Mao: The Unknown Story

It seems Mao was only presented with one option if he wanted to strike: interception by fighter planes. China apparently had no usable ground-to-air missiles. Mao vetoed interception. The unspoken reason was that he could not trust the air force, which was honeycombed with Lin men. Instead, Mao had every plane in China grounded, while the land army took over all the airports, blocking the runways to prevent any planes taking off. The only planes allowed into the air were eight closely monitored fighters sent up later to force down a helicopter carrying three friends of Tiger’s. When the three men were brought back to the outskirts of Peking, they agreed to shoot themselves together. Two did. The third, who had said that his last bullet was “reserved for B-52,” meaning Mao, weakened at the last moment, and fired into the air.

Mao was moved to his Suite 118 in the Great Hall, where there was a lift to a nuclear-proof bunker and a tunnel to the Western Hills. His servants were told to be ready for war, and his guards went onto top alert, and started digging trenches around Mao’s residences. The head of Mao’s guards for twenty-seven years said he had never seen Mao look so strained, so exhausted and so furious.

Mao remained sleepless and wiped out until the afternoon of 14 September, when news came that the Lins had crashed in Mongolia. This was an ideal outcome from his point of view, and he swigged some mao-tai, the powerful liquor he did not normally touch, in celebration.

But Mao’s relief that Lin was dead was quickly overshadowed by the news that there had been a plot to assassinate him, which came to light right after he heard that Lin had crashed. This was the first assassination plot against Mao by his top echelon, and it came as a profound shock. Equally alarming was the fact that quite a few people had known about these plans, and not one had informed. For days Mao hardly slept, in spite of downing fistfuls of sleeping pills. He ran a temperature and coughed incessantly. Breathing problems made it impossible for him to lie down, so he sat on a sofa day and night for three weeks, developing bedsores on his bottom. Then a heart condition was discovered. On 8 October, when he met Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, he barely spoke a word. One official present, who had last seen Mao the day before Lin fled, less than a month before, could not believe how washed-out Mao looked. Chou brought the meeting to an early close.

Mao had to struggle to deal with endless details in order to tighten his already incredibly tight security. Everybody near him had to report in detail on their every dealing with the Lins. A deputy chief of the Praetorian Guard, Zhang Yao-ci, owned up to having received some bamboo shoots “and two dead pheasants” from Mrs. Lin one New Year, and to having given her some tangerines. Mao’s warning to him tells a lot about the bleak world surrounding the Boss:

Don’t cultivate connections;

Don’t visit people;

Don’t give dinners or gifts;

Don’t invite people to operas [i.e. Mme Mao’s model shows] or films;

Don’t have photographs taken with people.

An altogether more monumental task was sorting out the armed forces, which were crammed with Lin men, especially at the top. Mao had no way of knowing who was involved in the assassination plot, or where anyone’s allegiance lay. One small but alarming incident came days later when senior air force officers were gathered to be briefed about the Lins. One of the men raced to the top of the building, shouted anti-Mao slogans and jumped to his death.

The only marshal Mao could trust to take over running the army was Yeh Jian-ying. He had been a faithful follower in the past, but had spoken his mind against the Cultural Revolution, and as a result had been cast into semi-disgrace, for a while living under virtual house arrest. At the time Mao brought him back to high office, several of his children and other close relatives were still languishing in prison.

But Mao had nobody else. He was also forced to reinstate purged Party officials, because they were the only alternative to the people installed by Lin’s network. These officials were mostly in camps. Now many were rehabilitated and re-employed. Mao loathed having to let this happen, and tried to limit the scale of the rehabilitations. He knew that these officials felt extremely bitter towards him after the appalling ordeals they had been put through. One former deputy chief of the Praetorian Guard spoke for many people when he told us how he felt then: “What Chairman Mao, what Party? I stopped caring about any of them …”