In World War II, a conman and petty criminal convinced New Zealand’s spy catchers that the country was infested with spies, who were primed to spring into action and commit widespread sabotage to pave the way for a Japanese invasion. The alarmed authorities mulled the suspension of civil rights and a declaration of martial law to handle the emergency, before they realized they had been hoaxed.
The Major at the Heart of a Major Intelligence Screwup
Major Kenneth Barnard Thomas Folkes was the major dupe at the center of an epic intelligence fail and scandal. Born in 1905 in Gloucester, England, Folkes’ work experience when WWII began was as law clerk for twelve years, then employment in a Midlands carpet manufacturing company. He enlisted in 1940 in the Corps of Military Police, but only listed the legal work in his background questionnaire. Folkes knew a bit of French, and had a sharp mind. Between that and his legal experience, he was deemed fit for intelligence work. So he was transferred to the Intelligence Corps, and commissioned as a second lieutenant.
Folkes never ceased to promote himself. Within just a few months of joining the military, he claimed to have interrogated a POW and tricked him “until he told me what he wanted to hide”. His claims were uncritically accepted, and nobody bothered to double check to see they were true. Seen as a promising prospect, he was offered command of New Zealand’s fledgling Security Intelligence Bureau (SIB) in late 1940. It came with a promotion to major, so Folkes jumped at the opportunity.
The Small Time Criminal Who Nearly Got New Zealand Placed Under Martial Law
Once in Wellington, Major Kenneth Folkes conflated and inflated his employment background of law clerk and Midlands carpet manufacturer employee. He presented himself as a former Midlands lawyer, now devoted to securing New Zealand’s war secrets. Folkes wanted to earn a reputation, and he did – but not the one he wanted. His name would forever be linked to Sydney Ross, a petty criminal and conman. Born in 1909, Ross held a series of short term jobs, mostly as a laborer.
He was better known for his illegal work. In the 1930s, Ross had seventeen criminal convictions, and was imprisoned for theft, burglary, false pretenses, and fraud. In 1939, he received a four year sentence for breaking and entering and theft. While in prison, Ross befriended an older convict, Alfred Remmers. A former policeman, Remmers had been sacked for committing a series of burglaries while on night beat duty. He was now behind bars for forgery. As to Ross, he was released from prison on March 28th, 1942.
The Rapid Rise of Major Folkes
Sydney Ross left jail with nothing but a battered briefcase, some clothes, and a train ticket. By the end of the following day, he had met New Zealand’s Prime Minister. He also had a car, money, accommodations, and the undivided attention of Major Kenneth Folkes. The head of the Security Intelligence Bureau, or SIB, saw in the recently released convict an answer to his prayers. So he committed the grave blunder of trusting him. Between the spy catcher and conman, New Zealand was brought to the brink of martial law. Ever since, the country has held a healthy skepticism of its intelligence services.
Folkes’ career in military intelligence had gotten off to a great start. He had enlisted in the British Army as a private. Less than a year, he had risen to major and was in charge of an entire country’s counterintelligence. New Zealand might have been a small and out of the way country, but still, it was a country. By any measure, Folkes’ rise had been rapid. Once he got to New Zealand, however, things began to turn sour for Major Folkes.
The Head of New Zealand’s Counterintelligence Despised New Zealanders
Major Folkes thought the New Zealanders were colonial bumpkins. He saw them as ignorant of basic security practices, and too intellectually lazy to want to change. In reality, his contempt for the locals reflected his own intellectual laziness, and rested upon unjustified arrogance. Folkes had been trained in British military intelligence practices for only a few months, had limited experience. That did not stop him from holding an imperialistic worldview that saw New Zealanders as inferior to the English. That mix was toxic. It left him unable to grasp that there might be ways to do things other than what he had learned in the brief training he had received back in Britain.
That was bad enough, but what made things worse is that Folkes let his disdain for the locals show. Unsurprisingly, the locals resented such open contempt, and became quite antagonistic. Many of Folkes’ 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, which was especially biting because the two kind of looked alike.
