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Solving a Chinese Puzzle
Lin Biao's final days and death, after two decades of intrigue
By Peter Hannam and Susan V. Lawrence
Posted 1/23/94
In September 1971, a mysterious series of events rocked China's enigmatic leadership. The outside world knew only that Chairman Mao Zedong's "closest comrade in arms" and anointed successor, Lin Biao, leader of the 2.9 million-strong Chinese military, had suddenly disappeared from public view. After months of international speculation about his fate, China announced that Lin had hatched an abortive plot to kill Mao, tried to flee to the Soviet Union and died when his plane crashed in Mongolia.
The Chinese have never offered any hard evidence that Lin was on the plane that crashed, and China watchers have never been sure what really happened to him. One Chinese account, published under a pseudonym in the West in 1983, claimed Mao had had Lin and his wife, Ye Qun, killed in Beijing and that their son, Lin Liguo, had tried to escape by air. Others think Mao ordered the Lins' plane shot down over Mongolia.
Revelations. Now, a U.S. News investigation in China, Mongolia, Russia, the United States and Taiwan has solved one of Communist China's greatest mysteries. The six-month probe's key findings:
Lin's dissatisfaction with Mao prompted him to make at least two attempts to reach out to the Chinese Communist Party's archenemies, Taiwan's Kuomintang (box, Page 53).
Lin, his wife and son were all killed when their plane crashed in Mongolia.
The Lin family was not en route to asylum in the Soviet Union at the time of the crash. Their plane was flying back toward China.
Lin's wife and son may have forced Lin to flee against his will.
Communist Party leaders in Beijing knew at least two hours in advance that the Lin family planned to flee but chose not to act.
A member of the Communists' Red Army since its creation in 1927, a veteran of Mao's Long March and a corps commander at age 23, Lin began his climb to power in the late 1950s, after a falling-out between Mao and then Defense Minister Peng Dehuai. In the following decade, Mao's disastrous Cultural Revolution shattered the Chinese Communist Party's leadership and catapulted the People's Liberation Army and its leader, Lin, to the pinnacle of political power.
But Lin and his second wife, Ye Qun, a former assistant in the Central Research academy whose political ambition rivaled that of Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, soon found that although China's Constitution named Lin as Mao's successor, it did not give him immunity from Mao's jealousy and suspicion. On July 1, 1971, two years after the Ninth Party Congress anointed Lin, the People's Daily warned that, "the gun must never be allowed to command the party." Lin's mysterious death two months later eliminated Mao's last serious rival.
The story of Lin Biao's final days begins in the remote stretches of Mongolia. At about 2:30 on the morning of Sept. 13, 1971, Dugarjavyn Dunjidmaa was guarding the explosives dump at a fluorite mine near the east Mongolian town of Bekh when the whine of turbines made her look into the night sky. Moments later, recalls Dunjidmaa, who now lives in a felt-covered yurt in Bekh, "I saw the plane with flames coming from its tail as it dropped. From my post, it was possible to follow the plane all the way down to its crash site [9 miles away]." So ended the flight of the British-built Trident 1E, with the Chinese Aviation number 256 painted on its wings.
Nine corpses. Police officer Tuvany Jurmed was among the first to arrive at the crash site and survey the debris, strewn over the steppe. "I saw three big fires, so the question was which to fight first," recalls Jurmed, whom U.S. News traced to his yurt in western Mongolia. "I got out of my car and took two or three steps and almost fell over something. When I looked down, I saw it was a man on his back."
Dawn revealed a gruesome sight. The charred bodies of eight men and one woman lay strung out in a line. Fire had left most of them naked save for pistol holsters and belts. "It was just impossible to recognize anyone who had been on the flight," remembers Dugerserengiyn Erdembileg, then Mongolia's deputy foreign minister, who arrived later that day from the capital, Ulan Bator, about 200 miles away, to inspect the corpses.
