I.T.T. Lincoln, International Spy

From British MP to Buddhist Abbot by Way of the Kapp Putsch

Aug 11, 2008 Alistair McCulloch

Ingatius Timotheus Trebitsch Lincoln, (I.T.T. Lincoln) played many roles including British MP, clergyman, German spy, revolutionary minister and Buddhist abbot.

I.T.T. Lincoln the International Adventurer

In another article the story of I.T.T. Lincoln's early life was told, detailing his birth in 1879 in Peks, Hungary, his conversion from Judaism through Presbyterianism to Anglicanism, his work as a social scientist for the Rowntree family and his election as Liberal MP for Darlington and his eventual downfall as a fraudster before his capture in the United States by Pinkerton's Detective Agency and deportation and imprisonment in London. Now read on:

Lincoln made his way to Germany where he associated with a right-wing private army (the Freikorps) and eventually became Minister for Information in the short-lived government established in 1920 as a result of the ‘Kapp Putsch’. It has been claimed(although not by Lincoln) that he met Adolf Hitler about this time and helped him escape capture by bundling him onto an airplane.

China and Buddhism

Lincoln's next port of call was Italy and from there he went to China where he became a political adviser to a Warlord who was intent on using his European contacts to obtain weapons for use in China's ongoing civil war. Lincoln had become an armaments trader, but whilst in China, he converted to Buddhism. This remained his faith for the rest of his life and he made a number of trips abroad including one to San Francisco where he established the first Buddhist seminary in the western hemisphere.

In 1931, he was ordained as a Buddhist abbot and changed his name to Chao Kung, also adopting the title ‘Venerable’ and based himself in Shanghai where he eventually died in 1943. True to form, there were many stories about his last days including that he had been broadcasting anti-British propaganda from a secret Tibetan radio station and that he had been poisoned by the Nazis.

Lincoln, the Record

Whatever his faults, I.T.T Lincoln was a remarkable man. This short article does not do justice either to his career or to his personality. In some respects he was most unpleasant, his treatment of his family, for example, was not good. He must, however, have had a very strong personality to have done so much in such a short time and to have taken in so many experienced and powerful people. To have become an MP at the age of 29 in an era generally regarded as a gerontocracy and to have done it as a foreigner with a foreign name in that most jingoistic of countries, England, is testament to this. Certainly, he has left a story worth telling and reading.

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I.T.T. Lincoln as Chao Kung, Buddhist Abbot