James Mcneish - The Sixth Man: The Extraordinary Life of Paddy Costello

Paddy Costello was a Second World War intelligence officer, a New Zealand diplomat, a linguist, teacher and scholar, a Renaissance man in the breadth and depth of his interests, and according to his enemies a Soviet agent during the Cold War. This long overdue biography sets the record straight. It convincingly shows that the slim evidence for the traitor charge was invented, exaggerated and misinterpreted. In fact, when Costello was a diplomat in Moscow the major secret he revealed was to the West: the Soviets had the atomic bomb.

It is now clear that Costello was punished for his pre-war Communist views, which he had trumpeted from the rooftops, and later vilified for being right in his analysis of communism, a victim of the McCarthy period.

This is an important book about a fascinating man who held fast to his beliefs and his humanity at a difficult time in history.

Phillip Knightley, author of The Second Oldest Profession:

Spies and Spying in the 20th Century

The book draws primarily on letters and diaries, and on interviews conducted over a period of several years. Official documents including declassified New Zealand and American Intelligence files have also been used. The author wishes to thank the late Michael King for a number of British security documents, the so-called Batterbee File, sent to me shortly before he died, the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade for help dating back to 1999 and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service for an informal briefing, following the release of a quantity of declassified material in 2003. A further consignment of forty-one NZSIS documents which arrived in 2007 as this book was going to press has helped to clear up a mystery which has frustrated writers and historians in two hemispheres for forty years.

Conversations where not taken from documents are based on reported speech.

Warm acknowledgement is made to Christopher Costello, Paddy Costellos executor, and his siblings Mick, Katie and Nicholas Costello and Josephine Proctor (ne Costello) and also to Doris Bornstein (ne Lerner) and Jack Lerner, Bil Costellos surviving sister and brother for their unstinting help and generous hospitality. They belong to a richly connected family scattered to Australia and New Zealand, with roots in Ireland and perhaps the sixteenth-century Spanish Armada on one side and, through marriage, the Jewish Pale of Settlement in southern Russia on the other. Their trust and openness to enquiry have made a long labour seem short; and their sometimes critical comments on the text have come without hint of censorship. Without their help and access to the family archives, no book would have been possible.

I owe thanks above all to my wife, Helen, researcher, photographic editor and critic, who has helped more than anyone to disinter Paddy Costello and rescue him from his detractors.

Full acknowledgements appear at the back.

An award by Creative New Zealand enabling me to concentrate on this project and a travel grant by the New Zealand History Research Trust Fund, Ministry for Culture and Heritage, are warmly acknowledged.

J. McN.

SECTION 1 (Auckland and Cambridge)

SECTION 2 (Greece and North Africa)

SECTION 3 (Moscow and Paris)

SECTION 4 (Growing Family)

SECTION 5 (Last days)

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Photographic Editor, HELEN McNEISH

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders for illustrations used in this book. Proper acknowledgement will be made in future editions in the event of any omissions that occurred at the time of going to press