Nilus, “the Russian mystic,” is credited with several versions of how he had secured the Protocols, and his stories flatly contradict one another. In 1905 he said that the Protocols were given to him by a prominent Russian conservative whose name he did not mention, and who in turn had received them from an unnamed woman who had stolen them from “one of the most influential leaders of Freemasonry at the close of a secret meeting of the initiated in France.” Then, several years later, Nilus wrote that his friend himself had stolen the Protocols from “the headquarters of the Society of Zion in France.” Several years afterwards, in a new edition of his book, Nilus said that the “Protocols” came from Switzerland and not from France. This time he named his Russian conservative friend, Sukhotin, who had died in the meantime. He added that the Protocols were not Jewish-Masonic but Zionist documents secretly read at the Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897. Then followed a new edition of the Nilus book bearing the date of 1917. A translation of this edition has recently appeared in this country, containing a brand-new explanation as to how the Protocols were rescued and given to the world. This explanation is taken from the German version published in Charlottenburg. The introduction to that edition says that the Protocols, having been read from day to day at the Basle Congress, were sent as read to Frankfort on the Main. The disclosure of them came through the infidelity of the messenger. The 1917 edition is published with a prologue and an epilogue, like a drama, which indeed it is, with all the ingredients of melodrama—a villain, a mysterious woman, a Grand Duke, a conspiracy to destroy the world, and a saint—Nilus, who convicts himself in his own writings of falsification in the giving of these various accounts of how the Protocols came into his possession. Nothing is known of Sergius Nilus. Russian standard reference books and encyclopedias contain no mention of his name. The anonymous American editor of the Nilus book gives the following information about Nilus: