The Mysteries of Trebitsch-Lincoln: Con-man, Spy, ‘Counter-Initiate’?

The Mysteries of Trebitsch-Lincoln: Con-man, Spy, ‘Counter-Initiate’?

BY DR. RICHARD B. SPENCE

Whatever else may be said about Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch-Lincoln, few can match his resume. He started life in Hungary in 1879 as plain Ignacz Trebitsch, the son of a prosperous orthodox Jewish family. He ended it sixty-four years later in Shanghai as the Abbot Chao Kung. Or at least he probably did. In between, using innumerable aliases, Trebitsch played the parts of actor, petty thief, convicted forger, Christian missionary, Anglican curate, Buddhist monk, member of Parliament, oil tycoon, fugitive, self-proclaimed genius, international spy, adviser to warlords and arch-conspirator. And those are just the ones we can be sure of.

Trebitsch’s picaresque career has spawned at least a half-dozen biographies, including his own Autobiography of an Adventurer (1932). By far the most thorough is Bernard Wasserstein’s 1988 The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln. But even Wasserstein’s diligent detective work cannot fill in all the blanks. His portrait of Trebitsch, as with most of the other biographies, is a chameleon-like megalomaniac whose quest for fame and fortune mostly ended in failure and disappointment. Trebitsch comes off as a mentally-unstable confidence man; a mendacious, back-stabbing scoundrel.

I. T. Trebitsch-Lincoln was all those things, but he may have been something more. While anything he claimed, or anything claimed about him, must be taken with a large dose of salt, the standard view of Lincoln may be too quick to dismiss some “unsupported” assertions as pure fantasy.

In contrast, writers such as French esotericist Rene Guenon and Jean Robin, see a more secretive and sinister side to Trebitsch. To Guenon, Trebitsch was an obvious “agent of the Counter-Initiation,” a tool of hidden forces which sought to thwart and misdirect human enlightenment. Robin puts him in the service of the dreaded “72 Unknown Superiors” whose manifestations included the mysterious Green Dragon Society.1 Robin, among others, even makes him an influence on the up-and-coming Adolf Hitler.2 Historian Guido Preparata dubs Trebitsch a “midwife to Nazism.”3 Preparata also insists that Trebitsch was “neither a spy nor an imposter, [but] in all likelihood was, like [Alexander Helphand] Parvus one of those ‘specialists’ fluent in the art of subversion, who were part of a wider network of mercenaries fascinated in one form or another by the ways of power.”4 It’s an intriguing possibility, to say the least, but not one easy to prove.

Trebitsch-Lincoln’s career is much too long and convoluted to summarise in this article. It will focus instead on two areas of mystery regarding his person and actions. First, to what degree was Trebitsch actually involved in espionage? Next, what were his links to the realm of secret societies and the occult and how did these influence his fascination with Buddhism and Tibet?

Trebitsch-Lincoln the Spy

Wasserstein sees Trebitsch’s secret agent exploits as largely imaginary and finds “not a shred of convincing evidence” that Mr. Lincoln engaged in espionage prior to World War I.5 However, clandestine activities, by their very nature, are difficult to pin down. Done right, they should not leave incriminating records.

A firm proponent of Trebitsch’s spy career is British writer Donald MacCormick, aka Richard Deacon. If Wasserstein seldom strays from the security (false security?) of official documentation, McCormick eagerly embraces informal and undocumented sources, including rumour and hearsay. However, MacCormick was a British naval intelligence officer and had first-hand experience with the clandestine world and its inhabitants.

McCormick suspects that Trebitsch’s early religious conversions and travels (1897-1902) provided cover for some sort of intelligence gathering, though for just who is uncertain.6 The same may apply to his later conversion to Buddhism.

