9. An Incompetent Spy Catcher and His Hapless Crew
Major Kenneth Folks’ New Zealander colleagues saw him as “aggressive, discourteous, and impertinent“, and leaked those assessments to the press. Within a few months of his arrival, local newspapers ran editorials that compared Folkes 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 who repeatedly screwed up.
In one episode, Folkes’ men subjected an innocent American in charge of geophysical survey work to “stealthy pursuit” that was anything but stealthy. In another bungled endeavor, they ran a five-day operation to try and “trap a suspected spy” at a Wellington hotel. In a plot twist, they went about it in such an incompetent way that the operation 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 out of the way of New Zealand with no spies to catch. Then salvation and serious work seemed to arrive in the form of career criminal Sydney Ross.