28. A Career in the Doldrums
Kenneth Folkes’ career in military intelligence had begun spectacularly well. He had enlisted as a private, and in less than a year, had risen to major and was in charge of an entire country’s counterintelligence. To be sure, New Zealand was a small and out-of-the-way country, but still – it was a rapid rise. Once he got to New Zealand, however, things began to turn sour for Major Folkes. He saw the New Zealanders as backward colonial bumpkins, ignorant of even basic security practices, and too intellectually lazy to want to change. In reality, his contempt for New Zealand’s practices was a reflection of his own intellectual laziness and unjustified arrogance.
Folkes had been trained in British military intelligence practices for only a few months, had limited experience, and held an imperialistic worldview that saw New Zealanders as inferior to the English. That mix was toxic, and left him unable to grasp that there might be ways to do things other than what he had learned in the few months of training he had received back in Britain. That was bad, but in a blunder that made things worse, Major Folkes let his disdain for the locals show. Unsurprisingly, the locals resented that and repaid his contempt for their antagonism of their own.