One personal document survived the flames--an identity card belonging to Lin's son, Lin Liguo, which was later used to confirm his presence on the flight. There were no clues to the identities of the remaining eight bodies, though the plane's markings, Mao buttons, a log book and other documents indicated the plane and its passengers were Chinese.
Gendensambuugiyn Zuunai, now a member of Mongolia's democratic parliament, helped write the first medical report on the crash. "As a medical expert on the site, I confirmed that there was no one over 50," he says. Zuunai was equally certain that the sole female corpse was too young to be that of Lin's 50-year-old wife, Ye Qun.
But Zhang Ning, who in 1971 was engaged to marry Lin Biao's son Lin Liguo, insists that the Lin family was indeed on the doomed plane. Zhang, who now lives in New Jersey, and a second witness, who requested anonymity, were with the Lin family in their compound in the seaside resort of Beidaihe in the days and hours before the flight. These eyewitnesses told U.S. News that the family had known for more than a year that Lin might be purged. By early September, they believed the purge was imminent.
But to the frustration of his wife and son, the elder Lin seemed prepared to accept his fate passively. "Lin Biao didn't read books, didn't read newspapers," Zhang recalls. "Usually, he just sat there, blankly." When he did stir, Lin, who suffered from medical complaints ranging from wartime wounds to chronic headaches and diarrhea, spent his time consulting medical texts and preparing Chinese medicinal remedies for himself, Zhang says.
Life in the compound remained calm until hours before the flight. Ye spent a quiet evening on September 11 receiving her regular tutorial in European and Chinese history from an Air Force instructor and reading a biography of then President Richard Nixon. The return from Beijing of her son Lin Liguo at 9 p.m. on September 12 set events in motion. The younger Lin apparently brought news that Mao was planning to strip Ye of her Politburo seat.
While other residents of the compound watched a movie, Ye and her son conferred. Then, shortly before 10 p.m., Ye announced that the family would leave by plane for the southern city of Guangzhou at 7 the next morning. Lin Biao was already resting in his private quarters in a separate building. He had taken sleeping pills, as was his habit.
Lin Biao's daughter, Lin Doudou, had heard from her brother days earlier that he was considering escape plans. Lin Liguo worried that his father's health was too poor to withstand the interrogations and physical hardships inflicted on purge victims. But Lin Doudou opposed the escape plan. When she heard Ye's announcement, Lin Doudou ran to the guard unit in the compound and asked that soldiers be sent to protect her father.
At 11, Ye spoke to Premier Zhou Enlai by telephone for 20 to 30 minutes. What they said remains a mystery. By midnight, two hours after Lin Doudou had sought help, the soldiers still had not responded. Ye told her family to pack quickly; they would leave immediately. Ye's driver, Mu Zhongwen, later told Zhang Ning that he saw Ye and Lin Liguo bundle the groggy leader into an armor-plated Red Flag limousine for the journey to the Shanhaiguan airport some 25 miles away.
Lin Doudou returned to the guard quarters, pleading with the unit to seal the road outside the compound and close the airport. Still the guards did not act; they said they were receiving their instructions from the top party leadership in Beijing and that the party had ordered Lin Doudou and her fiance, Zhang Qinglin, to board the plane with the others. The couple refused.
A bodyguard fired at the car as it left the compound but missed. Soldiers on the road outside let the car pass. When Lin Biao, his wife and son reached the runway at Shanhaiguan Airport, according to the driver's account, there was no time to drag in mobile stairs, so the Trident crew dropped a rope ladder. "Lin Biao was still weak, so Big Yang [Yang Zhengang, who had driven the Lins to the airport] put Lin over his shoulder and Ye Qun pulled [him] on," Zhang Ning says.