The SIB’s Poor Reputation
New Zealand’s press often questioned whether Major Folkes’ SIB was too much like the Gestapo – and an inept one at that. The media and public often derided SIB men as mediocrities, draft dodgers, and incompetent snoops who screwed up time after time. On one occasion, Major Folkes’ men subjected an innocent American in charge of geophysical survey work to “stealthy pursuit” that was anything but stealthy. In another botched operation, they spent five days trying to “trap a suspected spy” at a Wellington hotel.
The intelligence agents’ efforts were 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. Against that backdrop, Sydney Ross seemed like salvation and an opportunity for serious intelligence work that would silence the doubters and critics. On March 29th, 1942, just one day after he was released from prison broke, homeless, and without prospects, Sydney Ross met with the Minister of National Service, Robert Semple.
A Fabulist Who Hoodwinked New Zealand’s Government
Sydney Ross told Minister Semple that a Nazi agent, recently landed by submarine, had tried to recruit him to join a sabotage cell, part of a vast network whose tentacles stretched across the country. Alarmed by what he had heard, Semple immediately took the recently freed jailbird to see Prime Minister Peter Fraser – back then, meeting New Zealand’s leaders seems to have been quite easy. By sheer luck, Fraser had just received classified reports from Australia, where real spy rings had been uncovered. He was thus primed to accept that his country could have similar rings.
The prime minister referred Ross to Major Folkes, and the head of the SIB saw the recently released felon as a godsend. Finally, here was a real threat and an opportunity for Folkes and his men to round up real spies and shut up the critics. Folkes gave Ross money, a car, and accommodations, and set him up as an undercover agent. Given the alias “Captain Calder”, Ross was ordered to gather intelligence on the Nazi network. For three months, he reported back to Folkes about the results of his undercover work.
The Fictional Spies Who Infested New Zealand
Sydney Ross fed Major Folkes alarming information, which the SIB head passed on to the New Zealand government’s bigwigs. Per Folkes, who repeated Sydney Ross’ claims as if they were gospel truth, enemy subversives were more widespread throughout New Zealand and dangerous than anybody had imagined. They planned to blow up key targets, kidnap or assassinate Prime Minister Fraser, Minister of National Service Semple, and other cabinet members, all as a prelude to a Japanese invasion. Ross claimed that the network was headed by his prison pal Alfred Remmers, now dying of leukemia and living in the countryside.
Ross also claimed that Remmers’ house in Wellington was the conspirators’ base of operations. In July, 1942, Folkes demanded that the government supply him with troops, declare martial law, and grant his SIB emergency powers to arrest and detain suspects without trial. Before he suspended civil rights throughout New Zealand, Fraser asked the police to investigate. In no time flat, they discovered that the supposed “Nazi headquarters” was occupied by an elderly government clerk, a dry cleaners, and three nurses, all innocent of any foreign contacts, let alone subversion and espionage.
Keeping the Hoax Alive
To Major Kenneth Folkes’ horror, it began to dawn on him that rather than shake off its reputation for screw-ups, the SIB might have committed its worst screwup to date by believing Sydney Ross. As his scam began to fall apart, the career criminal became ever more 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.
Ross 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. Unfortunately for Ross – and fortunately for New Zealanders and their civil liberties – the doctors who inspected Ross’ wounds swiftly concluded that they must have been self-inflicted.
New Zealand’s Biggest Intelligence Scandal
The story of the “Impudent Jailbird” who had conned Kenneth Folkes and the SIB, whose men had been “blatantly hoodwinked” hit New Zealand’s press in late July, 1942. The SIB’s latest screwup was the final straw. The discredited organization was taken over by the commissioner of police, and the now-thoroughly-discredited Major Kenneth Folkes was sent back to Britain in disgrace. Sydney Ross was arrested and sent back to prison, where he remained until his release in 1946. He did not get enjoy his freedom for long.
Ross passed away a short time after he was set free at age thirty seven, his life cut short by tuberculosis. It was an anticlimactic end for a man who had almost brought martial law to, and the 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. It was a lie.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
History Halls – The Hitler Diaries Hoax: When Respected Publication Fell For a Scam
New Zealand History – Sydney Ross
Radio New Zealand – Nazi Hoax: The Story of Syd Ross
