58):
that always brings to mind for me. Maybe you guys too.
The opening sequence of Johnny Quest where there are these
dudes and like skin type 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's
(08:20):
what I always think of when I hear frogman. Wow,
I mean, it's not it's not far off of the
frogman is. Frogman is an 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. Uh as you might imagine. This is
(08:42):
mostly a discipline for military and police forces. Yeah, a
lot of times there will be explosives experts that are frogman,
because one of the things you do a lot of
times in the line of work is sabotaging other ships
or even like you know, um places where ships are launched,
even probably like ports and the infrastructure that's underwater that
(09:03):
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 Frogman. This was
really surprising to me. It's spying on underwater network cables,
(09:23):
so like huge fiber optic cables and splicing in and
getting information out deep underwater, like tapping into them 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, Uh, cutting one, and when we say cables,
we're not talking about the kind of cable you might
(09:43):
have a Time Warner gigantic info pipes essentially, and cutting
one could deplete Internet supply in an entire country. It
could cut it off. The etymology is a little bit uncertain.
If first came as a stage name really the Fearless
Frogman from play in the eighteen seventies, and later a
(10:07):
guy named John Spence who was an enlisted member of
the U. S. Navy said that people called him Frogman
because he was training in a green waterproof suit. Dude,
that is really cool and he just just see to say,
you guys can see just to remind yourself, there's the
Johnny Quest frogman there in these green suits and they've
got their tanks on and their masks and like the
(10:27):
the 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. Frog frog person name Johnny Quest.
(10:51):
So one of the sorry, one of the one of
the other things that Frogman would tend to do, especially
during World War two times, along the technology being developed
for underwater travel and different kinds of transportation and weapons,
there are these things they called chariots. Well chariot was
a type of these things, but they're really manned torpedoes.
(11:13):
That sounds like a really bad idea, doesn't it doesn't it.
It's the kind of idea that the person who doesn't
have to actually perform it comes up with. All right, guys,
we got this thing. It's great, you're gonna love it.
We'll see Okay, so in my head and I didn't
do a deep dive into chariots or right, but in
(11:36):
my mind it was a way to get these frogmen
who you know, who have a limited amount of oxygen.
These operatives um 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
me more. I mean, these things were a rig two.
Well you see this thing. I think the explosives thing
(11:56):
came a little bit later as like, well, why Joe,
we we've got these boys going out there, what 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 and then the divers were like
wait what yeah, because that technology probably existed beforehand, just
(12:20):
to accelerate their speed. You know. Uh. The the work,
it could be exploratory. But the primary differentiation between your
average every day Jane or Joe diver diver person is
that being trained, being trained in tactical diving work means
that these people will be trained in as you said,
(12:42):
matthe use of explosives, UH, the use of surveillance techniques,
for instance, stealth diving. We have a lot of former
and current members of the military who listened to this show,
and we would like to hear for you on this
(13:03):
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 let us know. I don't want to stir the
(13:23):
pot too much here, 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
the Royal Frogman or And in addition to that, my
(13:46):
second question would be are there any stereotypes because a
lot of a lot of different branches of the military
have stereotypes about UH specific organization. So do please tell
us all of that. Um So, just to jump us
back into the Cold War era where we are excellent, excellent,
(14:09):
so during this time in Britain, and the United Kingdom.
There were a lot of operations that were done in
Malta and a lot of these other places where there
were smaller conflicts and things, and these these combat divers
played a huge role in this. A lot of it
was taking out minds that had been placed during the
war that they just had to get rid of, or
(14:32):
spying on a ship just to make sure, you know,
what's going on with this stuff. Is that an actual
research vessel or 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 still active
military individuals who were working during World War two ended
(14:55):
up finding jobs doing these kind of things. And today
a resooming the focus even sharper to the individual. The
protagonist of our story Commander Lionel Crab, also known as
Buster Crab, Buster Crab, and we'll tell you more after
a word from our sponsor. Commander Lionel Crab a k
(15:23):
Buster Crab that's Crab with two bees, was born on
January nine, o nine. He 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
(15:48):
is not related to today's episode that they were aiding
and embedding a ring of pedophiles in the United Kingdom.
I feel like that needs to be said when they
are brought up. Okay, well yep, full stop. So command, yeah,
look it up if if you have time and you
know you didn't eat recently. Um. So, Commander Crab received
(16:11):
what was called the George Medal, that's after King George,
for removing Italian minds 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 o b E or an Officer of the
Order of the British Empire, for again clearing minds, this
(16:33):
time in Livorno. And that, by the way, is a knighthood.
So he got he got knighted. So he's sir Crab.
Well yeah, um, 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 moving minds is it's a it's always a
(16:55):
good thing, but it's not necessarily a humanitarian thing. This
might not have been to protect commercial fishermen, right commercial
fishing vessels. This could have been to ensure that other,
like friendly military powers were able to traverse these these
(17:16):
areas at Malta. Would they do 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'm I was assuming
they would blow them up. That that in my head,
(17:37):
That's what I was thinking, the way you would a
lot of times, the way you would do mindes, the
like land mines. There are there are ways to disable
a land mine 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 the minds
of mind fields. Yeah, I would, I would say, without
(17:57):
having ever done mind removal in a way that we
talk about on air, I would say that there are
three ways to disable of mind. Well, the first would
be rendering the equipment nonfunctional, so accessing it breaking the
wires right h depending on whatever the active mechanism of
(18:19):
the mind is at the time. The other one be
as Moll said, completely removing it, and then the other
would be as Matt said, blowing it up 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 But yeah, they are crazy looking to their
(18:41):
like attached to the sea floor with chains, 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 triggered 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 remember
that game, I remember, But I just like it was
(19:01):
the kind of game where like, for the longest time
I just kind of clicked it and 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 because
in the right mind it's it's key to double it's
key to double click. I used to set the difficulty
(19:22):
on on the highest you can change 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
(19:42):
or wherever you want, and then it will show 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 playing it now. All right, all right, Well
(20:07):
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 it was a pretty
rare set of skills. There was a specific instance that
you looked into matt where the Soviets sent emissaries to Britain.
(20:30):
Right by by was it submarine? Was by both? It
was by ship there warships and it's pretty interesting. Apparently
the 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
(20:50):
the ship and they were cheered and everybody was like, oh,
you guys are so great. You have really beat those Nazis.
