'THE SIXTH MAN' By JAMES MCNEISHRANDOM HOUSE 2007, RRP $35, Reviewed by MARK DERBY
Paddy Costello's Russian-Jewish wife Bella, we are told, 'had in her beauty and sadness the sadness of small Jewish
towns hemmed in by curses'.
The precision, power and originality of this description, from James McNeish's recent biography of Costello, are
representative of the book. Meticulous in its research, it is also replete with fine and surprising sentences, the
product of its author's long training in fiction along with many other forms of prose.
This is clearly the book McNeish has longed to write since he finished Dance of the Peacocks, his collective biography
of five of the best-known scholarly expatriates of the 1930s, a period when 'New Zealand exported such a flowering of
young thoroughbreds to war and revolution in Europe'. The Sixth Man completes the picture, since Costello was a close
friend of several of the Rhodes Scholars in the earlier book, his life intersected with theirs at many points, and he
was at least as able a scholar, although never a Rhodes.
Yet this is a very different and even better book than Dance of the Peacocks - more shapely than that enthralling but
sprawling work, and also more focused in its objective. McNeish's purpose goes beyond celebrating the life of this
hugely accomplished and dangerously attractive character. He aims to rescue the reputation of a man now remembered, if
at all, as 'the most important New Zealand spy recruited by the Soviet Union'. That allegation was never more than a
vague but persistent rumour in Paddy Costello's own lifetime. He was never charged with espionage, and even officially
exonerated. Yet repeatedly, since his sudden and early death in 1964, Costello has been accused in print of treachery,
and the mud has stuck. McNeish, drawing on recently released confidential documents, examines these spying charges at
length and concludes that Costello was guilty only of being a frank and unapologetic left-winger. His book is a strong
and convincing refutation of the smears which have lately overshadowed Costello's many outstanding achievements.
Growing up in working-class Auckland in the 1920s, Costello was still a schoolboy when he began to develop a very un-New
Zealand talent - a flair for languages. He taught himself Latin and Greek from library books, Gaelic from his Irish
relatives and local wharfies, French and Italian by means unknown. Later he would add to these Russian, Persian and
several more. He won a string of scholarships and became a classicist at Auckland University and then at Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he joined the distinguished future traitors Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. There
is no evidence that Costello ever met them, let alone shared their intentions, but their mere proximity seems to have
counted against him later.
As fascism spread vigorously outward from Germany, Italy and Japan, three million were unemployed in Britain, and
Marxism swept across Trinity, Costello joined peace and anti-Nazi demonstrations, met victims of fascism while on trips
in Europe, and moved steadily but idiosyncratically leftward. Among his friends were a fellow New Zealander, the young
mathematician and communist Griff McLaurin, who would shortly die a hero's death in the early days of the Spanish Civil
War. Through McLaurin he met Bella Lerner, an English-born Russian Jew and Communist Party member, and within three
weeks he married her and briefly became a Party member himself. By now a lecturer in classics at a small South England
university, Costello was an impassioned and highly visible supporter of the Republican cause in Spain and even
considered following his friend McLaurin to the front lines. Such associations would later prove highly damaging,
although Costello made no secret at all of his views, his associates or his activities.
That is, until 1937, when he carried out a seriously compromising secret mission, in McNeish's words an act 'of reckless
evangelism'. Soon after learning of McLaurin's death in Spain, Costello acted as courier for the British Communist Party
and carried the equivalent of $30,000 to their sister party in India. The trip passed without incident but, unbeknown to
Costello, was monitored by the security services of both countries and their reports were added to a swelling
confidential file on the outspokenly radical New Zealand-born academic. That file was fattened further in 1940 when
Costello was sacked from his lectureship for advising a friend who, in the fevered atmosphere of the outbreak of war,
was jailed for publicising information sent from the front. McNeish describes the incident as trifling, and Costello's
role as minor and entirely above board. Certainly his response to losing his teaching job would have been unusual in a
secret agent of a foreign power. Costello promptly enlisted in the New Zealand army and served with distinction and
courage for the duration of the war.
