missionary was followed by his return to England and his improbable
election to the House of Commons in 1910 as a naturalized citizen,
although financial difficulties brought a quick end to his political
career. Subsequent business maneuvers involving dubious Galician
and Romanian oil companies likewise came to naught.
With the outbreak of World War I, Trebitsch-Lincoln offered his
services as a double agent to the British naval intelligence bureau
under Reginald Hall but was rebuffed. He then turned to the Ger-
mans, meeting with the consul general in Rotterdam, and was given
a minor assignment to report on shipping activity in British ports.
His fear of arrest, however, caused him to flee to the United States,
where, rejected by the German government as well, he wrote a two-
part newspaper exposé boasting of his exploits as a master spy and
underscoring his humiliating treatment by the British. To quell the
negative propaganda, Hall and his colleagues retaliated by securing
Trebitsch-Lincoln’s extradition. Yet despite his defiant admission of
being a German spy, he was charged only with financial fraud. In
July 1916, a London criminal court found him guilty and imposed a
three-year prison sentence.
Released in 1919 and stripped of his British citizenship, Trebitsch-
Lincoln became involved in various right-wing nationalist intrigues
in Central Europe, beginning in Berlin as a participant in the Kapp
Putsch and concluding with his deportation from Austria in 1921.
The remainder of his life was spent primarily in China. Initially an
arms dealer and political advisor to several warlords in northern
China, he converted to Buddhism in 1925 under the name Chao Kung
and founded a monastery in Shanghai. In early 1941, his freelance
espionage career was briefly revived through a plan—promoted
by Gestapo official Josef Meisinger but overruled by the Foreign
Office—to establish a German radio station in Tibet that would un-
dermine British rule in India. He died in Shanghai on 6 October 1943.
His two autobiographical works—Revelations of an International
Spy (1916) and Der grösste Abenteurer des XX. Jahrhunderts!?
(1931; The Autobiography of an Adventurer)—should be approached
with considerable skepticism.TREFF. Derived from the verb treffen (to meet), a Treff involves a
confidential exchange of information or instructions between an
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