Desmond Patrick Costello (31 January 1912 – 23 February 1964) was a New Zealand-born linguist, soldier, diplomat and university lecturer and professor who has been accused of being a KGB agent.
[1] In 1932, Costello was awarded a postgraduate arts scholarship and travelled to Cambridge, where he attended Trinity College until 1934, graduating with first class honours in the classical tripos.
In 1935, Costello became a senior research scholar at Trinity and married Bella (Bil) Lerner, the London-born daughter of a Jewish family with Ukrainian origins.
He was likely under the influence of contemporaries such as James Klugmann and John Cornford, both prominent members of the Party and influential figures in the Cambridge University Socialist Society, which also included Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.
[2] In 1936 Costello was appointed lecturer in classics at the University College of the South West in Exeter, a position from which he was dismissed in 1940 because of his left-wing political activities and his associations with a student who had been convicted of an offence under the Official Secrets Act.
In 1942 he was seconded to Eighth Army GCHQ, but was later transferred back to the 2nd New Zealand Division as divisional intelligence officer to General Freyberg, and promoted to captain.
In 1945 he was recalled to the Army and as Major Costello was one of a party sent to Poland, ostensibly to arrange the repatriation of liberated British and Commonwealth prisoners, but also to report on conditions there.
While there he was arrested for public drunkenness and later informed by Alister McIntosh, then-head of the Department of External Affairs, that his career was finished and he should begin to look for other employment.
Costello however remained employed until 1955, as his posting as First Secretary of the New Zealand Legation in Paris had already been arranged and was allowed to proceed following a severe reprimand from Prime Minister Holland.
Late in 1951 the then Director-General of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, was in New Zealand and raised formally with both Holland and McIntosh the case of Costello, the MI5 view of him, and the security sanctions which the UK Embassy had put in place, to the detriment of the NZ Legation's work.
In 1981, Chapman Pincher published Their Trade is Treachery, which contained the allegation that Anthony Blunt had ‘pointed the finger’ at Costello ‘who might have been recruited as a spy’.
Inquiries later established that the passports were in fact authorised and issued by Jean McKenzie, the chargé d'affaires at the Legation, the only person there empowered to do so; but controversy continues about the role played by Costello, based on defectors’ accounts and handwriting analysis.
Golitsin's codename was "Kago",[16] and he is referred to by that name at serial 270a on the MI5 file, a memorandum from MI5's man in Wellington to head office, dated 21 June 1963.
This referred to revelations by "Kago" that evidently went beyond Costello, to include some of his colleagues in the New Zealand Legation in Moscow, about whom the Security Service then began ‘exhaustive inquiries’.
[14] This is entirely plausible: Alister McIntosh told the New Zealand author Michael King in 1978 that ‘Paddy of course was a terrific personality and he influenced the whole of the staff [in Moscow] except Patrick’.
[18] In 2000, Michael King wrote to Prime Minister Helen Clark seeking documents about Costello and another New Zealander suspected of spying, William Ball Sutch.
Of those who have written about the file, McGibbon still considered, as he did in 2000, that ‘Final resolution of the question...still depends on revelation of records presumably lodged in the former KGB archives in Moscow’.