The Book of the Dead

by John Mitchinson

  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 g
rowing 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.

  To avoid continual public ridicule, Hoskin left England in the early 1960s, settling first in Ireland and then in Calgary, Canada. When he died in 1981, he left much of his fortune to his beloved cats. His Lobsang Rampa series had sold more than 4 million books, and they continue to sell.

  Hoskin insisted to the end that he really was “Lobsang Rampa” inside, and the books have an undeniable energy to them. But they are complete fakes, having as little to do with real Buddhism or life in Tibet as Psalmanazar’s book had to do with Formosa. Like Cagliostro’s elixir of life, they are a beguiling attempt to give people what they want: versions of a strange, mystical East, where ancient sages hold all the universe’s secrets, where the laws of time and space don’t hold, and where the tawdriness of the modern world—of life under the kitchen sink—holds no sway.

  It’s safe to assume that when eighteen-year-old Archibald Belaney (1888–1938) left Hastings in Sussex for the wide-open spaces of Canada, he had no plans to become an impostor. Like so many of the other people in this chapter, his early life was marked by rejection and abandonment. His father was a drunken wastrel, leaving his mother for a new life in the United States when Archie was only thirteen, and dying some years later in a barroom brawl. His mother, Kitty, had already taken herself off to London, leaving Archie to be raised by his two viciously disciplinarian aunts. He grew up a self-absorbed child, playing at Red Indians alone in the nearby woods and keeping a menagerie in his room, with a strong distaste for authority and the petty snobbishness of English suburban life. After attending Hastings grammar school, he managed a short stint in a timber yard before being sacked for detonating a homemade bomb in the works chimney. In exasperation, his aunts allowed him to pursue his dream of moving to Canada to study farming.

  Archie at once fell in love with the wild, unspoiled Canadian outback. He also fell in love with, and married, a Native American woman, Angele Egwuna, an Ojibwa from northern Ontario. His affinity for the land, and for its indigenous peoples, took firm root and, gradually, Belaney began to abandon his English background. He worked as a trapper and guide and soon took to using an Indian name—Washaquonasin, translated into English as Grey Owl, or Walks-in-the-Dark. But dogged by the shadow of his past, in 1912, like his own father before him, he left Angele and their two little daughters, Agnes and Flora, and moved in with Marie Girard, with whom he had a son, Johnny. At the same time, he buffed up his biography. He was now the son of a Scottish father and a half-Apache mother, born in Mexico but since accepted as an honorary Ojibwa.

  On the outbreak of World War I, Belaney joined the Canadian Black Watch—as an Indian. He earned the respect of his comrades for his exceptional marksmanship and knife-throwing skills, and for his uncanny ability to move undetected across no-man’s-land. He became a sniper but was wounded badly in his foot. After it developed gangrene, he was sent back to England to recuperate. There, in 1917, he met and married his old Hastings sweetheart, Ivy Holmes. The marriage lasted for five years till Ivy found out about Angele and divorced him for bigamy. Belaney, by then honorably discharged from the army and with a disability pension, headed back to Canada and the great outdoors. He made no attempt to contact Marie Girard, or his first wife, Angele Egwuna (although he never divorced her).

  By 1925 he was living with Gertrude Bernard, a beautiful Iroquois woman eighteen years his junior, whom he renamed Anahareo. It was Anahareo who seems to have put the idea into Archie’s head that killing animals for money wasn’t a good thing. With her encouragement, he began instead to write for the Canadian press about life in the wilderness. By the early 1930s, he had become a naturalist for the Canadian National Parks service. The couple lived in a cabin on a lake in central Saskatchewan with Rawhide and Jellyroll, their two adopted beavers, whose lodge took up almost half the cabin.

  During this period Grey Owl became famous as the first environmental activist to achieve an international following. A sequence of books about his life with Anahareo followed, and in 1935, at the request of his publisher, Lovat Dickson, the Canadian who ran Macmillan in London, he began a high-profile lecture tour of England. Dressed in full Indian headdress and buckskin, Grey Owl was dubbed the modern Hiawatha. The tour was a huge commercial success, but the workload put a strain on his relationship with Anahareo. In 1936 she moved out with their small daughter, Shirley Dawn, while Grey Owl entered into another bigamous marriage with a medical assistant called Yvonne Perrier. At their wedding in Montreal, he used the name Archie MacNeil, to fit in with his supposed Scottish heritage.

  A second international lecture tour saw him mobbed by crowds wherever he went. He was invited to Buckingham Palace to meet the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, and gave a royal command performance, attended by the young Richard and David Attenborough, both of whom later said that the experience had a significant influence on their careers. (Sir David was captivated by the naturalism, and more than sixty years later, Lord Richard was to make a movie of Grey Owl’s life.) Though now a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic, Grey Owl’s triumph was short-lived. After an intense schedule of more than two hundred lectures, he returned to his cabin in Canada in 1938 suffering from exhau
stion and died of pneumonia shortly afterward.

  Within weeks of his death, newspapers began to unearth Grey Owl’s true identity. It wasn’t an edifying picture. The latter-day Hiawatha was an English bigamist who had dyed his hair and his skin to appear more authentic. He had walked out on at least four women, fathering children by three of them. Several native Canadians had clearly been aware of his true identity—or at least his racial origins—but it seems they kept quiet about it: He was such a fine ambassador for their way of life and the land they wanted to protect. Anahareo, the woman to whom he had been closest, always maintained she had never doubted his story. The initial shock was hard for his friends to take. Lovat Dickson, who at first valiantly tried to defend Grey Owl’s reputation, was forced to concede that he, too, had been fooled: “We had been duped,” he wrote in Wilderness Man, his definitive biography of Belaney. “There was no Arcadia.” Grey Owl’s books stopped selling and the conservationist causes he had championed fell out of favor.