You guys are awesome. We still really like you guys,
and you're doing great things in the world. Um. They
then they took they took a trip to Britain and
it was Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Prime Premier
(21:11):
Nikolai Bulgannon 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 uh that is roughly, oh,
I forget to put. Seventy six miles southwest of London
is where that port is if you're looking in overall
view of the UK. Um. They spent eight full days
(21:34):
there in 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. And that's talking opposition party as well as
you know, the party that's in power. Um, you know
all the a lot of MPs, probably an influential business people.
(21:55):
They had a dinner with the Prime Minister at the time,
who was Anthony Eden. Twice they did at they visited
him at Checkers. And I don't know what that is.
This is not the fast food restaurant Checkers, I guess.
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 to you by Checkers. But it's spelled
(22:18):
the Cold War fast food, Yes, but it's spelled c
h E q U e r S, so in course
that's how they'd spell it in Britain. Meanwhile, the c
I A, the m I six and Naval Intelligence are
in the middle of this mission placing divers under the
(22:39):
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 are docked there, or they reported there, like are
they doing any weird stuff with underwater divers checking out
our ports? So you know it makes sense from a
(23:01):
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 Checkers the fast food is
pretty good, you gotta eat that worked really well. Uh.
The actual thing is it's short for Checkers Court. That's
the country house of the UK Prime Minister. So they
(23:24):
went visited at his house like it's like the British
Camp David kind of thing. It's a treat, went to
check his all right. So let's drill down even further
to a specific day, April nineteen, nineteen fifty six. So
on this date, Lionel bust a Crab was on a
(23:45):
mission to spy on a Soviet warship that was docked
in Portsmouth Harbor. I am not going to even attempt
to pronounce the name um, but just so you guys
are on my side of miss spell 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,
(24:06):
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 of the ship. After
his dive, he was never seen resurfacing and he never
made any further contact with his handlers. For all intents
(24:28):
and purposes, 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 you know, setting up
your mission, walking you through it. You've seen twenty four
It's kind of like that in a way. Uh, there's
somebody who's always on the line, who's setting things up
(24:49):
for you and giving you intelligence as you're gathering more intelligence.
And there's a tight time frame as well. I think
that's very important to you know. So when he failed
to comply with that time frame, the British Admiralty stated
that he was guild while looking on an experimental mind
(25:10):
in Stokes Bay, a few miles away from Port smith Hall. Yeah,
they said he was killed in an experimental mind hadn't
even been in uh near the ships, yeah, yeah, and
then essentially he had killed himself in an accident. But
here's the thing. The Soviet Union apparently exposed this as
(25:30):
as disinformation when they reported that there was indeed at
least one frogman that had been spotted servicing right near
their ship when it was 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 look
monitoring the whole, but he was doing it without any
(25:52):
official authority. Yeah, so the story is already changing a
whole lot through the official sources is about what exactly
is going on here. Again, it's that thing of let's
not expose our larger operation. Um. But then something kind
of crazy happens. Yeah, about six months later, on the
(26:14):
south coast of England, someone discovers a body is has
it's headless and handless, someone's decapitated, cut off the hands
at the wrist, and the officials say, well, here here
the remains of Commander Crab. And we talked a little
bit about technology at the time. Like Matt mentioned the
(26:35):
idea of manning torpedoes, the technology of the time forensically
meant that with neither head nor hands available, it was
almost impossible to get a solid identification on the body,
the dental records, no fingerprints, none of that stuff. And
already the the way that a body will change if
(26:57):
submerged in water, uh for a long time. Is that's
something that we could we could make a guess at, right,
and maybe even the type of water or 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
(27:20):
kind of scars, tattoos, anything like that. And crabs former
diving partner, a fellow named Sydney Knowles, identified the body.
He's the one who said that's Buster. Yep. So so
what happened? What happened to Commander Crab? Well, we've got
(27:40):
a little better idea now that it's been years and
years and years since the occurrence, since we've got you know,
some some reports from the intelligence offices that we're carrying
out the mission in which Commander Crab met his demise um.
But honestly, there are a lot of question and will
(28:01):
answer some and pose quite a few more after a
word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. Okay,
So jump way way away for from nineteen fifty six
to the year two thousand and six the future. Yes, uh,
(28:21):
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. Um. It
was a formerly secret document and it was an official
report of Commander crabs final mission. So what the Intelligent
(28:42):
groups had to say about it? Essentially, the report showed
that UH 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 secrecy of what's
going on, where people are, what they're doing, like the
actual names of your operatives, which is that's that's a
(29:05):
big detail. But I want to I want a caveat that,
because following standard procedures could mean almost anything. Oh yeah,
and that is my phrase there. So standard procedures is
not what was used in in the article. That was
(29:26):
creative 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 if they ever came into question, right, we need
(29:48):
some 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 mother 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 the idea there is that through some error, whether
(30:11):
bureaucratic or whether whether it was a minor bureaucratic error,
or whether it was a complete um poop show from
the beginning, 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 is that swinging a miss right move. I know,
(30:33):
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. He says constantly,
(30:55):
way more often than you would even you would say
the name of like someone you loved, you know, 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.
(31:15):
I'm I'm good also, and I don't 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
(31:37):
shot and srotic if he's drinking like that every day,
and he would probably be falling down drunk by you know,
late afternoon. Yeah, at least spy better. I've had from
so more like Blitz James Blitz, Yeah, exactly, so uh so. Yeah,
(32:02):
it was it was clear then that now that we
have that specific there, they had woefully, woefully misjudge the
sequence of events, right, yes, exactly. And then well here
here's the other thing. When it was clear that he
(32:22):
had gone missing, Um, 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 chose 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 Krushchev,
(32:44):
they're they're on a diplomatic mission. There's not supposed to
be any spine going on right here. This is supposed
to be a uh here, shake my hand, welcome to
my country. Let's discuss things. You know. Krushev is, by
the way, the so the official who was famously alleged
to have pounded his shoe and uh international meetings and
(33:07):
told the US that he was going to crush them,
alleged that probably didn't happen. There. There's let's just a
jump on that bench. 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 specific meeting
(33:30):
with I believe the labor party that took place during
this trip, and how upset and angry Khruschev was at
certain things, and the threats that he made it's it's
fascinating fiasco dinner. I think fiasco dinner. So as soon
as they found out in real time, not counting the
(33:55):
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. He's that guy's gone. Yeah, we don't know
who he was. He's gone. The Prime Minister himself, Anthony Eaton,
(34:20):
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. You think
he'd be pretty grumpy finding that out, wouldn't. Yeah, But
I think that idea is protecting him because he's actually
in the room with all these guys you know, and
you don't you don't want any kind of tell on
(34:42):
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 their during
their honeymoon phase with the American electorate. They say, we're
(35:03):
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 when the actual unelected government
officials that are instead appointed right or promoted into these
(35:25):
positions are often the ones who will control access to
that intelligence. And I think, um, I think you guys
raised a great point where where the Prime Minister probably
probably doesn't know, but I'm just so skeptical about that
stuff when they say that they really don't know. I
(35:46):
know it can occur and they might not know about
a specific mission. Right, surely there was a program, right,
and it 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 in a pool.
(36:06):
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 Mr Sidney Knowles, he the
next year after this, two thousand and six, the whole thing.
In two thousand seven, he did an interview with the
(36:26):
BBC s show called Inside Out, 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
(36:47):
get rid of Crab, which is 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 in in Inside Out he goes Sydney goes into
it a little further, and we've got an excerpt that
we're going to read from that, So I'm just gonna
(37:08):
paraphrase this a little bit. Um. 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. Um, they were attended by the likes
of double agents like Anthony Blunt. And here's here's a
(37:28):
pretty tasty quote. He said, it's either 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, So Sydney
really believed that at this point Crab was going to defect.
(37:51):
So Sydney alerted the 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
nineteen UM, 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,
(38:13):
to the Russian warship severed Love on its visit to Portsmouth,
So he had been there before with Crab and none
of 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 Crab did not dive alone.
Uh Specifically, Sydney Knowls said Buster told him they had
(38:35):
given him a new buddy diver, 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,
as one of the pro Soviet people that Sydney Knowles
believes took Crab to these parties, right, Sir Anthony Blunt
(38:59):
was is for a long 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 the somewhere in the nineteen thirties to the nineteen fifties,
(39:21):
he was a member of a group called the Cambridge Five.
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 pros would encounter.
(39:44):
And 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, um
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 put all this put
in all this time, and you know, doing so many
(40:06):
heroic things and been given awards, but he just couldn't
find a job. 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 you're kind of ostracized a bit,
and U are treated almost like a societal barrial. Almost.
It's just a total shame and disrespectful. Yeah, incredibly so,
(40:31):
especially when we consider the lack of support. And when
you say support, we're not talking just financial support. Economic
support is important, but so is cultural support, assimilation support,
mental health support, and well for anyone listening outside of
the country. In the US, currently, we have an organization
(40:54):
called the Veterans Administration whose job it is to help
returning military members acclimate to society and have a civilian life.
And in many this is not a political jab. It
doesn't matter what side of the false psychotomy people are
(41:16):
find themselves on. In many cases, it isn't arguable that
the Veterans Administration has done a really terrible job organizationally.
Maybe a show for a different day. The other thing
about this, So we said two thousand six that fo
(41:36):
I report comes out, not the whole story. Still, Nope,
it's not the whole story. He gave the interview in
two thousand seven, then what happened next. In the same year,
in two thousand seven, retired Russian diver named Edward Koltsov
claimed that he had murdered Crab on that famous dive
in April by slicing his throat because he caught the
frogman planting a mine underwater. This was in a documentary
(42:02):
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 diplomatic ship, it's a warship, yeah,
in a diplomatic mission on a vessel like that function
(42:25):
is diplomatic vessel, then it's a clear active war and
could be considered a war crime. The way that this
would have changed the course of history had this occurred.
And what's disturbing about that is we still can't reliably
(42:47):
if that is true. We can't reliably suss out the motive.
Why would an intelligence agency that UM, as evidenced by
their continuing detection of just reprehensible criminals like these people
are good at keeping secrets, Why would they do this
rushed job with this obvious active provocation. This you know
(43:10):
they're they're big questions that this Koltsov story brings up.
Surviving relatives of Crab 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
either Crab willingly defected or that he was abducted and
(43:36):
then brainwashed. And we know just that, like we've seen
or heard of or read the Manchurian candidate, and we
we talked about allegations of this stuff with things like
Sir Hand, Sir Han, r f K's assassin. The big
question here is whether or not this kind of brainwashing
(43:57):
even works. But the unfortunate it and absolutely insane truth
of it is both the US and Russia tried it
numerous ways. They were like, let's give him truth serum,
what about l s D, what about sleep deprivation. Let's
see if we can take cult indoctrination tactics and apply
(44:18):
it to people to make them do things they would
not normally do. That is a lot to swallows out
their theory of what happened to the guy. Is it possible, though,
Is it possible that he defected? Is it possible that
he was killed by his own handlers. Is it possible
(44:39):
that the that Russian forces killed him, and that the
two great powers involved in this decided to prevent the
dominoes that would fall if this, if this stuff came out.
I've got one for you. What if he was setting
(45:00):
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, uh, permitting an active war interesting end
(45:20):
to spark all at war, to heat the Cold War up.
I'm not I'm not saying anything about it being true.
It was just 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
(45:43):
a really important point A lot of times, especially now,
this how does this apply to right? How does it
split 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
(46:07):
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
(46:27):
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
(46:51):
stuff that whichever country you live in, the stuff that
your leader is saying when it's not being recorded two
groups of other leaders is probably not the same stuff.
And 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
(47:11):
about internet censorship or the oppression of minorities. And then
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 and Country B have historically hated
(47:34):
one another. Right. 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, uh, forget Country A. They're the worst.
They smell, they're threatening us, they're taking all the resources.
(47:56):
All those people in Country B. They use way too
many batteries. I don't know if you guys noticed. You
guys noticed it. Yeah, and let's say. Let's say also
that one of you just recently got elected and eliminated,
so you're you're espousing all this. The word you'll often
here used as provocative language right domestically making public statements
(48:17):
internationally that kind of say 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. Uh. But when the two
of you meet on private phone calls or in person,
you become a lot more like people trying to negotiate
(48:41):
a car sale or people trying 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 I didn't like him that much either. Frankly, I'm
someone you can work with, and so here's what I need.
(49:01):
And it becomes sort of a quid pro que situation
where in the two people that publicly claim to 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 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.
