Salient. Official Newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Vol 40 No. 26. October 3 1977
The Con-man who beat the SIS
The Con-man who beat the SIS
In 1940 our powerful allies (British) "required" New Zealand to set up a security intelligence bureau. The British as part of their "requirement", "especially recommended" a Lieutenant Folkes to control the SIB for New Zealand. He was a pom, lent specially to NZ for the purpose.
So Folkes was Jumped to major and appointed director of the security intelligence bureau, controlling civil and military security in NZ reporting directly to the Prime Minister.
In Professor F.L.W. Wood's official war history 'The New Zealand People at War', the author states, "The bureau never seems to have functioned satisfactorily .... Folkes himself seems to have been unsuited to his responsibilities many of his subordinates lacked at least the training necessary for them .... The bureau was in fact received with general uneasiness and distrust .... the suspicion that it was accumulating lurid reports without the inclination to check or the capacity to evaluate them was confirmed in the most startling fashion in mid-1942. On 28 March 1942, the day following his release from Waikeria reformatory, an individual with an extensive criminal history, including convictions for false pretences obtained an interview with the Minister of Works, Mr Semple with a story of having been approached by enemy agents. Semple took him to Prime Minister Fraser, who passed him on to Major Folkes.
Over the ensuing three months he seems to have convinced Folkes and, it would appear, some members of war cabinet, that four Nazi agents had arrived by submarine and were living in Rotorua, that contacts had been made with fifth columnists throughout the country and plans made for extensive sabotage and the assassination of leading Cabinet Ministers prior to the landing of an invasion force at New Plymouth. Meanwhile, in pursuit of the conspirators, Folkes' informant, supplied with ample funds by the SIB and accompanied by its agents, toured the North Island. The police were not informed, though from their observation of the individual concerned they began to discover what was happening; nor were the chiefs of staff until, in the closing stages Folkes asked them for a large body of military personnel in order to round up the conspirators. He also asked the Prime Minister, unsuccessfully for special powers, apparently to arrest and detain the considerable number of completely innocent people who had been accused of complicity in the affair. Kraser's suspicions were growing and, some time in July he requested the police to investigate. They had little difficulty in exposing the affair as a hoax.
Despite a devastating report on the case and on the general work of the bureau by the Attorney-General, dated 18 September, and a chiefs of staff paper dated 22 December recommending the immediate dismissal of its head, it was not until 19 February that the Prime Minister wrote directing Folkes to hand over control of his organisation to the superintendent of police!!
I do not....know to what extent it is true that the con-man who'd fooled a whole government had in fact been given military rank and made deputy director of the SIB, or whether he was taken to Court, nor what happened to Folkes and the other SIB staffers. Mind you I think comment could be made about the many interesting parallels between the operations of the SIS 1974, and the SIB 1944, following the Sutch case.
But as we now know following the Sinclair at fair, the SIS will not allow even acdemics acess to even the most paltry records and therefore knowledge of this interesting little segment of New Zealand history will be kept away from prying eyes, and as a result form people who may want to tell a tale of what happens when a secret service gets out of hand.
—Graeme Christie.