John Costello

John Edmond Costello (3 May 1943 – 26 August 1995) was a British military historian, who wrote about World War I, World War II and the Cold War. He was the first foreigner to have access to the operational records of the KGB and its predecessors and was instrumental for opening historical research during the immediate post-perestroika period.

Birth and early life He was born at Larkfield Hospital, Greenock, Inverclyde, on 3 May 1943, the son of Lieut. Commander Cecil and Suzanne (née Davis) Costello. His father was an engineer officer in the Royal Navy and had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in the previous year. 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.

Naturally opinionated and outspoken, he soon became prominent in student debating and political circles. He was Secretary of the Cambridge Union, Chairman of the University’s Conservative Association, and reputedly one of the founders of the Pest (Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism) initiative. As editor-designate of the undergraduate journal New Radical he readily agreed to amalgamation with its Oxford equivalent, Oxford Tory (which had recently attracted Robert Maxwell’s wrath following comment on his Eastern Bloc connections), and he co-edited the resultant Tory. In later years he was joint-author of a Bow Group paper advocating establishment of a national Broadcasting Council. 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 title The Battle for Concorde and, edited by William F. Waller, was reissued by Macmillan in the following year as Concorde - Flight into the Future. 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.

Move to the United States 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 in New York and subsequently relocating to Miami.

In 1990, hoping to take advantage of the new spirit of glasnost within the Soviet Union, he wrote to the KGB’s press office asking what information they had on Rudolf Hess’s mysterious solo flight to Britain in 1941. His letter elicited, via the diplomatic bag, decrypted copies of Kim Philby’s contemporary messages to Moscow. 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”. 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 of Alexander Orlov. 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 a D-Notice; in 1993 British diplomats allegedly urged Russia to cease cooperation with him; 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.

Success and criticism Costello’s books achieved considerable commercial success and in America were held in high esteem. and in his theorising he “used instinct and imagination to buttress his scholarship”. 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. 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”.

Published works The Battle for Concorde (UK) (1971) with Terry Hughes , or The Concorde Conspiracy (US) (1976) D-Day (1974) with Warren Tute & Terry Hughes Jutland 1916 (1976) with Terry Hughes The Battle of the Atlantic (1977) with Terry Hughes The Pacific War (1981) Virtue under Fire: How World War II Changed Our Social and Sexual Attitudes (US) (1985) , or Love, Sex and War: Changing Values 1939–45 (UK) (1985) "And I was There": Pearl Harbor and Midway – Breaking the Secrets (1985) with Rear Admiral Edwin Layton (his story) & Captain Roger Pineau Mask of Treachery (1988) about Anthony Blunt Ten Days to Destiny (US) or Ten Days that Saved the West (UK) (1991), about Rudolf Hess Deadly Illusions (1993) with Oleg Tsarev, about Aleksandr Mikhailovich Orlov Days of Infamy: MacArthur, Roosevelt, Churchill – the Shocking Truth Revealed (1994) about the defeats at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines