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One of the Cold War's most baffling mysteries has been solved after an elderly Russian man admitted to killing a British spy in the fifties. Cdr Lionel "Buster" Crabb disappeared while spying on a Soviet warship in 1956. The vessel was en route to Portsmouth Harbour, bringing Soviet leaders to Britain for talks. At the time, the Navy feared that Cdr Crabb had drowned in the nearby Stokes Bay. But several months later, the diver's headless corpse was found floating along the coast. Now the final moments of Cdr Crabb's life have been put together after a retired Russian sailor told a documentary he needed to clear his conscience before he died. Eduard Koltsov told filmmakers he cut the Englishman's throat as he caught him placing a mine on the Soviet ship Ordzhonikidze, which was bringing Joseph Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev and other leaders for meetings with the British prime minister Anthony Eden. Mr Koltsov, who was 23 at the time of the James Bond-style incident, says he had been ordered to keep a watchful eye for any suspicious activity around the ship. It was then that he apparently saw Cdr Crabb planting the mine to the hull of the ship. In an action that would see him secretly awarded for his bravery, the frogman cut the throat of the impostor with a dagger which he revealed to the Russian film crew. "I saw a silhouette of a diver in a light frogman suit who was fiddling with something at the starboard, next to the ship's ammunition stores," Mr Koltsov said. "I swam closer and saw that he was fixing a mine." Cdr Crabb, decorated with the George Medal and an OBE for his actions during World War II, was 47 when he disappeared. The murky incident in Portsmouth sent relations between the Soviet state and Britain into freefall, ending any hopes of a rapprochement. The Russian envoys maintained that they were being spied upon and Mr Eden's conservative government was lambasted in the Commons for their loose grip on the security services.