This book opens with an hallucinatory account of one of the least-known incidents in our military history, the April
1941 battle at the Pass of Tempe in Greece, where the 21st Auckland Battalion was ordered to stand and engage the enemy,
'if necessary, to extinction'. Lance-Corporal Costello acquitted himself well in this debacle, his knowledge of Greek
enabling his Colonel and a remnant of their force to escape through the mountains and islands of the Aegean and rejoin
General Freyberg's men in Crete. Promotion followed, and Costello found himself confronting Rommel's tanks as an
intelligence officer in Cairo, working alongside a fellow Irish-New Zealander, Dan Davin, who became his lifelong friend
and admirer.
Freyberg's keen appreciation of Costello's language skills ensured that he kept the lanky linguist nearby through
subsequent campaigns in Italy. As Russia's role in the war became crucial, the general joined Costello's informal
Russian language classes and noted his ability to exchange banter with visiting Red Army officers. In the closing months
of the war, it was Freyberg who suggested that Costello leave his army duties to join the embryonic New Zealand legation
in Moscow. Security vetting was routine but unproblematic. New Zealand Rhodes Scholar Geoffrey Cox, first choice for the
legation post, had worked closely with Costello during the war and reported that he was a Marxist who 'would insist on
his views openly'. Indeed he did. 'I'm afraid I'm a bit leftwing, sir,' he told Prime Minister Peter Fraser, who was
apparently unconcerned at sending this 'communist' to Moscow.
There Costello proved an able diplomat, and within a year was seconded to the British delegation at the 1945 Yalta
conference between Churchill and Stalin. He succeeded in crossing the closely guarded border with Poland and, against
heavy odds, brought back a report of profound international importance. It was titled 'German Extermination Camps' and
gave his eyewitness account of the gas chambers at Lublin, together with accounts he received from survivors of
Auschwitz. The report, reproduced in full in McNeish's book, was perhaps the first reliable and detailed description of
the Holocaust to reach the outside world and helped to counter accusations that stories of Nazi atrocities were a hoax.
Costello spent six years in Moscow, acquiring a convinced distaste for Russia's dictatorship and a profound love of its
literature. He befriended the aging and dissident poet Pasternak, and translated the work of the 19th-century playwright
Griboyedov. His diplomatic reports on everyday life in various parts of Russia were so informative as to arouse
suspicion of their sources, and Costello, an unconventional and non-aligned leftist, knew he was the subject of
surveillance by the Russian, British and eventually US authorities. Yet he made no effort to tone down either his
criticism of Soviet affairs or his admiration for their people. He admitted cheerfully that, 'under the influence of
wine... I don't often in public tell an American First Secretary that I think the President of his country is a bum. I
have done so, nevertheless. And am thereby revealed as an indifferent diplomat.' Heavy-drinking and indifferent perhaps,
but also refreshingly frank and even-handed. In 1947, well before it was known to the US, Costello informed his
government that Russia possessed the atomic bomb. His superior, Alister McIntosh, said, 'you'd have thought he had
inside information. He hadn't, he'd worked it out using methods built up from his Intelligence training.' It is easy to
see how accusations of espionage steadily mounted around Costello, but not why he was later believed to be a willing
tool of the Soviet system.
With the closure of New Zealand's Moscow legation in 1950, Costello, described by McIntosh as 'the most brilliant
diplomatic officer we have,' was sent to the brand-new Paris legation, which in McNeish's description appears as a
glittering and intemperate enclave amid postwar austerity. This was also a period of vindictive anti-Communist
persecution and Costello faced growing pressure to resign, both from his government, led by the obtuse and reactionary
Sid Holland, and from British security. He was not unwilling to leave the cushioned life of a Paris diplomat, and made
inquiries about returning to academia. However he was still working at the legation when the incident occurred which
would ultimately destroy his reputation. New Zealand passports were issued to a Peter Kroger, allegedly of Gisborne, and
his wife, who used them to enter Britain and spy on its nuclear submarine base. Six years later they were exposed as the
American-born Morris and Lona Cohen, high-level KGB agents who had already succeeded in smuggling plans for the US
atomic bomb to Moscow.
It was a drastic breach of the legation's security, but an entirely unwitting one by staff deceived by the couple's
immaculately forged identity papers. Significantly, as McNeish here establishes through recently declassified documents,
Costello played no part in the passport affair. Years later, and following several official investigations, the head of
New Zealand's SIS would confirm this. Even so, a succession of writers on the crepuscular world of espionage have
concluded, on the basis of Costello's openly avowed leftwing views and on entirely unsupported allegations, that he was
somehow behind the passport affair. This charge was first made by the British journalist Chapman Pincher, described by
historian EP Thompson as 'a kind of official urinal' into which 'high officials of MI5 and MI6... and others, stand
patiently leaking in the public interest'. The New Zealand-born barrister and globetrotting radical John Platts-Mills
met and was impressed by Costello during his early days in Moscow. Knowledgeable in the law of defamation, Platts-Mills
says he finds Pincher's spying claim 'impossible to believe... but you can say anything about a person when he's dead.'
This comment is telling since John Platts-Mills was himself an outspoken leftist gadfly whose unabashed political views
also brought him various official sanctions, both open and covert. Pincher's allegations have since been repeated so
often that they have acquired an aura of authenticity, and reappeared recently in New Zealand writer Graeme Hunt's
facile and superficial study, Spies and Revolutionaries. Hunt piles guilt by association, insinuation and rank,
unsupported assertion on top of Costello's undoubtedly colourful professional record to label him a calculating traitor
directly responsible for issuing the Kroger passports.
Soon after this incident, as he had long intended, Costello resigned from the diplomatic service and began teaching
Russian at Manchester University. He soon gained a reputation as a masterly literary translator, although only of
projects which met his own high and eclectic standards. Invited by Pasternak to produce the first English translation of
Dr Zhivago, he declined because he didn't think the novel was very good, a view not critically acceptable until much
later. His death from heart failure came without warning at the age of 52.
Throughout this wonderfully rewarding biography, Costello emerges as irresistibly likeable. Both intellectually
brilliant and socially accomplished, he was a hard-drinking bon vivant forever breaking into song, a dedicated family
man and natural teacher who enjoyed the devoted affection of his wife, children, friends, students and colleagues. Dan
Davin, a fellow black-Irish boozer, based a central character in his war novel For the Rest of our Lives on his old
friend, and later attempted but did not complete a biography. McNeish has now triumphantly delivered this long-overdue
work. It features his trademark staccato sentences and invented conversations to considerable literary effect, and its
production is exemplary, with each chapter prefaced by extracts from Costello's letters, mostly published here for the
first time since his widow was protective of his legacy.
McNeish acknowledges that 'there will always be a residue of doubt about Costello'. Both he and Hunt draw on recently
released SIS files to support their diametrically opposed cases, and both indicate that there are more such papers yet
to come to light. Until then, The Sixth Man provides the valuable service of spotlighting the miasma of allegations
swirling around Costello, sorting the entirely unsupported from the inconclusive and placing them within a broader
portrait of a vastly talented and remarkably reckless individual whose undeniable achievements seem rather more
noteworthy than his unproven crimes.
A declaration of interest - mine is one of more than a hundred names listed in the acknowledgments to this book, although whatever help I
provided to its author was so minor and long ago that I can't remember it.
Other reviews
Mark Derby is a Wellington writer and researcher. He is editing a history of New Zealand's response to the Spanish Civil
War, to be published later in 2008 by Canterbury University Press.