(49:23):
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
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
(49:47):
recent Iran deal comes to mind just when thinking about
something like that and getting something very complicated out of
two countries that make those kinds of statements, and then
it just becomes more complicated when there are multiple country
treas involved. I know that's a little bit of ramp,
but I think it is important for us to clearly
(50:07):
establish that what what you're seeing if you if you
look into 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
(50:28):
is true, have always had the same the same message
and all three conversations, and other world leaders aren't particularly
into that. You know, they're they're they're getting 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
(50:50):
reasons that we still don't know what happened to Command
or crap. 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 the they could
(51:10):
be used in the modern day to scout defenses for
future missions. They could take and leave equipment in places
that will be used later. Um, they can place microphones
and you can determine all kinds of things underwater. If
you have really good mikes, you can 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
(51:33):
of crew, like if you're listening to submarines, which is
crazy to think about. The fiber optic um biblical lines
we mentioned before, this huge fiber optic wires um. They
can be tapped. Navy piers can also use wireless connection
systems and those signals can can be used to be
uh or I guess these divers can intercept those signals
(51:53):
if they wanted to from the water. The only thing
with that, though, you've got to break all kinds 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
will hear a lot of pundits and experts tell you
(52:16):
that the new and most important sphere of warfare and
therefore 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
(52:38):
putting a person in the room has stopped existing. You know,
for instance, with stuck s Net, the program used most
likely by the US and Israel to disrupt Iran's nuclear
enrichment activities, that that virus had to physically be put
(53:01):
into that system because there no country is going to well.
Iran at 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
(53:28):
have robots that can pass for human, we're still going
to have physical people traveling into a place. And this
means that as we record today, nobody knows how many
people are how many missions similar to this are actively happening.
(53:50):
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 some time. So that's an interesting
rabbit hole. And with that, for now we conclude the
(54:14):
story of Commander Crab. We will update it if we
learn whether any of these any of these conclusions have
become the inarguable truth. But this does not end our show.
We want we want to hear from you. Do you
think these operations are relatively rare in the modern day?
(54:38):
And by these operations we mean stuff that occurs with
absolute deniability, 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?
We want to hear from you, and that reminds us
it's time for corner. Our first shout out comes from
(55:02):
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 Ghoulan Movement episode, which was great.
I had no idea there was anything like that potentially
involved with the failed que. You were asking about the
definition of a social movement, and I have a definition
for you from my college class on social movement rhetoric,
(55:23):
perfect convenient. A social movement must meet the following criteria.
It must be an organized collectivity. It must be an
uninstitutionalized collectivity. And I just you know off Air who
we had to look up collectivity was I was. I
was thinking collective, but a collectivity as individuals who are
considered as a whole group. Uh. An example would be
(55:44):
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 is fairly straight forward.
A movement needs some kind of organization to make things happen.
Think social movement organizations like Black Lives Matter or the
(56:06):
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 the change it proposes
or opposes. Finally, propose or opposed change is fairly obvious
(56:28):
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 captain. Yeah, Well, well we we in the captain
made 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
(56:51):
you so much. Thanks thanks for writing to us, Captain
who's next. Well, next we have Mr B. And Mr
B is not a listener. Well, very well could be.
But who knows. I think you know, I don't know. Um,
he had a very interesting Monday this past October two.
(57:12):
Oh I know about this guy. Okay, Yes, this is
an article that was sent to us by our frenemy,
our best freendemy, our complaint department. Yeah, Jonathan Strickland. Uh
and I'm just going to read part of this article.
It's from K to Radio. Here we go. A Casper
man claiming to be from the future has been arrested
(57:33):
for having too much to drink in the present stone
cold awesome headline leading line. Casper police officers say at
around ten thirty pm on Monday October two, they were
dispatched to residents on East Second Street for a man
who was stating he was from the future and he
was there to help people. They found Mr B, who
(57:56):
claimed that he was from the year 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,
I always wanted to be president. Yeah, it's way less
(58:16):
commitment than being president of the country. Mr 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 seventeen, but he ended up in the
wrong year. It was supposed to be eighteen. I think
(58:37):
we can end it there. They they determined that Mr
B could not take care of himself and he was
causing a disturbance, so yeah, they took him in. He
had he had an early breath sample showing a blood
alcohol content of point one three six. So yeah, he
was definitely filled with alcohol and trying to time travel.
But hey, who's the same. Mr B wasn't a time traveler.
(58:59):
Come on, maybe that's how aliens operate, right, who's to say?
And we hope he is well, we hope his mission
goes well. Yeah, you know, maybe he is prophetic. We'll
see what happens since eighteen. And of course we want
to thank Jonathan Strickland for right in to us. Jonathan
(59:19):
Strickland is available for any questions, comments, or concerns about
our show twenty four hours a day, seven days a
week at Jonathan Strickland to how Stuff Works dot com.
And this concludes, but not our show. We will be
returning next week with with some stuff I think you're
(59:41):
gonna find interesting and maybe a few special announcements. So
say tuned. In the meantime, you can find all three
of us all over the internet. Were like Twitter, Instagram,
Facebook's maybe we'll start a Pinterest page. No no at
this stage if you want to, can you believe Mad
(01:00:02):
is so anti Pinterest? I was on an episode of
Comedy Bay many other day and there was like a
guest on it that was making up all kinds of
Internet based maladies, and one of them was Pinterest worms nice.
That sounds perfect. That's why probably Matt doesn't like Pinterest
because it makes him think of worms. See and if
you want to find us on those we're conspiracy stuff
at most of them were conspiracy stuff show at Instagram.
(01:00:24):
If you want to skip all the social media stuff
and you just want to send us a message or
you have a comment or a question, you can always
write to us. We are conspiracy at how stuff Works
dot com.
From UFOs to psychic power. Since government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events, you can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(00:24):
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
(00:44):
been the inspiration for several works of popular fiction. Ian
Fleming's nineteen sixty one James Bond novel, which then became
the movie Thunderball. Uh, 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
fart snol, but it was based directly, well as close
(01:07):
as you 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 command Er 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, what are you saying? It
(01:30):
makes me think of Mr Crabs from SpongeBob, like if
he had some secret life as a covert um 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 comes with being
(01:55):
a crab unless your soft shell delicious. Yeah, you know,
soft shell crab is not is not bad. I've been
I've been doing some experiments with crab recipes for everyone,
and it is not for everyone. That is true. H
And another thing that was not for everyone. Speaking of segways,
is the concept of the Cold War, that is, that
(02:18):
is the backdrop, that is the 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 of the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc.
