Peddling Half-Truths From the Ashes of the Soviet Empire   by Thomas Lipscomb, OMBBC*

The Daily Telegraph in London reports that a former sailor in the Soviet Navy admitted killing British war hero frogman, Commander Lionel “Buster” Crabb, in Portsmouth (UK) harbor. A former Soviet diver, Edourd Koltsov, claims he had been assigned to secure the Russian vessel carrying Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to England for high level talks with Prime Minister Anthony Eden in April of 1956. Crabb, according to Koltsov, had been caught planting an explosive mine on the hull of a Russian ship full of top Soviet officials on a peace mission.

This is the third partial truth that has floated up in the West from the ashes of the Soviet Empire in the past year. What is interesting about each of them is they appear to solve a longstanding historical mystery, but they actually may be diverting attention from a more likely suspect.

Who was working for whom?

First we are told in a recent book by a highly placed Romanian Securitate spymaster, Ion Mihai Pacepa, Programmed to Kill, that Lee Harvey Oswald was under Soviet direction at the time of his involvement in the JFK assassination. It is at least possible that Oswald was indeed a Soviet spy at some point, which has continued to make any attempt to get official information on the JFK assassination virtually impossible. And Pacepa certainly was privy to some of the highest level Soviet intelligence activities at the time and tells a lot of accurate information about them in the book.

But some insiders remain convinced Oswald was a relatively minor player in a much larger game and might even have ended as a double agent. The most conclusive evidence of this to date is the impossibility of getting copies of Oswald’s tax paperwork from the IRS. Even the Warren Commission was unable to get them released. It appears possible some party was paying Oswald, and left footprints in his American tax filings.

The existence of that party is important enough to cause the Federal Government to embargo access to what would appear to be innocuous tax statements to the present day. Had some entity of the Federal Government itself been paying Oswald as many conspiracy theorists have concluded? At any rate the least likely party still requiring this kind of embargo would be any part of the long gone Soviet Union.

Did Anthony Eden try to start WWIII?

Now the tale we are told by Koltsov takes place at the height of the Cold War, in 1956, the true “year of living dangerously” on the brink for the West and the Warsaw Pact nations, with the Polish Poznan riots, Hungarian Revolution, and Suez Crisis. Now we learn Anthony Eden’s British Government was apparently trying to begin World War III with a decapitating bang. Otherwise why blow up a Soviet ship with the new Soviet Premier Khruschev aboard moored in a British harbor?

The doughty CDR Crabb was certainly on an official mission and it has long been suspected that the Russians put a stop to it. But it is far more likely Crabb was planting a listening device that might assist the British in evaluating Soviet deliberations over their diplomatic negotiations rather than helping launch World War III. This was a year, after all, when NATO was carefully turning down ready opportunities to make things worse for the Russians in their rebellious occupied countries of Eastern Europe.

The mess with Hess:

Besides, that isn’t the way British intelligence works. Consider the likely murder of Rudolf Hess by British agents just before he was to be finally released from Spandau. For reasons of state, Britain did not want whoever had been safely bottled up in Spandau under Hess’s name ( and it was perfectly possible that it was Hess himself) running around signing book contracts and talking to the press.

One of the most bizarre actions in British history was Winston Churchill’s decision to hold Hess incommunicado from the day he parachuted into Britain until the day he died. And while ordinarily the British government papers regarding Hess would have been unsealed by now, they are still hidden by being quietly transferred to the Queen’s royal secrets collection. Hess may have been tricked into his “peace mission” by British intelligence but he had good reason to believe he would have a powerful audience for his proposal that stretched all the way to the former King, then the Duke of Windsor, after his abdication.

Is it remotely credible that Winston Churchill, perhaps the greatest communicator and press manipulator of the 20^th century, saw no benefit in displaying a supposedly insane Hess, Hitler’s second in command, to his war-battered nation? What a morale boost it might have been for the British public to have an English-speaking top Nazi nattering away on the BBC. And the crazier he was, the better the propaganda coup. Great Britain in May of 1941 could have used it. It stood alone against the Nazi conquest of Europe, and the United States wasn’t in the war yet.  Britain was at its most militarily vulnerable since the Spanish Armada stood off its shores 400 years earlier.

But Hess and whatever secrets he knew were kept incommunicado by the British, right on through his imprisonment at Spandau. Then the story supposedly changed. Those nasty Soviets were the ones who demanded Hess stay in Spandau, even though Hess was one of the very few Nuremberg defendants who had no part in the Nazi war effort or the Holocaust and certainly the only one to get bottled up for life. There were appeals for his release from President Nixon, Airey Neave, a Member of Parliament who had been an official at the Nuremberg Trials and others. But once the disintegrating Soviet state agreed to release him, Hess “committed suicide” before anyone could talk to him.

The length of Hess’s imprisonment was clearly tied to maintaining somebody’s state secrets. His suicide didn’t make sense either, besides being physically impossible. A man so crippled by arthritis that he couldn’t put on his shoes himself or raise his arms much above waist level committed “suicide” by tying a noose out of electrical cord, securing it, and reaching up so far over his head and hanging himself? (Senator John McCain’s torture as a prisoner in Hanoi left him unable to raise his arms as well.) And guess which of the Four Powers still governing Berlin had its military police on duty at Spandau at the time? Not Great Britain:but the United States, which made it a perfect cutout.

How perfidious WAS Albion this time?

And so the game goes on. Last September the British press was all abuzz with carefully surfaced papers bolstering up the old story of how beastly the Russians had been to poor Hess.

And one cannot blame them if it turns out to be true, as some experts have claimed, that Hess brought (to England) the plans on the Operation Barbarossa invasion of Russia, to commence a few weeks after his flight, with him on his “peace mission” as a good faith gesture. Both the United States and Great Britain had warned Stalin they had reason to expect a German invasion in advance, but so far as we know no one had shown him any Nazi plans to try to convince him that the claim was backed up by a source who might have actually been exposed to the plot. And Stalin to his death suspected the Allies had wanted the Nazi attack on Russia.

Eduard Koltsov clearly was playing to a naïve “documentary” film maker even more gullible than the Daily Telegraph’s Felix Lowe, who never even questions the wildly improbable story about Crabb’s mine.

And that is the central problem with half truths in the press these days. They are more often retailed without comment than analyzed critically. And that doesn’t help the press’s faltering credibility or circulation.

Thomas Lipscomb, a veteran journalist and editor, is a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, and *Oregon Magazine's Berlin Bureau Chief.

© 2008 Thomas Lipscomb