John Edmond Costello (3 May 1943 – 26 August 1995) was a British military historian, who wrote aboutWorld War I,World War II and theCold War. He was the first foreigner to have access to the operational records of theKGB and its predecessors and was instrumental in their being opened for historical research during the immediate post-perestroika period.
He was born at Larkfield Hospital,Greenock,Inverclyde, on 3 May 1943, the son of Lieut. Commander Cecil and Suzanne (née Davis) Costello.[1] His father was an engineer officer in theRoyal Navy and had been awarded theDistinguished Service Cross in the previous year.[2] After the war the family lived atGosport, Hampshire, and later atNewbury, Berkshire, where Costello was educated at the local grammar school before proceeding toFitzwilliam College, Cambridge, to read economics and law.[3]
Naturally opinionated and outspoken, he soon became prominent in student debating and political circles. He was Secretary of theCambridge Union, Chairman of the University’s Conservative Association, and reputedly one of the founders of the Pest (Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism) initiative.[4] As editor-designate of the undergraduate journalNew Radical he readily agreed to amalgamation with its Oxford equivalent,Oxford Tory (which had recently attractedRobert Maxwell’s wrath following comment on hisEastern Bloc connections), and he co-edited the resultantTory.[5] In later years he was joint-author of aBow Group paper advocating establishment of a national Broadcasting Council.[3]
Graduating in 1965, he worked as an advertising copywriter before joiningLondon Weekend Television and then theBBC where he was employed in documentary production.[6] In collaboration with Terry Hughes he wrote a succession of books of which the first, published by the provincial Compton Press in 1971, celebrated the British and French technical achievement in developing the world’s first supersonic airliner. This originally appeared under the titleThe Battle for Concorde and, edited by William F. Waller, was reissued byMacmillan in the following year asConcorde - Flight into the Future. With Hughes he went on to write accounts of the 1916Battle of Jutland and of the campaign waged by German submariners against British shipping in the Atlantic between 1939 and 1945, and the pair also worked withWarren Tute to tell the story of the 1944Normandy Landings.
In 1972 he embarked on a career as a full-time freelance writer. Five years later he moved to live in America, initially basing himself inNew York and subsequently relocating toMiami.[3] In 1981 his account of thePacific War, analysing its complex underlying causes and bringing together accounts of the fighting in its several theatres, won him a reputation in his new home country for authoritative and attractive historical writing. The book soon become a standard university teaching text in America where, in researching it, he had been able to access the kind of documents that in England were closed to public inspection.[4]
His opinion that World War II brought about a major change in British social and sexual attitudes, largely as a result of women’s participation in the war effort, found expression in his 1985 bestsellerLove, Sex and War: Changing Values. His assessment that the war had seen a collapse of morals and “hedonism in the shadow of death” was criticised as somewhat sensationalist,[3] but his 1988 account ofAnthony Blunt’s central role in formation of theCambridge spy-ring (Mask of Treachery) was almost uniformly well received. This established him in the field of writing he was to occupy for the rest of his career, Costello’s grasp of the scale and complexity of the espionage directed or facilitated by Blunt being acclaimed as “incomparably the finest yet revealed”.[7]
In 1990, hoping to take advantage of the new spirit ofglasnost within theSoviet Union, he wrote to theKGB’s press office asking what information they had onRudolf Hess’s mysterious solo flight to Britain in 1941. His letter elicited, via the diplomatic bag, decrypted copies ofKim Philby’s contemporary messages to Moscow.[8] Their content contributed to his bookTen Days that Saved the West (1991), in which he concluded thatMI5 had lured Hess to Britain in response to an invitation from theDuke of Hamilton - a conclusion subsequently dismissed as one of Costello’s “pet conspiracy theories”.[3]
His approach to the KGB led to his meeting Oleg Tsarev, a senior intelligence officer who had previously spent seven years underTASS cover in London and who, at Costello’s prompting, persuadedVladimir Kryuchkov that access to the archives of the KGB and its predecessors was a privilege for which western publishers might pay handsomely.[9] As a result Costello became the first foreigner to read KGB operational files and he and Tsarev collaborated in writing an account of the career ofAlexander Orlov.[6] This account (Deadly Illusions, 1993) revealed Orlov as a much more pivotal figure in the history of twentieth century intelligence than previously assumed, exposing in particular his key role in recruitment of the original members of the Cambridge spy-ring and of theatom spies in the United States.
Costello next persuadedCrown Publishing Group to pay a considerable sum to theSVR to allow a team of American historians to work alongside KGB officers in examining Soviet intelligence records. This exercise led to the publication of a succession of important books by members of the team, examining matters such as Soviet intelligence gathering in America in the 1930s and ‘40s, rivalry between the KGB andCIA inBerlin before construction of theWall, and the sequence of events during theCuban Missile Crisis.[8] Most immediately it resulted in Costello and Tsarev laying bare the extent of Soviet penetration of the BritishForeign Office over the course of more than twenty years and the existence in Britain of Soviet spy networks additional to the Cambridge ring.[9]
Costello was in the midst of working with Tsarev on a project to document these latter infiltrations when he died suddenly on a flight from London to Miami on 26 August 1995.[6] The espionage authorNigel West succeeded him in the project with Tsarev, and their resultant bookThe Crown Jewels was published in 1999.[9]
Costello’s unexpected death at the age of 52, in somewhat unusual circumstances, attracted initial speculation that it had been contrived by Russian or British interests.[10] There were certainly many, at government or agency level both in Britain and America, who were embarrassed by the security and intelligence failures he revealed. In 1988 he had been subject to aD-Notice;[11] in 1993 British diplomats allegedly urged Russia to cease cooperation with him;[12] and he ruffled feathers by praising the SVR for helping to establish “a new precedent for openness and objectivity in the study of intelligence history” at a time when Britain wished to maintain strict secrecy for intelligence documents.[13]
Costello’s books achieved considerable commercial success and in America were held in high esteem.[3] He believed a historian should bring “colour, light, action” to his work as well as thorough research[6] and, although his prose style was not universally admired (sometimes seeming to “coarsen conclusions that might have been more interestingly argued”) there was widespread admiration for his “ferocious energies” in seeking out neglected archive material and people whose knowledge had previously been overlooked.[3]
This flair for research was combined with “a penchant for conspiracy theory”[14] and in his theorising he “used instinct and imagination to buttress his scholarship”.[4] This led to criticism that he was a subjective interpreter rather than a dispassionate recorder of history and was prone to ignore evidence inconsistent with his thesis.[3] He wrote for a general rather than an academic audience and knew that controversy was critical to his popular appeal; as one of his friends and obituarists recalled, “he used controversy throughout his life to draw attention to himself and his causes”.[4]
