The Book of the Dead (41 page)

In London, he met the Reverend Lypshytz of the Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews. Trebitsch had been raised as an Orthodox Jew and was woefully short of cash, so he knew at once what to do. The prospect of a regular income as a Presbyterian missionary was easily enough to induce him to convert to Christianity. Sent to Montreal, Canada, he squandered large amounts of the society’s money without denting the religious persuasion of anyone. In 1901 he married Margarethe Kahlor, the daughter of a German sea captain, and brought her back to England, where she had four sons and he spent her inheritance. He served briefly as an Anglican curate in Appledore in Kent—just forty miles from Bobbing, where the Reverend Oates had enraged his flock—adding the word
Lincoln
to his name by deed poll to make himself sound more English. It was one of more than a dozen names he was to use in his career.

In 1904 I. T. T. Lincoln, as he now styled himself, failed the exams for the priesthood and started casting around for gainful employment. His eye fell on Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, Quaker philanthropist, Liberal grandee, and confectionery magnate. Expertly charming his way into Rowntree’s affections, Trebitsch Lincoln got himself appointed as his research assistant for a book he was planning on poverty in Belgium. The work involved frequent visits to the Continent and the linguistically gifted Trebitsch was ideal. He set to the task with alacrity, using
Rowntree’s name, money, and access to British embassies around Europe to live life to the full, and supplementing his already generous income (or so he later claimed) by moonlighting as a German double agent.

The innocent Rowntree was impressed by his energy, and it occurred to him he was just the sort of person Britain needed as an MP. He used his influence with the Liberal Party to take him on as candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Darlington: The only Hungarian citizen ever to be formally adopted by a major British political party. Hurriedly securing British naturalization, Mr. Ignatius Lincoln stood in the general election of January 1910. Endorsed by his fellow Liberals Churchill and Lloyd George, and delivering his speeches in a thick Hungarian accent, he ridiculed his opponent’s trade policy by claiming it was forcing Germans to eat their own dogs. To everybody’s amazement, he won. Though by only the slender margin of twenty-nine votes, it was an astounding achievement: The sitting Unionist MP was Herbert Pike Pease, a prominent local figure whose family had founded the Stockton and Darlington railway and who basically owned the town. Lincoln’s victory earned him a cartoon in
Punch.
He took his seat in the House, but because MPs were unpaid at the time, he was soon in considerable debt. When a second general election was called in December, he stood down, pleading insolvency.

This freed him to concentrate on a more straightforward career as a fraudster. With financial backing from the unsuspecting Rowntree, he floated a series of public corporations to exploit oil wells in central Europe, raising large amounts of investment on the stock market, not repaying borrowed money, and ruining the shareholders in the companies he started, all of
which collapsed. Desperate, he resorted to forgery to obtain further loans, but by 1914 he was bankrupt again.

When World War I broke out, Trebitsch Lincoln, as a former Austro-Hungarian citizen with a German wife, found himself in an awkward situation. He was also fearful of arrest, lest his forgeries be discovered. Never one to take the easy option, he decided he would become a spy—ideally as a double agent in a neutral country.

He didn’t mind who took him on. He offered his services to the British first, but they ignored him. He then went to Holland and tried the Germans. The Germans were dubious, but decided to give him a go. So he returned to England and promptly offered to sell German secret codes (that he didn’t have) to the British. While he was getting nowhere with them, his past caught up with him (as he had feared it would) and he had to leave in a hurry for the United States to avoid arrest for fraud. Here he sold his story to the papers: the British MP turned German master spy.

Infuriated by his antics, the British government sought his extradition, and Trebitsch was arrested by the Americans and packed off back to London. While in prison awaiting trial, he was given a job in the censor’s office at Mount Pleasant Sorting Office, reading mail written in German. He was taken there and back each day in a prison van. Making friends with his guards, on the way home one evening, he somehow persuaded them it would be a good idea if they all stopped off for a drink. So while the guards went to the bar, Trebitsch went to the bathroom and escaped out of the window.

