[2] After the war the family lived at Gosport, Hampshire, and later at Newbury, Berkshire, where Costello was educated at the local grammar school before proceeding to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, to read economics and law.
[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.
With Hughes he went on to write accounts of the 1916 Battle 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 with Warren Tute to tell the story of the 1944 Normandy Landings.
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 of Anthony Blunt’s central role in formation of the Cambridge spy-ring (Mask of Treachery) was almost uniformly well received.
[8] Their content contributed to his book Ten Days that Saved the West (1991), in which he concluded that MI5 had lured Hess to Britain in response to an invitation from the Duke of Hamilton - a conclusion subsequently dismissed as one of Costello’s “pet conspiracy theories”.
[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 the atom spies in the United States.
Costello next persuaded Crown Publishing Group to pay a considerable sum to the SVR 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 and CIA in Berlin before construction of the Wall, and the sequence of events during the Cuban Missile Crisis.