He be friended the aging and dissident poet Pasternak, andtranslated the work of the 19th-century playwrightGriboyedov

His diplomatic reports on everyday life invarious parts of Russia were so informative as to arousesuspicion of their sources, and Rosetta Stone software Costello, an unconventionaland non-aligned leftist, knew he was the subject ofsurveillance by the Russian, British and eventually USauthorities. Yet he made no effort to tone down either hiscriticism of Soviet affairs or his admiration for theirpeople. He admitted cheerfully that, 'under the influence ofwine... I don't often in public tell an American FirstSecretary that I think the President of his country is abum. I have done so, nevertheless. And am thereby revealedas an indifferent diplomat.' Heavy-drinking and indifferentperhaps, but also refreshingly frank and even-handed. In1947, well before it was known to the US, Costello informedhis government that Russia possessed the atomic bomb. Hissuperior, Alister McIntosh, said, 'you'd have thought he hadinside information. He hadn't, he'd worked it out usingmethods built up from his Intelligence training.' It is easyto see how accusations of espionage steadily mounted aroundCostello, but not why he was later believed to be a willingtool of the Soviet system. With the closure of NewZealand's Moscow legation in 1950, Costello, described byMcIntosh as 'the most brilliant diplomatic officer we have,'was sent to the brand-new Paris legation, which in McNeish'sdescription appears as a Rosetta Stone Chinese glittering and intemperate enclaveamid postwar austerity. This was also a period of vindictiveanti-Communist persecution and Costello faced growingpressure to resign, both from his government, led by theobtuse and reactionary Sid Holland, and from Britishsecurity. He was not unwilling to leave the cushioned lifeof a Paris diplomat, and made inquiries about returning toacademia. However he was still working at the legation whenthe incident occurred which would ultimately destroy hisreputation. New Zealand passports were issued to a PeterKroger, allegedly of Gisborne, and his wife, who used themto enter Britain and spy on its nuclear submarine base. Sixyears later they were exposed as the American-born Morrisand Lona Cohen, high-level KGB agents who had alreadysucceeded in smuggling plans for the US atomic bomb toMoscow. It was a drastic breach of the legation'ssecurity, but an entirely unwitting one by staff deceived bythe couple's immaculately forged identity papers.Significantly, as McNeish here establishes through recentlydeclassified documents, Costello played no part in thepassport affair. Years later, and following several officialinvestigations, the head of New Zealand's SIS would confirmthis. Even so, a succession of writers on the crepuscularworld of espionage have concluded, on the basis ofCostello's openly avowed leftwing views and on entirelyunsupported allegations, that he was somehow behind thepassport affair. This charge was first made by the Britishjournalist Chapman Pincher, described by historian EPThompson as 'a kind of official urinal' into which 'highofficials of MI5 and MI6... and others, stand patientlyleaking in the public interest'. The New Zealand-bornbarrister and globetrotting radical John Platts-Mills metand was impressed by Costello during his early days inMoscow. Knowledgeable in the law of defamation, Platts-Millssays he finds Pincher's spying claim 'impossible tobelieve... but you can say anything about a person when he'sdead.' This comment is telling since John Platts-Mills washimself an outspoken leftist gadfly whose unabashedpolitical views also brought him various official sanctions,both open and covert. Pincher's Rosetta Stone French allegations have since beenrepeated so often that they have acquired an aura ofauthenticity, and reappeared recently in New Zealand writerGraeme Hunt's facile and superficial study, Spies andRevolutionaries. Hunt piles guilt by association,insinuation and rank, unsupported assertion on top ofCostello's undoubtedly colourful professional record tolabel him a calculating traitor directly responsible forissuing the Kroger passports.