He went on the run, making his way back to the States and supporting himself by writing yet more brazen (and largely fictitious) accounts of his spying career for the newspapers. The
British, after much difficulty and a series of fiascos involving the U.S. federal police and the Pinkerton detective agency, managed to track him down and extradite him a second time. He stood trial and was sentenced to three years for fraud, which he served in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight. In 1919, having done his time, he was stripped of his British citizenship and deported to mainland Europe.

He headed for Germany, where the extreme right-wing journalist Wolfgang Kapp and a cadre of anti-Semitic former German army officers were plotting the overthrow of the Weimar Republic. Trebitsch, with his effortless ability to get on with absolutely anybody, was appointed press officer to the group, in which capacity he met the young Hitler. With his fellow Nazi Dietrich Eckart, Hitler had flown to Berlin intending to join the coup. But on catching sight of Trebitsch’s distinctly Jewish physiognomy, so the tale goes, the deal was off. “Come on, Adolf,” said Eckart. “We have no further business here.” Another version casts Trebitsch in an even more pivotal historic role: It is said that he saved Hitler’s life by bundling him onto a plane as he was about to be arrested.

The putsch took place in 1920, when Kapp and six thousand German naval commandos under General Walther von Lüttwitz marched on Berlin. The occupation was short-lived (the rebels were brought down in less than a week by a general strike) but, for a brief glorious moment, Mr. Ignatius Lincoln was minister of information—the only former British MP ever to serve as a member of a German government. The revolt having failed, Trebitsch went south and took refuge in Munich, the heartland of fascism. There he devoted himself to Byzantine intrigues with extreme right-wingers in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. In Budapest he became involved with a loose alliance of rabid
monarchists and fervent anticommunists known as the White International. Many of its members were so murderously anti-Semitic that they preferred to avoid delegation and personally kill Jews, but Trebitsch, as ever, charmed them all. After which, true to form, he betrayed them, selling their secret plans to the Czechoslovak government. Because of his reputation, no one but the Czechs believed that the (for once) genuine documents were actually genuine. Trebitsch then set off for Italy to campaign for the fascists, but they didn’t trust him an inch and threw him out. As a deportee from the United States, Britain, Austria, and Italy, he was becoming quite famous:
Time
magazine called him “the man no country wanted.”

Trebitsch didn’t care. He chose a country where no one had ever heard of him and went there: China. Calling himself Puk Kusati, he dabbled in forged passports and worked for three different warlords as an arms dealer, dashing off a few pieces of anti-British propaganda in his spare time. Then in 1925, after a revelatory epiphany, Trebitsch Lincoln surprised everyone by suddenly converting to Buddhism and becoming a monk. As Chao Kung, he was an assiduous student, meditating for six years and rising to the high rank of bodhisattva. He had his shaven head branded with the twelve circular symbols from the Buddhist wheel of life and became the first Westerner to found his own Buddhist monastery in the East. But old habits die hard: On entering the sacred portal, initiates were required to hand over their worldly goods to Abbot Chao Kung, and he passed the evenings seducing nuns. His Shanghai monastery would be the closest thing he had to a settled base for the rest of his life. In 1931 he published an autobiography in which, despite having written an earlier book entitled
Revelations of an International Spy
, he denied ever having
had any involvement in espionage. He wrote only of his newfound passion for Buddhism and his vision for world peace.

The outbreak of World War II spurred the old Trebitsch back into action once more. The city of Shanghai was also the base of the Far Eastern section of the Gestapo. Trebitsch contacted the bureau chief, Joseph Meisinger, the “Butcher of Warsaw,” who had ordered the execution of thousands of Jews. Like many an anti-Semite before him, Meisinger was completely taken in by Chao Kung/Trebitsch. Under the guise of a peace mission, Chao Kung offered to deliver every Buddhist in the East to the German/Japanese cause. His price was a face-to-face meeting with Hitler, where he would prove his power by conjuring three Tibetan sages out of thin air. Incredibly, both Rudolf Hess and von Ribbentrop enthusiastically endorsed this plan, which only foundered when Hess flew to Scotland in 1941. Two phials of sacred Tibetan liquid were found in his plane. Shortly after that, Chao Kung did something entirely out of character: He wrote to Hitler denouncing the Holocaust. It was to prove his death warrant. When the Japanese invaded Shanghai in October 1943, he was summarily arrested. He died a few days later from “a stomach complaint,” poisoned on the instructions of the Nazi high command.

What are we to make of Trebitsch Lincoln? The very least one can say of him is that he never wasted a day. The range of people he persuaded to trust him is amazing—Yorkshiremen, Nazis, Buddhists: None of them is especially noted for their gullibility. Like Cagliostro, he seems to have had an almost magical talent to impress and inspire people that he himself wasn’t fully able to control. And it is just possible that his final religious conversion—to Tibetan Buddhism—marked some sort of genuine spiritual homecoming.

In 1925, the year of his mystical experience, he had tried to return to England to see his twenty-three-year-old son, John, who was awaiting execution for murder. John Lincoln was a British soldier who had bludgeoned a traveling salesman to death while drunkenly trying to burgle his house. Despite a petition with more than fifty thousand signatures asking for the hanging to be delayed so that Trebitsch could visit his son for the last time, the authorities went ahead as planned. They even refused him a temporary entry visa to go to the funeral. When informed of John’s death as he waited for a boat at The Hague, he broke down and wept, exclaiming in despair: “My sins have been visited on my son!”

No one reads Trebitsch Lincoln’s books these days, but it is curious to discover that the author of the twentieth century’s bestselling books on Tibetan Buddhism was yet another impostor:
Tuesday Lobsang Rampa
(1910–1981). He rocketed to fame in 1956 with the publication of
The Third Eye
, a riveting account of growing up in Tibet. Despite having been rejected as an obvious hoax by several publishers and receiving horrendous reviews (only the
Times
charitably called it “almost a work of art”), it became a massive international bestseller. The publishers, Secker & Warburg, admitted that they, too, had had doubts about its authenticity but thought it would make a good read anyway. They prefaced it with a statement saying that many of the author’s stories were “inevitably hard to corroborate.” On one occasion, to test his veracity, Lobsang Rampa’s editor at Secker & Warburg read out some phonetic Tibetan to him, to which he didn’t react. When he was told that he had just failed to understand a single word of his “own language,” Lobsang Rampa
threw himself on to the floor, apparently writhing in agony. His excuse was that that he had been horrifically tortured by the Japanese during the war and had blocked out all knowledge of Tibetan through self-hypnotism.

In fact, he had done no such thing. Tuesday Lobsang Rampa was Cyril Henry Hoskin, a plumber’s son from Devon. There was a stark contrast between his actual character and his literary alter ego: Hoskin had never been outside England and didn’t even have a passport. Exposed by the
Daily Mail
in 1958, based on information acquired by a private detective in the pay of Heinrich Harrer (author of the classic travelogue
Seven Years in Tibet)
, Hoskin was unrepentant. He explained that the spirit of a Tibetan monk had possessed him after he fell out of a tree in his garden in London while trying to photograph an owl.

Some of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa’s disclosures must stretch the credulity of even the most devoted fan. He claimed to have had a splinter inserted into his pineal gland in Tibet, which had activated his “third eye.” The operation took place when he—or the monk who possessed him—was eight, he said, and was accompanied by a slight “scrunch” as the splinter went into his skull and a “blinding flash.” He learned from the monk who carried out the procedure that this would enable him to “see people as they are, and not as they pretend to be.” Whether this, or some other gift, was responsible, “Lobsang Rampa” went on to produce another eighteen books. In
Doctor from Lhasa
, he tells how he learned to fly a plane, was captured by the Japanese during World War II, spent time in concentration camps as the official medical officer, and was one of very few people to survive the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In
The Rampa Story
, he describes journeying through Europe and the United States, enduring
further capture and torture, before transmigrating into the body of Cyril Henry Hoskin. His first name, Tuesday, marked the day of the week on which his “reincarnation” took place. Nor did he restrict himself to mere terrestrial travel, recounting a visit to Venus aboard a space ship and meeting two aliens—helpfully named the Tall One and the Broad One. His fifth book,
Living with the Lama
, he admitted, was not Lopsang Rampa’s work at all: He had taken dictation from Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers, his Siamese cat.