McCormick accepts Trebitsch’s claim to have early on visited South America, whereas Wasserstein observes that there is “no independent corroboration of this story.”7 McCormick links Trebitsch to Argentina and a Welsh immigrant there named Isaac Roberts. Roberts, claims McCormick, introduced young Mr. Trebitsch to an up-and-coming British politician, David Lloyd George.8 McCormick further argues that Trebitsch’s pre-war investigations into European social conditions were really political intelligence gathering for Lloyd George.9 McCormick alleges that Trebitsch served Lloyd George as a secret adviser on oil, a realm that also brought him into contact with, and possibly the employment of, the infamous “Merchant of Death,” Basil Zaharoff.10 Another source puts Trebitsch among Zaharoff’s intimates as early as 1909, though there is, of course, no real evidence.11 According to McCormick, who quotes Isaac Roberts, a “triangular association” existed among Zaharoff, Lloyd George and Trebitsch based on the fact that “each knew a secret about the other.”12 Zaharoff, for instance, knew that Trebitsch was a spy, and not just for himself and the little Welshman, but also for the Germans. McCormick believes that Trebitsch began selling information to the Germans as early as 1911.

World War I was a turning point for Trebitsch. From his arrival in London around 1897, he had pursued a path which led him into the Anglican Church, secured him British nationality and culminated in 1910 with his election to Parliament. In 1914, things took a very different path. Trebitsch committed forgery and then compounded his difficulties with a blundering attempt to play double agent for British and German intelligence. Fleeing to the neutral USA, he made a splash in New York with his sensational and very anti-British Confessions of an International Spy. This purported to reveal the secret origins of the war and Britain’s underhanded part in them. After arrest and long delay, and a headline-grabbing jailbreak, he was extradited to Britain in 1916 where he was convicted and imprisoned on the forgery charge. In the years following, Mr. Lincoln’s hatred of England was matched only by His Majesty’s loathing of him. Or so it seemed.

A contrary view holds that Trebitsch’s estrangement from Britain was all part of an elaborate cover scheme. According to this, Trebitsch remained a secret British agent for many years, perhaps for the rest of his life. That regular British officialdom had no inkling of this and vilified and harassed him at every turn was just as it should be; as an apparent enemy of the British Empire, he thus gained the attention and confidence of the Empire’s real foes.

It seems a ludicrous idea, yet there are things that give pause. For instance, in December 1914 Admiral William Reginald “Blinker” Hall, chief of the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division, caught Trebitsch red handed in the clumsy attempt to double-deal the British and Germans. Instead of arresting him, however, Hall suggested that Trebitsch take advantage of the time remaining on his passport and go to New York. Given that Trebitsch was about to be picked-up for forgery, it was good and timely advice.

As noted, in the States Trebitsch turned his hand to anti-British propaganda and also tried to ingratiate himself with the Kaiser’s officials and spies. This was precisely the modus operandi employed by a British operative who arrived in America just a few months before Trebitsch " Aleister Crowley. While Crowley never lived down his outwardly treasonous behaviour, he also suffered no retribution from the British Government whose employee he was. This does not stop Rene Guenon from labelling Trebitsch and Crowley as “brothers” both as double-agents for London and Berlin and as agents of the Counter-Initiation.13 Of course, in stark contrast to Crowley, Trebitsch ended up in prison. The simple answer may be that Trebitsch was a real turn-coat while Crowley only pretended to be one. Or, it may be that while the self-proclaimed Beast was successful in penetrating the German apparatus in the US, Trebitsch was not. His German associates seem to have thought so little of him that one of them turned him for the reward. So, was Trebitsch’s extradition and trial really damage control to cover and punish a failed agent?

The notion that Trebitsch was and remained a British agent seems especially popular in French circles. According to McCormick, the French held him in suspicion since 1914 when they detected him sniffing out oil in Algeria, presumably for Perfide Albion.14 Guenon accepted the notion, noting later links between Trebitsch and British agents in Central Asia. As late as 1937, French writer Robert Boucard labelled Trebitsch an agent of L’Intelligence Service alongside T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell.15

Trebitsch’s name does pop up alongside Lawrence’s in some late 20s press reports. In January 1929, the Indian Government felt obliged to issue an official denial regarding the alleged involvement of the two adventurers in recent troubles in Afghanistan.16 Trebitsch was supposed to be fishing in these waters as a Soviet agent " a charge, as we will see, that surfaces elsewhere.

The staunchest advocate of the Trebitsch-as-British-agent theory is Guido Preparata. He points in particular to Trebitsch’s post-war shenanigans in Germany. Preparata even wonders whether Trebitsch was ever in a British prison or simply kept on ice waiting a new assignment. Wasserstein clearly documents Lincoln’s jail time, but he and Preparata do agree that Trebitsch was stripped of his British nationality and booted from England in the summer of 1919.

He landed on his feet, as he always did, in post-war Berlin where the fragile Weimar Republic clung to power. Somehow, he wormed his way into the confidence of a cabal of right-wing conspirators. In March 1920, in the so-called Kapp Putsch, the plotters seized control of Berlin, only to back down and flee a few days later. Trebitsch briefly basked in the limelight as press chief of the revolutionary regime and dreamed of becoming its future propaganda minister (a la Goebbels).

Trebitsch’s precise role in the Kapp affair is murky. Some dismiss him as a mere hanger-on, but a contemporary report reaching American intelligence labelled him the “organiser of the Kapp Putsch” and “the leader of the whole Revolution.”17 Robin believes that Trebitsch played a critical role in his brief alliance with the German militarists by convincing them that the Reich’s “road to glory” lay in the East, an idea that coincidentally or deliberately meshed with the concept of Lebensraum proclaimed by another early influence on the Nazis, “Geopolitician” Karl Haushofer.18 Robin sees Trebitsch, like Haushofer, as a source of “inspiration” for Hitler and the Nazis and, as such, another representative of the “72 Greens” or “Unknown Superiors.”19 The latter, he claims, were linked to the shadowy Green Dragon Society and the legendary kingdom of Agharthi.

The Hitler-Trebitsch web is spun more elaborately by Hennecke Kardel who insists that in the early 20s Trebitsch Lincoln was identical with Moses Pinkeles, a mysterious Jew who allegedly helped fund the early Nazi movement.20 Just who or what Pinkeles actually was remains an intriguing question, but it seems clear that he was not Trebitsch who was otherwise occupied adventuring and spying in China.

Preparata has another take on Trebitsch’s role in the Kapp business. He believes that the British used Trebitsch as “an agent steeped in counter-insurgency tactics and disinformation to thwart, expose and burn all the monarchist conspiracies against the Weimar Republic.”21 Preparata cites a British report which provocatively suggests that Trebitsch came to Germany at the instigation or with the encouragement of then Secretary for War Winston Churchill.22 Another reference to Trebitsch-Churchill collusion appears in a March 1921 US military intelligence report which unambiguously declares that I. T. T. Lincoln “was and still is an English agent.”23 Planned or not, Trebitsch soon fell out with his monarchist co-conspirators and absconded with their documents which he sold to the Czech Government.

One “friend” he preserved from the Kapp misadventure was a Prussian officer, Max Bauer. In the aftermath of the Putsch, Bauer surfaced in Moscow as a military adviser to the Red Army. His presence there was related to the secret collusion between the German and Soviet militaries, but there also is reason to suspect that Bauer acted as an agent of Soviet military intelligence in Germany and later in China. Preparata has Bauer and Trebitsch conniving with the Soviets as far back as 1919 and it is more than curious that the duo escaped post-Putsch Berlin with papers supplied by the Soviet Embassy.24

Was Mr. Lincoln also a Red agent? In 1919 British authorities delayed his departure from England until a short-lived Bolshevik regime in Hungary collapsed supposedly because they feared he would return to his homeland and join the Revolution. The aforementioned US intelligence report claims that when the rightist Kapp plot began to lose momentum, Trebitsch shifted gears and began “working to bring about Bolshevism in Germany.” Then again, by helping to undermine both the socialist Weimar regime and its right-wing opponents, Trebitsch may have been serving Moscow’s interests all along. More accusations of Bolshevik intrigue show up in reports reaching the US Bureau of Investigation. In April 1921, word came that Trebitsch was “actively engaged in the ‘Red Movement’” and “working in the interest of the Soviet Government in Austria and Hungary.”25 US officials were concerned by reports that he was coming to the States.