(02:43):
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 hedge them on the power above
all other powers. The Eastern Bloc was comprised of the
USSR and various Soviet satellite states, so Russia and all
(03:06):
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 existed beforehand, in an earlier incarnation of what
(03:30):
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 World War two an enemy of my
(03:52):
enemy as my friend's situation, right, It's almost like there
was a brief quieting of pre exist seeing tensions between
the UK and the US and Russia, it's like we
don't like each other, but we're gonna hang because we
don't like that other guy way way way yeah yeah, yeah, Like, look,
(04:12):
we're never going to be friends, but this guy is
a real pill. So 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
(04:35):
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
(04:56):
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 and pens and like, you know,
ways of hiding micro dots in um 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
(05:18):
this tiny little disc of plastic that could be like
inserted into 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, we I could
do on my iPhone with the map, you know. And
the truth of the matter is that even today in tweventeen,
(05:42):
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 opera in
the eighties, how many just disappeared in the dark ripped
(06:05):
out appendix of your history book, Yeah right. And the
whole idea is you can't expose the rest of whatever
larger operation you're doing. If you've got an operative, it
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, which arguably the Middle
(06:27):
East is embroiled in today. With that in mind, let's
zoom in a little bit. Let's get a bit of
a sharper focus to of course, quote taken, spycraft requires
a very specific set of skills. Wow, good job, Matt. Yeah,
the golden voice. Uh. And some operatives will specialize in
(06:51):
certain environments. Right. You might have someone who can physically
look like the average member of another country a region,
and who can fluently speak those languages, like a business
person who just exists incognito somewhere. Right. And this this
(07:13):
is crucial because, 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,
(07:37):
if you're 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 frogman. You know,
(07:58):
that always brings to mind for me. Maybe you guys too.
The opening sequence of Johnny Quest where there are these
dudes and like skin type 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's
(08:20):
what I always think of when I hear frogman. Wow,
I mean, it's not it's not far off of the
frogman is. Frogman is an 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. Uh as you might imagine. This is
(08:42):
mostly a discipline for military and police forces. Yeah, a
lot of times there will be explosives experts that are frogman,
because one of the things you do a lot of
times in the line of work is sabotaging other ships
or even like you know, um places where ships are launched,
even probably like ports and the infrastructure that's underwater that
(09:03):
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 Frogman. This was
really surprising to me. It's spying on underwater network cables,
(09:23):
so like huge fiber optic cables and splicing in and
getting information out deep underwater, like tapping into them 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, Uh, cutting one, and when we say cables,
we're not talking about the kind of cable you might
(09:43):
have a Time Warner gigantic info pipes essentially, and cutting
one could deplete Internet supply in an entire country. It
could cut it off. The etymology is a little bit uncertain.
If first came as a stage name really the Fearless
Frogman from play in the eighteen seventies, and later a
(10:07):
guy named John Spence who was an enlisted member of
the U. S. Navy said that people called him Frogman
because he was training in a green waterproof suit. Dude,
that is really cool and he just just see to say,
you guys can see just to remind yourself, there's the
Johnny Quest frogman there in these green suits and they've
got their tanks on and their masks and like the
(10:27):
the 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. Frog frog person name Johnny Quest.
(10:51):
So one of the sorry, one of the one of
the other things that Frogman would tend to do, especially
during World War two times, along the technology being developed
for underwater travel and different kinds of transportation and weapons,
there are these things they called chariots. Well chariot was
a type of these things, but they're really manned torpedoes.
(11:13):
That sounds like a really bad idea, doesn't it doesn't it.
It's the kind of idea that the person who doesn't
have to actually perform it comes up with. All right, guys,
we got this thing. It's great, you're gonna love it.
We'll see Okay, so in my head and I didn't
do a deep dive into chariots or right, but in
(11:36):
my mind it was a way to get these frogmen
who you know, who have a limited amount of oxygen.
These operatives um 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
me more. I mean, these things were a rig two.
Well you see this thing. I think the explosives thing
(11:56):
came a little bit later as like, well, why Joe,
we we've got these boys going out there, what 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 and then the divers were like
wait what yeah, because that technology probably existed beforehand, just
(12:20):
to accelerate their speed. You know. Uh. The the work,
it could be exploratory. But the primary differentiation between your
average every day Jane or Joe diver diver person is
that being trained, being trained in tactical diving work means
that these people will be trained in as you said,
(12:42):
matthe use of explosives, UH, the use of surveillance techniques,
for instance, stealth diving. We have a lot of former
and current members of the military who listened to this show,
and we would like to hear for you on this
(13:03):
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 let us know. I don't want to stir the
(13:23):
pot too much here, 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
the Royal Frogman or And in addition to that, my
(13:46):
second question would be are there any stereotypes because a
lot of a lot of different branches of the military
have stereotypes about UH specific organization. So do please tell
us all of that. Um So, just to jump us
back into the Cold War era where we are excellent, excellent,
(14:09):
so during this time in Britain, and the United Kingdom.
There were a lot of operations that were done in
Malta and a lot of these other places where there
were smaller conflicts and things, and these these combat divers
played a huge role in this. A lot of it
was taking out minds that had been placed during the
war that they just had to get rid of, or
(14:32):
spying on a ship just to make sure, you know,
what's going on with this stuff. Is that an actual
research vessel or 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 still active
military individuals who were working during World War two ended
(14:55):
up finding jobs doing these kind of things. And today
a resooming the focus even sharper to the individual. The
protagonist of our story Commander Lionel Crab, also known as
Buster Crab, Buster Crab, and we'll tell you more after
a word from our sponsor. Commander Lionel Crab a k
(15:23):
Buster Crab that's Crab with two bees, was born on
January nine, o nine. He 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
(15:48):
is not related to today's episode that they were aiding
and embedding a ring of pedophiles in the United Kingdom.
I feel like that needs to be said when they
are brought up. Okay, well yep, full stop. So command, yeah,
look it up if if you have time and you
know you didn't eat recently. Um. So, Commander Crab received
(16:11):
what was called the George Medal, that's after King George,
for removing Italian minds 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 o b E or an Officer of the
Order of the British Empire, for again clearing minds, this
(16:33):
time in Livorno. And that, by the way, is a knighthood.
So he got he got knighted. So he's sir Crab.
