Chou En-Lai's Phone Call

A daughter of Lin Piao from his first marriage. Lin Do Do, told Chou En-lai that the family was leaving on a night flight for an unknown destination. Chou En-lai still not linking Lin with a plot, telephoned to Peitaho to ask whether this was so. According to an account I heard from a high cadre, his Intention was simply to advise that Lin should not take off on any night inspection trips because of the imperfections of facilities for night take offs and landings.

Lin Piao was at a concert but his wife Yeh Chun took the call and assured Premier Chou that he was entirely mistaken. She said they had no intentions of a night flight or any other flights. Chou En-lal't suspicion were aroused and he immediately issued an order that all planes ware to be grounded unlets authorisation was produced and signed by three people. Including Lin Piao and himself.

Another incident in that drama-filled night was the appearance of an officer at Chairman Mao's Peking head-quarters, urgently demanding an audience with Mao to deliver a "safe-hand" message of the utmost urgency. Enough suspicions went aroused by that time to arrest and search the officer and it was found that the "safe-hand" message was an order to assassinate Mao on the spot, which the officer speedily admitted.

Meanwhile, Yeh Chun had rushed panic-stricken to the concert hall to warn her husband that Mao was evidently very much alive; that Chou was privy to their flight plans and they must leave immediately. Within a very short, time a convoy of cars was hurtling through the night towards the Peitaho airport, with Lin Piao's in the lead. A guard in the cat who objected to what was obviously an unseemly flight, was shot by Lin Li-kuo and pushed out of the speeding car. (He was later rescued still alive, with an incredible story to tell.)

At the airport, Lin was confronted with the Chou En-lai order. He bluffed his way around that by saying the order was garbled and that authorisations were valid if signed by one of the three persons named. So he immediately signed his own death warrant.

One plane was fuelled. Whether the tanks were completely filled is not clear but one can assume that in the hurried escape no great margin of fuel was taken on for the first leg of the flight to Ulan Bator, in Outer Mongolia. As the plane started to taxi, a suspicious member Of the fuelling crew parked a huge fuel truck square across the runway, The plane had to make a detour over rough ground and in order to take off on what was left of the runway, had to make as nearly a vertical takeoff as possible with the fuel-consuming boosters fully exploited.

The plane, later ran out of fuel and crashed in Outer Mongolia, killing everyone who was still alive by the time it crashed. It teems there was a gunfight on board, according to leaks from Soviet sources which say bullet wounds were found in some of the chaired bodies.

After the plane took off, a helicopter with three of Lin's top staff officers and several cases of documents also took to the air. It circled several times around Peitaho airport until the pilot was shot for refusing to follow the direction taken by Lin Piao. By the time the helicopter started on course, fighter planes were airbound and forced it to land. It transpired later that the three officers were pledged to destroy the documents and commit suicide in the event of plans being thwarted. Two officers did shoot and kill themselves as militia-men raced towards the helicopter. The third succeeded only in inflicting a headwound. He was captured and the documents, including some revealing diaries of Lin Piao and his wife were seized intact.

I have bean able to check and re-check all the above elements of the "Lin Pioo case" from authoritative sources but there is one tantalising detail which I was not able to clear up. Did Lin Piao take Wu Fa-hsien, the then head of the Air Force, the head of the Navy and other officers of the general staff with him, as is generally rumoured? One of my Informants assured me that they were to leave on a second plane but were all arrested and the second plane never did take off. This seems plausible as it is hardly likely that Lin Piao would have all his general staff officers at his side during the Peitaho "holiday" and it was so planned that they would join him at the time for the original departure time — probably just about dawn — in case the assassination attempts failed.

This detail end the question of whether the Soviet Union was informed and ready to receive the fleeing plotters will only become clear when the official report is available.

If this account seems to reflect only a personal obsession of Lin Piao to seize power, Chinese party members and the public are encouraged to see it as part of the eternal "struggle between two lines," a sort of twin Liu Shao-chi's plot to divert the Chinese revolution into a restoration of bourgeois capitalism. However, the drive for personal power emerges as a much clearer additional motive in the case of Lin Piao than in that of Liu Shao-chi.

In any case it is one more extraoidinary episode in the drama of the Chinese revolution.