Trebitsch-Lincoln the Occultist

In October, under the name of Patrick Keelan, he did just that, but he was soon on to China. There, he became adviser and financial agent to a succession of warlords and likely peddled influence and information for anyone who would pay him. McCormick contends that Trebitsch worked for German interests in China which gains credibility from one of the “acquaintances” he made on the voyage to New York. This was Albert T. Otto, a German-American businessman who apparently was so impressed by Keelan/Trebitsch that he handed him some $50,000.26 Otto, however, was himself a man with an interesting history. Prior to 1917 he had been a representative of the Krupp armaments firm in the US and subsequently came under investigation as a German agent.27 He may have played the same part in 1921 by serving as a cut-out for Berlin’s financing of Trebitsch.

In the East, Trebitsch found someone else interested in his services: the Japanese. “Lincoln had long been watched and even courted by some Japanese secret agents,” says McCormick, among them Col. Kenji Doihara, the so-called “Lawrence of Manchuria” and a key figure in the secretive Black Dragon Society which served Imperial Japan’s espionage and subversive interests.28 McCormick believes that Trebitsch became an “active co-conspirator” with the Black Dragons, and that may not have been all.29

To get a handle on this and other connections, we need to look at Trebitsch’s known and alleged links to the occult. The first reference is about 1898, soon after his nominal conversion to Christianity. Briefly returning to Hungary, he “evidenced an interest in esoteric religion by becoming editor of a spiritualist paper.”30 A few years later, as an Anglican curate in Appledore, Kent, Trebitsch reportedly encountered Harold Beckett, an ex-Indian Army officer who became the young clergyman’s Western “initiator.”31 Beckett allegedly had contact with Continental occults such as Maitre Philippe and his pupil, Gerard “Papus” Encausse. Among the secrets Beckett supposedly revealed was that in each generation there were only seventy-two “true men.”32 Whether Trebitsch believed that he was one of these elect, or whether they were the same as the “72 Unknown Superiors” is also unclear. With this kind of guidance, claims Serge Hutin, Trebitsch went on to join numerous secret societies including the Freemasons, the Ordo Templi Orientis and Chinese triads.33

Nothing more is heard of his esoteric leanings until October 1925 when he underwent a “mystical experience” in a hotel room in Tientsin. “I made a great renunciation, I quitted the world,” he declared.34 What he embraced, however, was not Buddhism but Theosophy, that amalgam of Eastern-mysticism-for-Westerners concocted by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

Trebitsch’s revelation awoke in him a burning desire to visit Tibet, the Holy Land of mystics and seekers of various stripes. He repeatedly petitioned British authorities to allow him to reach Tibet via India, only to be turned down each time. Whether he ever accessed Tibet through Chinese territory is unknown, but remains an intriguing possibility.

Trebitsch’s interest in Buddhism and Central Asia actually dated as far back as 1916. While awaiting extradition in New York, he boasted that before the war he had been “an active spy in Central Asia, working as a Buddhist monk.”35 Moreover, he claimed to have come up with a scheme to foment a “grand religious revival in the East,” which would destroy British power in Asia.36 One must wonder whether his 1925 conversion was simply the emergence of a long-prepared plan.

Tibet, of course, was widely perceived as the strategic high ground of the Eurasian landmass and figured in Haushofer’s theory of “geo-politics.” In the mid-20s, British, Soviet, German and Japanese agents all maneuvered for influence and advantage there, and Trebitsch would not have been the only operative to try to do so under the guise of religion.37

Instead of the Land of Eternal Snows, Trebitsch next surfaced in Sri Lanka as a novice in a Buddhist monastery. What brought him out of this splendid seclusion was the imminent execution in England of his eldest son, convicted of murder. Thanks again to the obstruction of British officialdom, he was unable to reach the boy before he hanged but claimed that he had been in psychic communication with his doomed son as well as his spiritual teacher back in Sri Lanka.38

Over the next several years, Trebitsch continuously shuttled between the Far East and Europe, his purposes and finances remaining, as ever, vague. In August 1926, he arrived in New York under the name of Hermann Ruh, a German engineer. His declared destination was Japan, but before proceeding there he spent months in San Francisco lodged in a Japanese hotel and studying with Zen master Nyogen Senzaki. This brings us back to McCormick’s charge that Trebitsch had fallen in with Japanese intelligence, and again raises the spectre of the mysterious Green Dragon. As discussed in a previous article for New Dawn, there is no consensus on what the Green Dragon Society was, or if it even existed, but there is persistent linking of the Society with Japan and Zen Buddhism. It is worth noting that Karl Haushofer is alleged to have been one of only two or three Westerners admitted to the Green Dragon Society.39 Was Ignatius Trebitsch-Lincoln one of the others? Under the name of the Lama Dordji Den, Trebitsch is even invoked in Teddy Legrand’s (Pierre Mariel) 1933 novel, Les Sept Tetes du Dragon Vert (“The Seven Heads of the Green Dragon”) which purports to reveal the Dragon as a sinister international conspiracy bent on world domination.40

Trebitsch’s whereabouts c. 1928-30 is especially hazy. He is identified in places as far flung as Shanghai, Tibet, Afghanistan, and perhaps most intriguing of all, Nice, France. According to Robin, Trebitsch, again as Dordji Den, lived there in the Villa Bleue.41 Overseen by a wealthy Swedish countess, the Villa was said to be the meeting place of occultists and “grand adepts” from across Europe. While there, Trebitsch reportedly impressed the denizens with his “magnetic [hypnotic?] powers” and received, in turn, access to further secret knowledge.42 While Trebitsch certainly was in France in 1929 and likely in Nice, there is no solid proof of the Villa Bleue’s existence.

Trebitsch is further alleged to have received initiation as Dordji Den at the Sera Monastery outside Lhasa.43 In fact, he supposedly received two initiations in Tibet, the second in 1930. This flies in the face of Wasserstein’s research which finds no demonstrable evidence that Trebitsch ever reached Tibet, and shows quite conclusively that he received the title of bhikkhu, or monk, at the Pao-hua Shan Monastery, near Nanking, in May 1931. It was here that he acquired the new name of Chao Kung, to which he promptly added the prefix of “The Venerable.” So, was Dordji Den just a figment of Guenon’s and others’ imaginations, someone else entirely, or was Trebitsch initiated three times. And initiated into what, exactly?

Trebitsch-Lincoln a Bodhisattva

Trebitsch surely demonstrated more commitment to Buddhism than he did to his previous religious affiliations. Barely a week after his ordination as monk, he received elevation to the rank of bodhisattva. In preparation for this, he endured the painful branding of twelve small stars on his scalp which represented the dozen spokes of the Wheel of Becoming. He also embraced a strict vegetarian diet and ever after only appeared in public in his monk’s robes.

In the summer of 1932, the newly-minted Chao Kung again sailed for Europe. His first stop was Marseilles where he was met by a delegation of Buddhists from Nice. These he apparently knew from his visit four years earlier. He remained in Nice for a few weeks and then headed for his real destination " Berlin.

Germany in the fall of 1932 was living through the death throes of the Weimar Republic. Hitler’s Nazi Party had scored huge gains in recent elections and in a few months he would be named chancellor. Riding high at the same time was the popular psychic Erik Jan Hanussen, a favourite of the Nazis until his predictions came a bit too close to home. Hanussen (like Trebitsch, of Jewish origin) was at least aware of Chao Kung’s presence in Berlin and publicly defended his reputation in the psychic’s newsletter.44 Also said to be haunting Berlin at this time was the mysterious “Man (or Lama) with the Green Gloves,” an Asiatic mystic variously linked to Tibetan adepts, the Green Dragon or even said to be Trebitsch himself.45

The new Nazi regime refused to renew Trebitsch’s visa, and he was forced to return to Shanghai in early 1933. However, his European trip was not without some success; he brought back to China a dozen or so acolytes, including several from the Nice group. Now in command of his own tiny sect, he proclaimed himself abbot. His band of followers was formally initiated in the autumn of that year.

Curiously, among the attendees at the initiation was the Soviet ambassador to China, Dmitrii Bogomolov. While Wasserstein dismisses this and other details as “probably coincidental,” Trebitsch’s name continued to be linked with Soviet officials or agents throughout the 30s.46 For instance, in 1936 Trebitsch was reported to make regular visits to the Chinese offices of Wostvag, a German trading firm that was a known front for the Comintern and Soviet military intelligence.

His name also continued to pop up in relation to Japanese agents and interests. McCormick claims that Trebitsch played an obscure part in drawing the ex-Manchu Emperor Pu-Yi into the Japanese camp and installing him as the puppet-ruler of Manchuria.47 Wasserstein acknowledges allegations that Trebitsch was a friend and confidant of Pu-Yi but again notes that there is no documentary evidence to back them up.

In 1934 the Venerable Chao Kung formed the League of Truth which aimed to promote Trebitsch’s personal blend of Buddhism. Its insignia was a reverse swastika over two hemispheres. Some argue that he conjured up the sect as a new tool in his war with the British Empire and, perhaps, to better serve his employers in Tokyo.48 Oddly, it also was in 1934 that he made his last attempt to enter Britain. He got as far as Liverpool before being arrested and put on a boat back towards Shanghai. On the way he was interrogated by Japanese police in Kobe. Of course, this also provided an ideal cover for an intelligence debriefing.

He never stopped trying to reach Tibet. Around 1935, he joined forces with a Russian-born adventurer named Gene Roubin (another Soviet connection?) who actually had visited Tibet for one dubious purpose or another. Three years later, alarming but unsubstantiated reports reached British officials in China that the determined Trebitsch was on his way to Lhasa claiming to be the simultaneous reincarnations of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas!49

In the late 30s, Chao Kung established a more or less permanent home in Shanghai. Soon after the outbreak of World War II, he grandiosely issued a call for world peace. He demanded the immediate resignation of the British French, German and Soviet governments (but not Japan’s) and warned that “otherwise, the Tibetan Buddhist Supreme Masters… will unchain forces and powers whose very existence are unknown to you and against whose operations you are consequently helpless.”50 Was he speaking on behalf of the “72” or the masters of Agharthi, or was he just blowing his own horn? In any case, the warring leaders paid him no heed.

In wartime Shanghai, Trebitsch collaborated with Nazi and Japanese officials. In 1942 he was reported to be part of a “group of fifth columnists who broadcast propaganda talks from Japanese secret radio stations in Tibet.”51 The chief of the German XRGS radio station in Shanghai definitely did solicit him to go to Tibet and set up propaganda broadcasts aimed at India. Trebitsch is also known to have collaborated with the Abwehr’s station in Shanghai, Buero Siefkin, which in 1941 informed Berlin that Chao Kung had long been a member of the “Grand Council of Yellow Cap Lamas” who exercised great influence in Tibet and India.52 He even won the confidence of the Gestapo’s local representative, Joseph “The Butcher of Warsaw” Meisinger who concocted a half-baked scheme to send Trebitsch to Berlin.

But so far as can be determined, Trebitsch never left Shanghai. He died there in the Japanese-run General Hospital on 6 October 1943. Reportedly, he feared being poisoned. Rumours spread that he had committed suicide or had been murdered by his erstwhile Nazi friends. Naturally enough, tales also surfaced that he still lived. McCormick notes one that appeared in the Times of Ceylon after the war stating that the former member of parliament had been sighted in Darjeeling, India, living peacefully on the doorstep of Tibet.

Whether or not Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch Lincoln was more than a venal megalomaniac remains a debatable proposition and probably will never be definitively settled. Myths and speculation clearly outnumber facts where he is concerned, but it also seems likely that the known facts alone do not tell the whole story. The possibility that he may have been among the most secret of British secret agents is tantalising as is his apparent connection to Soviet intelligence. So too are the hints that he was in contact with or at least aware of higher, secretive powers at work in the world. Whether these were the lords of Guenon’s “counter-initiation” we will never know for sure and, perhaps, neither did Trebitsch.

Footnotes:

1. Jean Robin, Hitler: l’elu du dragon (Paris: Guy Tredaniel, 2009), 140
2. Ibid., 77, and Serge Hutin, Governantes Invisiveis e Sociedades Secretas (Sao Paulo: Hemus, 2004), 46.
3. Guido Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2005), 111.
4. Ibid., 102.
5. Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 122.
6. Richard Deacon, A History of the British Secret Service (New York: Taplinger, 1969), 197.
7. Wasserstein, 31.
8. Deacon, BSS, 198.
9. Ibid., 198-199.
10. Ibid., BSS, 199.
11. George Tallas and Anthony Stephen, Peddler of Wars: Sir Basil Zaharoff Story (Bloomington, IN: Author-House, 2007), 83.
12. Donald McCormick, Peddler of Death: The Life and Times of Sir Basil Zaharoff (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965), 10.
13. Rene Guenon to Rene Schneider, 13 Sept. 1936.
14. Deacon, BSS, 199.
15. Robert Boucard, Paris Soir, (24 Oct. 1937).
16. “Afghan Throne,” The Argus [Melbourne)] (24 Jan. 1929), 7.
17. Investigative Case Files of the Bureau of Investigation (BI), #202600-1356, “Trebitsch Lincoln and the Kapp Putsch,” AmMission, Budapest, c. 1920.
18. Robin, 94.
19. Ibid., 90, 140.
20. Hennecke Kardel, Adolf Hitler"Founder of Israel (San Diego: Modjeskis Society, 1996), 53-54.
21. Preparata, 90.
22. Ibid., 108.
23. BI, #202600-1356-2, 5 March 1921, Col. Smith, MID to Baley, BI.
24. Preparata, 106, and BI, #202600-1356, “Trebitsch Lincoln and the Kapp Putsch.”
25. BI, #202600-1356, Baley to B. Morton, 22 April 1921.
26. Wasserstein, 231.
27. BI, #200975, Senes Detective Bureau to BI, 20 May 1918.
28. Richard Deacon, Kempei Tai: A History of the Japanese Secret Service (New York: Beaufort Books, 1983),134-135.
29. Ibid., 134
30. Wasserstein, 35.
31. Hutin, 28.
32. Robin, 103.
33. Hutin, 46.
34. Wasserstein, 256.
35. David Lampe and Laszlo Szenasi, The Self-Made Villain: A Biography of I. T. Trebitsch-Lincoln (London: Cassell, 1961), 79.
36. Ibid.
37. See, Richard Spence, “Red Star over Shambhala: Soviet, British and American Intelligence & the Search for Lost Civilization in Central Asia,” New Dawn, #109 (July-Aug. 2008), 53-58.
38. Bernard Grant, To the Four Corners. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1933, 181.
39. Wulf Schwartzwaller, The Unknown Hitler (New York: Berkley Books, 1990), 100.
40. Richard Spence, “Behold the Green Dragon: The Myth and Reality of an Asian Secret Society,” New Dawn, #112 (Jan.-Feb. 2009), 71.
41. Robin, 95-96.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Mel Gordon, Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001), 224.-225
45. Hutin, 47, and “El Lama de los Guantes Verdes,” www.bolinfodecarlos.com.ar/020906_lama_guantes.htm.
46. Wasserstein, 301.
47. Deacon, BSS, 151.
48. “Trebitsch Lincoln, el Espia Ingles Que Se Convirtio en Enemigo de la Gran Bretana,” Prensa (23 Feb. 1936).
49. Wasserstein, 306-307.
50. Ibid., 309.
51. Lampe, 204.
52. Wasserstein, 311.

Dr. Richard Spence is a professor of History at the University of Idaho. Among other works, he is the author of Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Feral House, 2002). His latest book is Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, published by Feral House.

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