The Hapless Security Intelligence Bureau
Kenneth Folks’ New Zealander colleagues saw him as “aggressive, discourteous, and impertinent“. They leaked those assessments to the press, and within a few months of his arrival, local newspapers ran editorials that compared him to Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, whom he slightly resembled physically. Newspapers also questioned whether Folkes’ Security Intelligence Bureau (SIB) was too much like the Gestapo – and an inept one at that. SIB men were derided as mediocrities, draft dodgers, and incompetent snoops given to blunder after blunder.
In one episode, SIB men subjected an innocent American in charge of geophysical survey work to “stealthy pursuit” that was not stealthy at all. In another bungled endeavor, they conducted a five-day sting to try and “trap a suspected spy” at a Wellington hotel, that was an open secret to “the innocent suspect, the hotel staff, and half the town“. The SIB and its head were widely ridiculed as hapless spy catchers who futilely spun their wheels in out of the way New Zealand with no spies to catch. Then salvation and serious work seemed to arrive in the form of career criminal Sydney Ross.