Well yeah, um, 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 moving minds is it's a it's always a
(16:55):
good thing, but it's not necessarily a humanitarian thing. This
might not have been to protect commercial fishermen, right commercial
fishing vessels. This could have been to ensure that other,
like friendly military powers were able to traverse these these
(17:16):
areas at Malta. Would they do 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'm I was assuming
they would blow them up. That that in my head,
(17:37):
That's what I was thinking, the way you would a
lot of times, the way you would do mindes, the
like land mines. There are there are ways to disable
a land mine 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 the minds
of mind fields. Yeah, I would, I would say, without
(17:57):
having ever done mind removal in a way that we
talk about on air, I would say that there are
three ways to disable of mind. Well, the first would
be rendering the equipment nonfunctional, so accessing it breaking the
wires right h depending on whatever the active mechanism of
(18:19):
the mind is at the time. The other one be
as Moll said, completely removing it, and then the other
would be as Matt said, blowing it up 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 But yeah, they are crazy looking to their
(18:41):
like attached to the sea floor with chains, 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 triggered 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 remember
that game, I remember, But I just like it was
(19:01):
the kind of game where like, for the longest time
I just kind of clicked it and 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 because
in the right mind it's it's key to double it's
key to double click. I used to set the difficulty
(19:22):
on on the highest you can change 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
(19:42):
or wherever you want, and then it will show 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 playing it now. All right, all right, Well
(20:07):
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 it was a pretty
rare set of skills. There was a specific instance that
you looked into matt where the Soviets sent emissaries to Britain.
(20:30):
Right by by was it submarine? Was by both? It
was by ship there warships and it's pretty interesting. Apparently
the 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
(20:50):
the ship and they were cheered and everybody was like, oh,
you guys are so great. You have really beat those Nazis.
You guys are awesome. We still really like you guys,
and you're doing great things in the world. Um. They
then they took they took a trip to Britain and
it was Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Prime Premier
(21:11):
Nikolai Bulgannon 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 uh that is roughly, oh,
I forget to put. Seventy six miles southwest of London
is where that port is if you're looking in overall
view of the UK. Um. They spent eight full days
(21:34):
there in 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. And that's talking opposition party as well as
you know, the party that's in power. Um, you know
all the a lot of MPs, probably an influential business people.
(21:55):
They had a dinner with the Prime Minister at the time,
who was Anthony Eden. Twice they did at they visited
him at Checkers. And I don't know what that is.
This is not the fast food restaurant Checkers, I guess.
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 to you by Checkers. But it's spelled
(22:18):
the Cold War fast food, Yes, but it's spelled c
h E q U e r S, so in course
that's how they'd spell it in Britain. Meanwhile, the c
I A, the m I six and Naval Intelligence are
in the middle of this mission placing divers under the
(22:39):
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 are docked there, or they reported there, like are
they doing any weird stuff with underwater divers checking out
our ports? So you know it makes sense from a
(23:01):
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 Checkers the fast food is
pretty good, you gotta eat that worked really well. Uh.
The actual thing is it's short for Checkers Court. That's
the country house of the UK Prime Minister. So they
(23:24):
went visited at his house like it's like the British
Camp David kind of thing. It's a treat, went to
check his all right. So let's drill down even further
to a specific day, April nineteen, nineteen fifty six. So
on this date, Lionel bust a Crab was on a
(23:45):
mission to spy on a Soviet warship that was docked
in Portsmouth Harbor. I am not going to even attempt
to pronounce the name um, but just so you guys
are on my side of miss spell 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,
(24:06):
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 of the ship. After
his dive, he was never seen resurfacing and he never
made any further contact with his handlers. For all intents
(24:28):
and purposes, 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 you know, setting up
your mission, walking you through it. You've seen twenty four
It's kind of like that in a way. Uh, there's
somebody who's always on the line, who's setting things up
(24:49):
for you and giving you intelligence as you're gathering more intelligence.
And there's a tight time frame as well. I think
that's very important to you know. So when he failed
to comply with that time frame, the British Admiralty stated
that he was guild while looking on an experimental mind
(25:10):
in Stokes Bay, a few miles away from Port smith Hall. Yeah,
they said he was killed in an experimental mind hadn't
even been in uh near the ships, yeah, yeah, and
then essentially he had killed himself in an accident. But
here's the thing. The Soviet Union apparently exposed this as
(25:30):
as disinformation when they reported that there was indeed at
least one frogman that had been spotted servicing right near
their ship when it was 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 look
monitoring the whole, but he was doing it without any
(25:52):
official authority. Yeah, so the story is already changing a
whole lot through the official sources is about what exactly
is going on here. Again, it's that thing of let's
not expose our larger operation. Um. But then something kind
of crazy happens. Yeah, about six months later, on the
(26:14):
south coast of England, someone discovers a body is has
it's headless and handless, someone's decapitated, cut off the hands
at the wrist, and the officials say, well, here here
the remains of Commander Crab. And we talked a little
bit about technology at the time. Like Matt mentioned the
(26:35):
idea of manning torpedoes, the technology of the time forensically
meant that with neither head nor hands available, it was
almost impossible to get a solid identification on the body,
the dental records, no fingerprints, none of that stuff. And
already the the way that a body will change if
(26:57):
submerged in water, uh for a long time. Is that's
something that we could we could make a guess at, right,
and maybe even the type of water or 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
(27:20):
kind of scars, tattoos, anything like that. And crabs former
diving partner, a fellow named Sydney Knowles, identified the body.
He's the one who said that's Buster. Yep. So so
what happened? What happened to Commander Crab? Well, we've got
(27:40):
a little better idea now that it's been years and
years and years since the occurrence, since we've got you know,
some some reports from the intelligence offices that we're carrying
out the mission in which Commander Crab met his demise um.
But honestly, there are a lot of question and will
(28:01):
answer some and pose quite a few more after a
word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. Okay,
So jump way way away for from nineteen fifty six
to the year two thousand and six the future. Yes, uh,
(28:21):
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. Um. It
was a formerly secret document and it was an official
report of Commander crabs final mission. So what the Intelligent
(28:42):
groups had to say about it? Essentially, the report showed
that UH 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 secrecy of what's
going on, where people are, what they're doing, like the
actual names of your operatives, which is that's that's a
(29:05):
big detail. But I want to I want a caveat that,
because following standard procedures could mean almost anything. Oh yeah,
and that is my phrase there. So standard procedures is
not what was used in in the article. That was
(29:26):
creative 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 if they ever came into question, right, we need
(29:48):
some 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 mother 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 the idea there is that through some error, whether
(30:11):
bureaucratic or whether whether it was a minor bureaucratic error,
or whether it was a complete um poop show from
the beginning, 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 is that swinging a miss right move. I know,
(30:33):
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. He says constantly,
(30:55):
way more often than you would even you would say
the name of like someone you loved, you know, 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.
(31:15):
I'm I'm good also, and I don't 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
(31:37):
shot and srotic if he's drinking like that every day,
and he would probably be falling down drunk by you know,
late afternoon. Yeah, at least spy better. I've had from
so more like Blitz James Blitz, Yeah, exactly, so uh so. Yeah,
(32:02):
it was it was clear then that now that we
have that specific there, they had woefully, woefully misjudge the
sequence of events, right, yes, exactly. And then well here
here's the other thing. When it was clear that he
(32:22):
had gone missing, Um, 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 chose 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 Krushchev,
(32:44):
they're they're on a diplomatic mission. There's not supposed to
be any spine going on right here. This is supposed
to be a uh here, shake my hand, welcome to
my country. Let's discuss things. You know. Krushev is, by
the way, the so the official who was famously alleged
to have pounded his shoe and uh international meetings and
(33:07):
told the US that he was going to crush them,
alleged that probably didn't happen. There. There's let's just a
jump on that bench. 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 specific meeting
(33:30):
with I believe the labor party that took place during
this trip, and how upset and angry Khruschev was at
certain things, and the threats that he made it's it's
fascinating fiasco dinner. I think fiasco dinner. So as soon
as they found out in real time, not counting the
(33:55):
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. He's that guy's gone. Yeah, we don't know
who he was. He's gone. The Prime Minister himself, Anthony Eaton,
(34:20):
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. You think
he'd be pretty grumpy finding that out, wouldn't. Yeah, But
I think that idea is protecting him because he's actually
in the room with all these guys you know, and
you don't you don't want any kind of tell on
(34:42):
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 their during
their honeymoon phase with the American electorate. They say, we're
(35:03):
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 when the actual unelected government
officials that are instead appointed right or promoted into these
(35:25):
positions are often the ones who will control access to
that intelligence. And I think, um, I think you guys
raised a great point where where the Prime Minister probably
probably doesn't know, but I'm just so skeptical about that
stuff when they say that they really don't know. I
(35:46):
know it can occur and they might not know about
a specific mission. Right, surely there was a program, right,
and it 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 in a pool.
(36:06):
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 Mr Sidney Knowles, he the
next year after this, two thousand and six, the whole thing.
In two thousand seven, he did an interview with the
(36:26):
BBC s show called Inside Out, 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
(36:47):
get rid of Crab, which is 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 in in Inside Out he goes Sydney goes into
it a little further, and we've got an excerpt that
we're going to read from that, So I'm just gonna
(37:08):
paraphrase this a little bit. Um. 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. Um, they were attended by the likes
of double agents like Anthony Blunt. And here's here's a
(37:28):
pretty tasty quote. He said, it's either 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, So Sydney
really believed that at this point Crab was going to defect.
(37:51):
So Sydney alerted the 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
nineteen UM, 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,
(38:13):
to the Russian warship severed Love on its visit to Portsmouth,
So he had been there before with Crab and none
of 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 Crab did not dive alone.
Uh Specifically, Sydney Knowls said Buster told him they had
(38:35):
given him a new buddy diver, 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,
as one of the pro Soviet people that Sydney Knowles
believes took Crab to these parties, right, Sir Anthony Blunt
(38:59):
was is for a long 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 the somewhere in the nineteen thirties to the nineteen fifties,
(39:21):
he was a member of a group called the Cambridge Five.
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 pros would encounter.
(39:44):
And 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, um
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 put all this put
in all this time, and you know, doing so many
(40:06):
heroic things and been given awards, but he just couldn't
find a job. 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 you're kind of ostracized a bit,
and U are treated almost like a societal barrial. Almost.
It's just a total shame and disrespectful. Yeah, incredibly so,
(40:31):
especially when we consider the lack of support. And when
you say support, we're not talking just financial support. Economic
support is important, but so is cultural support, assimilation support,
mental health support, and well for anyone listening outside of
the country. In the US, currently, we have an organization
(40:54):
called the Veterans Administration whose job it is to help
returning military members acclimate to society and have a civilian life.
And in many this is not a political jab. It
doesn't matter what side of the false psychotomy people are
(41:16):
find themselves on. In many cases, it isn't arguable that
the Veterans Administration has done a really terrible job organizationally.
Maybe a show for a different day. The other thing
about this, So we said two thousand six that fo
(41:36):
I report comes out, not the whole story. Still, Nope,
it's not the whole story. He gave the interview in
two thousand seven, then what happened next. In the same year,
in two thousand seven, retired Russian diver named Edward Koltsov
claimed that he had murdered Crab on that famous dive
in April by slicing his throat because he caught the
frogman planting a mine underwater. This was in a documentary
(42:02):
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 diplomatic ship, it's a warship, yeah,
in a diplomatic mission on a vessel like that function
(42:25):
is diplomatic vessel, then it's a clear active war and
could be considered a war crime. The way that this
would have changed the course of history had this occurred.
And what's disturbing about that is we still can't reliably
(42:47):
if that is true. We can't reliably suss out the motive.
Why would an intelligence agency that UM, as evidenced by
their continuing detection of just reprehensible criminals like these people
are good at keeping secrets, Why would they do this
rushed job with this obvious active provocation. This you know
(43:10):
they're they're big questions that this Koltsov story brings up.
Surviving relatives of Crab 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
either Crab willingly defected or that he was abducted and
(43:36):
then brainwashed. And we know just that, like we've seen
or heard of or read the Manchurian candidate, and we
we talked about allegations of this stuff with things like
Sir Hand, Sir Han, r f K's assassin. The big
question here is whether or not this kind of brainwashing
(43:57):
even works. But the unfortunate it and absolutely insane truth
of it is both the US and Russia tried it
numerous ways. They were like, let's give him truth serum,
what about l s D, what about sleep deprivation. Let's
see if we can take cult indoctrination tactics and apply
(44:18):
it to people to make them do things they would
not normally do. That is a lot to swallows out
their theory of what happened to the guy. Is it possible, though,
Is it possible that he defected? Is it possible that
he was killed by his own handlers. Is it possible
(44:39):
that the that Russian forces killed him, and that the
two great powers involved in this decided to prevent the
dominoes that would fall if this, if this stuff came out.
I've got one for you. What if he was setting
(45:00):
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, uh, permitting an active war interesting end
(45:20):
to spark all at war, to heat the Cold War up.
I'm not I'm not saying anything about it being true.
It was just 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
(45:43):
a really important point A lot of times, especially now,
this how does this apply to right? How does it
split 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
(46:07):
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
(46:27):
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
(46:51):
stuff that whichever country you live in, the stuff that
your leader is saying when it's not being recorded two
groups of other leaders is probably not the same stuff.
And 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
(47:11):
about internet censorship or the oppression of minorities. And then
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 and Country B have historically hated
(47:34):
one another. Right. 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, uh, forget Country A. They're the worst.
They smell, they're threatening us, they're taking all the resources.
(47:56):
All those people in Country B. They use way too
many batteries. I don't know if you guys noticed. You
guys noticed it. Yeah, and let's say. Let's say also
that one of you just recently got elected and eliminated,
so you're you're espousing all this. The word you'll often
here used as provocative language right domestically making public statements
(48:17):
internationally that kind of say 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. Uh. But when the two
of you meet on private phone calls or in person,
you become a lot more like people trying to negotiate
(48:41):
a car sale or people trying 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 I didn't like him that much either. Frankly, I'm
someone you can work with, and so here's what I need.
(49:01):
And it becomes sort of a quid pro que situation
where in the two people that publicly claim to 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 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.
(49:23):
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
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
(49:47):
recent Iran deal comes to mind just when thinking about
something like that and getting something very complicated out of
two countries that make those kinds of statements, and then
it just becomes more complicated when there are multiple country
treas involved. I know that's a little bit of ramp,
but I think it is important for us to clearly
(50:07):
establish that what what you're seeing if you if you
look into 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
(50:28):
is true, have always had the same the same message
and all three conversations, and other world leaders aren't particularly
into that. You know, they're they're they're getting 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
(50:50):
reasons that we still don't know what happened to Command
or crap. 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 the they could
(51:10):
be used in the modern day to scout defenses for
future missions. They could take and leave equipment in places
that will be used later. Um, they can place microphones
and you can determine all kinds of things underwater. If
you have really good mikes, you can 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
(51:33):
of crew, like if you're listening to submarines, which is
crazy to think about. The fiber optic um biblical lines
we mentioned before, this huge fiber optic wires um. They
can be tapped. Navy piers can also use wireless connection
systems and those signals can can be used to be
uh or I guess these divers can intercept those signals
(51:53):
if they wanted to from the water. The only thing
with that, though, you've got to break all kinds 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
will hear a lot of pundits and experts tell you
(52:16):
that the new and most important sphere of warfare and
therefore 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
(52:38):
putting a person in the room has stopped existing. You know,
for instance, with stuck s Net, the program used most
likely by the US and Israel to disrupt Iran's nuclear
enrichment activities, that that virus had to physically be put
(53:01):
into that system because there no country is going to well.
Iran at 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
(53:28):
have robots that can pass for human, we're still going
to have physical people traveling into a place. And this
means that as we record today, nobody knows how many
people are how many missions similar to this are actively happening.
(53:50):
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 some time. So that's an interesting
rabbit hole. And with that, for now we conclude the
(54:14):
story of Commander Crab. We will update it if we
learn whether any of these any of these conclusions have
become the inarguable truth. But this does not end our show.
We want we want to hear from you. Do you
think these operations are relatively rare in the modern day?
(54:38):
And by these operations we mean stuff that occurs with
absolute deniability, 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?
We want to hear from you, and that reminds us
it's time for corner. Our first shout out comes from
(55:02):
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 Ghoulan Movement episode, which was great.
I had no idea there was anything like that potentially
involved with the failed que. You were asking about the
definition of a social movement, and I have a definition
for you from my college class on social movement rhetoric,
(55:23):
perfect convenient. A social movement must meet the following criteria.
It must be an organized collectivity. It must be an
uninstitutionalized collectivity. And I just you know off Air who
we had to look up collectivity was I was. I
was thinking collective, but a collectivity as individuals who are
considered as a whole group. Uh. An example would be
(55:44):
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 is fairly straight forward.
A movement needs some kind of organization to make things happen.
Think social movement organizations like Black Lives Matter or the
(56:06):
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 the change it proposes
or opposes. Finally, propose or opposed change is fairly obvious
(56:28):
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 captain. Yeah, Well, well we we in the captain
made 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
(56:51):
you so much. Thanks thanks for writing to us, Captain
who's next. Well, next we have Mr B. And Mr
B is not a listener. Well, very well could be.
But who knows. I think you know, I don't know. Um,
he had a very interesting Monday this past October two.
(57:12):
Oh I know about this guy. Okay, Yes, this is
an article that was sent to us by our frenemy,
our best freendemy, our complaint department. Yeah, Jonathan Strickland. Uh
and I'm just going to read part of this article.
It's from K to Radio. Here we go. A Casper
man claiming to be from the future has been arrested
(57:33):
for having too much to drink in the present stone
cold awesome headline leading line. Casper police officers say at
around ten thirty pm on Monday October two, they were
dispatched to residents on East Second Street for a man
who was stating he was from the future and he
was there to help people. They found Mr B, who
(57:56):
claimed that he was from the year 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,
I always wanted to be president. Yeah, it's way less
(58:16):
commitment than being president of the country. Mr 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 seventeen, but he ended up in the
wrong year. It was supposed to be eighteen. I think
(58:37):
we can end it there. They they determined that Mr
B could not take care of himself and he was
causing a disturbance, so yeah, they took him in. He
had he had an early breath sample showing a blood
alcohol content of point one three six. So yeah, he
was definitely filled with alcohol and trying to time travel.
But hey, who's the same. Mr B wasn't a time traveler.
(58:59):
Come on, maybe that's how aliens operate, right, who's to say?
And we hope he is well, we hope his mission
goes well. Yeah, you know, maybe he is prophetic. We'll
see what happens since eighteen. And of course we want
to thank Jonathan Strickland for right in to us. Jonathan
(59:19):
Strickland is available for any questions, comments, or concerns about
our show twenty four hours a day, seven days a
week at Jonathan Strickland to how Stuff Works dot com.
And this concludes, but not our show. We will be
returning next week with with some stuff I think you're
(59:41):
gonna find interesting and maybe a few special announcements. So
say tuned. In the meantime, you can find all three
of us all over the internet. Were like Twitter, Instagram,
Facebook's maybe we'll start a Pinterest page. No no at
this stage if you want to, can you believe Mad
(01:00:02):
is so anti Pinterest? I was on an episode of
Comedy Bay many other day and there was like a
guest on it that was making up all kinds of
Internet based maladies, and one of them was Pinterest worms nice.
That sounds perfect. That's why probably Matt doesn't like Pinterest
because it makes him think of worms. See and if
you want to find us on those we're conspiracy stuff
at most of them were conspiracy stuff show at Instagram.
(01:00:24):
If you want to skip all the social media stuff
and you just want to send us a message or
you have a comment or a question, you can always
write to us. We are conspiracy at how stuff Works
dot com.
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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