The Chinese Assassin (18 page)

Trickery was used to force Marshall
L
in Piao to board the Trident aircraft for that fateful journey on the night of
12
September
1971
. Deception of
the
vilest kind was employed, worthy of any of the murderous intrigues perpetrated in the secret precincts of the imperial courts of China in ancient times. They used his daughter To
u
-tou to bait
the
trap and didn’t hesitate to cause her physical
suffering
so as to add realism
to
their plot. It was typical of their character that afterwards in their faked
documents
they told the people of China
and
the world that
it
was she who had reported her father
to
the authorities
and
so ensured the failure of his ‘plot’
to murder Chairman
Mao and seize power.

But it was a
l
m
os
t as
i
f by then Marshall Lin
was anticipating treachery
and
did not seek to
avoid its snare. He seemed in the
end to welcome
it
passively as
though
he desired nothing more than the cold embrace of death. Ever since the Lushan meeting he had remained sunk in
a deep
and unprecedented melancholia
,
listless and apathetic,
he became a
complete recluse
in
his study, hiding more than
ever behind his shaming ailment,
and
building
an impassable battier between himself
and the
outside world.

The inevitable process of clothing, vicious and petty personal feuds
in
high-sounding political and philosophical arguments, so little un
de
rstood
by the outside world, began immediately after we came down from Lushan. On the day after his thunderous attack, Chairman Mao resorted to his classic and well-tried tactic
of
self-ef
fa
cement. He circulated one
of
his imperial-
s
tyle edicts to all who had attended the meeting, professing a humility which he knew would be totally disregarded.

‘Those opinions of mine were given only as personal views,’ he said, in a note reproduced
in the calligraphy of his
own hand— a device which he also
knew
would help imbue
the
words with
a
mystical quality. ‘They were only casual remarks. Don’t draw any hasty conclusions. Let
the Central Co
mm
ittee do it
gradually.’
The
insidious political manoeuvres
and
the indirect public pillorying
in the party press
that this was designed to spark
of
f
unfolded relentlessly under the Chairman’s famous but grossly hypocritical exhortation: ‘Learn from past mistakes
to
avoid
future
ones,
and
cure
the sickness to
save the patient.’
But
Marshall
Li
n,
true
to his vow by
the
window in Lushan, made no effort whatsoever to engage his
enemies.

His son
Li
n Li-kuo and his
wife
Yeh Chun worked
frantically with
his supporters
and
drew up
plan after plan
for him to defend
himself:
But he kept his
mind
resolutely closed to
them.
He scarcely read the
documents
they placed before him. He spoke little, retreated deep into his inner
self and
never for one moment countenanced
any
of the
suggestions. Later,
after his
death, snatches
of
these
disregarded proposals were
falsified and
enlarged on,
then embodied
in wholly fabricated
documents circulated
throughout
China as proof
of
Marshall Li
n
’s ‘guilt’
in planning a coup
d’état
.

I
realised
his will had
finally
broken when he made no attempt to
resist
the vital reorganisation in
January
of the
Peking Military
Region that placed
less
loyal commanders in key
positions
in
the capital
around him. He
seemed unperturbed and carried
out
all
his routine duties
perfunctorily
in the
seclusion
of his study as though he had ceased to live in the
real
world beyond
its walls,

On many
occasions
in the early months I entered his
room
to
find
him
fumbling
on
his
desk-top with his
divining stalks. But
after a while I ceased to ask what the
hexagrams
foretold.
Always
the omens were ill. He had succumbed completely,
and I’m
sure the
emanations
of
despair
from his
mind
and body ensured in turn that no matter how often he consulted the River Map
and
laid out the
stalks
they would only ever produce
forebodings
of calamity.

Only once did
he seem to rouse
himself
from
this
moribund mental
torpor—after
the American Kissinger had come
secretly
to
Peking
from
Pakistan
in mid-summer. It was as though sudden fear, for the very
survival
of
the
China he had fought to
build,
revived him. He was deeply apprehensive that the sudden
and
public offering of China’s hand in friendship to the greatest enemy of
the
Soviet Union would
increase the
danger of a sudden attack by Soviet forces
across our
northern-
borders. His conviction
was profound
and
the fear galvanised him back to
life.

For
two days he
worked frantically and without
pause, compiling a
detailed
draft of his views. The
document
he produced
was
a forcef
ul
and brilliantly
argued exposition of
both our
nuclear
and
conventional s
t
rengths—o
r
rather weaknesses—
compared with the Russians. He rushed copies to the
Chairman and
Premier Chou
E
n-lai a
n
d I
was
ready to rejoice that this outside threat of
danger
had brought the
Marshall Li
n
I loved
back to life from the
brink
of the grave.

But many
years had passed since our leadership had
debated their opinions
openly and
honestly without
fear
of
recrimination.
The poison
from
a once-mighty mind turned sick
had
spread
its
suspicions and
jealousies too
deep in the Chung
Nan Hai. The
memorandum
was seized by the plotters, distorted and added as
fuel to the flames they were already stoking
like
demons to incinerate
Marshall Li
n
. Within two days
he
h
ad sunk back deeper
than ever before
into his terrible
apathy.

E
ven
the
horrifying
reports that were secured by
our own military intelligence agents
in early
September failed
to
arouse
him.
They
discovered
that
the left-wing plotters had
maliciously passed false
‘proof’ to the
American Central Intelligence Agency via Israeli agents in
Moscow that Marshall Li
n
was planning to murder Chairman Mao. The
American spies,
although they
could
not know whether the
information was true
or
false, unscrupulously relayed
the
information
back to Chairman
Mao
as
if
it were true.
Their
aim
was
to win his gratitude and so persuade Chairman Mao to welcome their head of state, Nixon,
with open arms, because lie needed the accolade
of a successful visit to China to increase his prestige
and ensure victory
in the coming presidential election.

This
was
th
e
plotters’
master
stroke! They knew that no
matter
how much evidence was
produce
d
internally
about the
suspected treachery of his opponents,
nothing would
explode with
more
devastating impact
in the
persecution-cra
z
ed
brain of
Chairman
Mao than a
report
from the enemy’s espionage apparatus of an
internal Chinese plot to kill hi
m
.

Marshall Li
n
must have known
that this was his
death warrant. But still he would
do
nothing to resist his fate. He seemed to retreat even further into the shell of his resigned inner despair. His eyes saw less, his ears became more deaf to reason. His wife
and son, now at their wits’ end,
persuaded him at last to move for his
health’s sake to the sea resort of Peitaiho,
200 miles
from Peking on the
Gulf of
Tientsin.
He agreed reluctantly
and
without enthusiasm,
and
at the end of the
first
week in September we all flew there from Peking in one of the four
British-built
Trident jet airliners which had been bought from
Pakistan the
previous year for the personal
use
of the leadership. Because of his family’s fears,
Lin
Li-kuo, from that time onward, wed the influence of
his
Air Force officer’s
rank
to keep the same aircraft
standing
by twenty-four hours a
day
in a state of constant
readiness in
case an emergency should require
it.

His
plan, which he
confided
to me, was to fly south to
Chekiang
where the commander most loyal to his father in the whole of
the
People’s Liberation Army would ensure their
safety
from intrigue. If
necessary
he would pilot the plane
himself: