Paddy Costello may have been embroiled in intrigue during the Cold War and has been the subject of several books. Photo / Supplied, File
OPINION
Trevor Barnes' recent book about the Portland Spies has put an Aucklander, Paddy Costello, in the ring.
Not for the first time, Costello is associated with the issue of passports to the Russian illegals, the Krogers - alias Peter and Lona Cohen.
MI5 accepted Costello was not involved, in this instance, but his wife was also in the frame. On file are applications for the death certificates of two children, which, MI5 insisted, were signed by his wife.
These stories had already been run in 2017 when the MI5 files on the Costellos were released. So had the New Zealand Intelligence Service new evidence to support its view, as told to the Weekend Herald, that "Costello most likely was working with the intelligence services of the USSR"?
It appeared to rest on a reference in the Mitrokhin Archive, as interpreted by MI5
aficionado Christopher Andrew and defected KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin, and on the late Dennis Lenihan's research in Archives NZ and the Turnbull Library.
But read differently, this material provides an alternative picture of Costello.
Rather than a spy, Costello emerges as a concerned and formidable scholar, anxious to awaken his compatriots to the danger of escalating East/West rivalry.
In letters written during his Moscow posting, in the mid-1940s, Costello advanced the idea that "NZ should not swallow whole British and American views". He was not out of line.
For example, the Government had sided with the Czechs, and not the Hungarians as the Americans and British wanted, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1946. But it was Costello, as rapporteur, who copped the blame. Back in Moscow, he sunk further into disfavour when he passed on information suggesting Russia was making an A-bomb.
The British and Americans regarded this as a sign of his complicity with Russian
Intelligence (RIS). Costello, however, was trying to warn the West. A Soviet nuclear device, he wrote, was surely reason enough for the US to reconsider its hegemonic designs.
Costello's outspokenness did not rankle in NZ, and he was offered a further posting to Paris when the Moscow legation closed, in 1950. He was even forgiven when he went on a bender and ended up in a police cooler, during a brief visit home.
When the NZ Police tipped off MI5, its future director, Roger Hollis, quipped "in vino veritas". But since Costello's Auckland spree coincided with the unravelling of the Burgess/Maclean deception, MI5 may have welcomed a chance to divert attention away from its security lapses.
Costello's posting to Paris gave them a further opportunity. It meant nothing to them that he went with the blessing of the British ambassador in Moscow, Sir Roger Makins. His opinion, recorded in MI5 files, was that both Costellos were generally regarded as suspect when they arrived in Moscow, but on closer acquaintance, he judged Costello to be a "rather idealistic and academic type who aired pink views out of sheer esprit de contradiction long after he lost faith in the Soviet political system".
In Russia, Costello's diplomatic investigations had led him to mix with intellectuals critical of the system, that is, he wrote, if they weren't already dead or in the Gulag.
In France, however, reporting on the complex development of the political left in post-war Europe, he associated with the likes of J. P. Sartre, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. For British and American intelligence agents, already convinced that Costello was a security risk, this was manna.
The US ambassador to NZ came to PM Sidney Holland in 1954 demanding Costello's resignation.
In his letters to author Dan Davin, Costello reflected on the reasons for this forced discharge. As a diplomat, he explained, he had lacked a "proper Atlantic viewpoint viz: Russia producing an A-bomb (1947); no prospect of Titoism in China (1950); France cannot win the Indo-China War (1951-4) etc. These statements of mine were no more acceptable for being correct.
"When all the major assumptions underlying a country's foreign policy are mistaken, it is folly on the part of an official to draw attention to the fact. I find myself in the same situation as US diplomats in China who predicted that Chiang-Kai-shek would not win the civil war."
Telling truth to power was a risky business, however it did not prove that Costello was a spy. But maintaining links with old associates, from his Moscow days, just might.
Swapping diplomacy for academia, with a chair of Russian studies in Manchester, he regularly hosted visiting Russian delegations, helped by his family who also spoke their language. It was now open season and MI5 tailed Costello until his death.
Historian Ian McGibbon argues that we will never know whether, or not, Costello was a spy without access to Russia's intelligence archives. What is indisputable, as NZ archives show, is that he served his country with great distinction in war and peace. For this, he deserves to be remembered.
• Rita Ricketts divides her time between research in Wellington and in Oxford. She has benefitted from residencies at the Stout Centre, the last being cut short by Covid.
