24. The Security Intelligence Bureau’s Great Blunder
As his scam began to unravel, Sydney Ross grew desperate to hang on to his employment as an “undercover agent” and the gravy train that went with it. To keep the hoax alive, he resorted to yet another elaborate hoax to bolster his story. He dug a deep hole in a forest, lacerated his back with barbed wire, then staggered to the roadside, where he gave a passing driver £10 to summon help. He then claimed to have been tortured by Nazis and forced to dig his own grave at gunpoint, before he pulled off a miraculous escape. However, doctors who inspected his wounds figured out that they were self-inflicted. The story of the “Impudent Jailbird” who had hoaxed Major Kenneth Folkes and the Security Intelligence Bureau, whose men had been “blatantly hoodwinked” hit the newspapers in late July 1942.
The SIB’s latest blunder was the final straw. The embarrassed organization was taken over by the commissioner of police, and the now-thoroughly-discredited Major Kenneth Folkes was sent back to Britain in disgrace. Ross returned to prison, where he remained until his release in 1946, shortly before his death at age 37 of tuberculosis. It was an anticlimactic end for a man who had almost brought martial law to, and ended the rule of law in, New Zealand. After the war, Folkes returned to his job with a Midlands carpet manufacturer and died in obscurity in 1975. A self-promoter and fabulist to the end, his headstone described him as a recipient of the Distinguished Service Order. There is no record that he had ever received such an award.