Among his adventures, he posed as a Protestant missionary, Anglican priest, British Member of Parliament for Darlington, German right-wing politician and spy, Nazi collaborator, Buddhist abbot in China, and self-proclaimed Dalai Lama.

After leaving school he enrolled in the Royal Hungarian Academy of Dramatic Art,[1] but was frequently in trouble with the police over acts of petty theft.

With Rowntree's support, he was nominated in 1909 as the Liberal candidate for the Parliamentary constituency of Darlington in County Durham, even though he was still a Hungarian citizen at the time.

In the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, he was involved in a variety of failed commercial endeavours, living for a time in Bucharest, hoping to make money in the oil industry.

Returning to England, he narrowly escaped arrest, leaving for the United States in 1915, where he made contact with the German military attaché, Franz von Papen.

Papen was instructed by Berlin to have nothing to do with him, whereupon Trebitsch sold his story to the New York World Magazine, which published under the banner headline Revelation of I. T. T. Lincoln, Former Member of Parliament Who Became a Spy.

[6] With the fall of Kapp, Trebitsch fled south from Munich to Vienna to Budapest, intriguing all along the way, linking up with a whole variety of fringe political factions, such as a loose alliance of monarchists and reactionaries from all over Europe known as the White International.

His name was also used by other impostors; following the assassination of the Italian MP Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, the police arrested a certain Otto Thierschadl alias Chirzel, who gave as his name Tribisch Lincoln.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, he also made contact with the Nazis, offering to broadcast for them and to raise up all the Buddhists of the East against any remaining British influence in the area.