Witnesses in the compound, including Zhang Ning, saw the Trident in the sky. It flew southeast, then returned 20 minutes later, circling the airport several times before flying north. It may have been trying to land again at Shanhaiguan, but the runway lights had been turned off on the orders of the party leadership. Soviet officials and Mongolian witnesses say the plane then flew north over Mongolia, almost to the Soviet-Mongolian border, but abruptly turned around. It was flying south when it crashed.
Moscow rules. The definitive answers to the riddle of Lin Biao's fate, however, lie in Russia. A Soviet KGB team traveled twice to the crash site in 1971. U.S. News located the investigation team's leaders in Moscow.
Gen. Vitali V. Tomilin, 65, then a Soviet military pathologist, and former KGB investigator Gen. Alexander V. Zagvozdin, now 70, say they took a year to complete their work. The results were kept secret. "We told nothing either to the Chinese or to the Mongolians," Tomilin said in his office in a Moscow morgue. "Only four people in the Soviet Union knew: me, Alexander [Zagvozdin], [KGB director Yuri] Andropov and [Communist Party Chief Leonid] Brezhnev."
The two Soviet specialists journeyed to Mongolia in October 1971; when they reached Savargan, they found that the victims had been buried for more than a month. "The bodies were difficult [to test], all burnt and rotten," recalls Tomilin. But the possibility that any of the passengers were dead before the crash was, Tomilin says, "excluded at the very beginning. All the injuries on the bodies were from the crash."
Two corpses caught the investigators' eyes, in part because their gold teeth implied high rank. Mongolian criminologist Turiyn Moyu watched as aides severed the heads of the two bodies. Two guards then boiled the skulls in a big caldron to remove rotting flesh and hair. "I used to tease [the guards]. 'Is the meal ready?' " Moyu chuckles. The other remains were reburied.
The Soviets took the skulls back to Moscow, where forensic tests proved they were Lin's and Ye's. Says Tomilin, "I could have concluded [Lin's identity] just from the form of his ear lobe. Or just by comparing the dental work. Or just by photo-fitting the skull with his photograph. But all three tests were conclusive, plus his height, age and his wartime wounds. It couldn't have been better." Similar tests, Tomilin says, proved the other skull was Ye's.
Because Lin had spent 1938-41 in Moscow for treatment of wounds he had received fighting the Japanese, the Soviets had a voluminous medical record on him. But even superficially, the evidence was clear. A rare photo of a hatless Lin shows a glancing bullet wound to his head. The skull recovered from the grave provided a perfect match. (The skulls, Tomilin says, are still stored in the KGB archives.)
To confirm the identification, however, the Soviet team braved the Mongolian winter by returning in early November to exhume the corpses again. An old wartime X-ray found in Lin's Moscow medical records showed that Lin had suffered from tuberculosis, and Tomilin rummaged through the remains he believed to be Lin's to find a section of lung hardened to a bonelike material. "And we found it there, on the same spot," he says proudly, "on the right lung."
The cause of the crash remains elusive. The Chinese claim the plane ran out of fuel. Zagvozdin emphatically disagrees. He says the Soviets concluded that the plane had enough fuel to fly to the Soviet cities of Irkutsk or Chita. Others argue that the fire on the ground would not have raged so fiercely if the aircraft had been out of fuel. Zagvozdin and the then Mongolian deputy foreign minister, Erdembileg, also insist, however, that the plane was not shot down. Zagvozdin hypothesizes that the pilot may have been flying low to evade radar and crashed when he misjudged his altitude. The witnesses at the fluorite mine in Bekh insist, however, that the plane was on fire before the crash.
China is not eager to revisit the Lin Biao affair. The Foreign Ministry, asked to comment on this story, responded, "China already has a clear, authoritative conclusion about the Lin Biao incident. Other foreign reports of a conjectural nature are groundless." Re-examining Lin's ignominious end would distract China from its top priority, economic growth, and might reveal uncomfortable truths about Mao Zedong. While he is no longer considered infallible, China's Great Helmsman is still largely immune from official criticism.
US News and World Report 01/23/1994
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