QI The Book of the Dead

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 new-found passion for Buddhism and his vision for world peace.

    The outbreak of the Second World War 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 are exactly 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, whowas awaiting execution for murder. John Lincoln was a British soldier who had bludgeoned a travelling salesman to death while drunkenly trying to burgle his house. Despite a petition with over 50,000 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 best-selling 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 best-seller. The publishers, Secker & Warburg, admitted that they too had had doubts about its authenticity, but thought it would make a good read anyway. They