The World

After Mao had declared the end of his Cultural Revolution, he noticed that Lin was pursuing his own ambitions, exerting influence even over his personal bodyguards and criticizing Madame Mao. Lin was also alarmed by Mao’s warmongering: in March 1969, Chinese and Soviet troops clashed on the Ussuri River, encouraged by Mao, who toyed with launching a full-scale war. The Helmsman tested Lin by demanding a self-criticism. Marshal Lin refused. Lin’s secret views of Mao were reflected in the plans of his beloved son Tiger, playboy deputy chief of the air force command who came to loathe the ‘paranoid sadist … the biggest feudal tyrant in Chinese history’ whom he codenamed B-52 after the American bombers.

Tiger planned the assassination of B-52, just as the Chairman briefed allies that Lin ‘can’t wait to seize power’. The Lins decided to divebomb Mao’s train, but B-52 kept changing his plans. Now Tiger’s latest plan clashed with the news that Mao had turned on the marshal. They planned their escape, but Tiger hoped to kill Mao first. Foolishly he confided in his sister Dodo, a fanatical Maoist, who snitched to Mao’s bodyguards. When Mao was informed, he was so alarmed he had to be sedated. As Lin Biao, his wife and the pistol-brandishing Tiger raced for the airport, they were chased by Mao’s guards but just managed to board their half-fuelled plane and take off.

Two hours later, Mao learned that a plane had crashed in Mongolia, and that his paladin was dead. Frantic and feverish, quaffing mao-tai and sleeping pills, he was suddenly old and his doctors discovered a heart condition. He had long believed in ‘one united front’ against Moscow, but now the old manipulator planned a final world-changing reversal. ‘We must win over one of the two hegemons,’ he said; ‘never fight with two fists.’ That dovetailed with Kissinger’s plan.

It started with ping-pong. Mao directed the moves through his nephew Mao Yuanxin, son of his brother Zemin executed in 1943. He had long found his wife Jiang Qing unbearable. Once when she talked her way into his compound he threatened to arrest her unless she got out. So it was his young nurses-cum-lovers who interpreted his orders. The Helmsman ‘came to trust women far more than men’, his doctor, Li, recalled. Bingeing on sleeping pills, he said: ‘Words after sleeping pills don’t count.’ Now the order was so surprising that his favourite nurse, whom he called Little Wu, had to double-check.

‘You’ve taken sleeping pills,’ said Little Wu. ‘Do the words count?’

‘Yes! Do it quickly!’ ordered Mao. ‘Or there won’t be time.’ Zhou was to coordinate the plan, suddenly inviting the American ping-pong team to play in Beijing. ‘You’ve opened a new chapter,’ Zhou told the bemused paddlers, ‘in Chinese–American relations.’ Via Pakistan, Mao invited Kissinger to Beijing. ‘This,’ said Kissinger to Nixon, ‘is the most important communication to an American president since the Second World War.’ In July 1971, as India and Pakistan clashed, Kissinger flew in.

CALL ME SIR – DUMB DOLL DOMINATES INDIA

Nixon called Indira Gandhi ‘the Bitch’ and sometimes ‘the Witch’. ‘The Indians are no goddamn good,’ he told Kissinger; he preferred the Pakistanis, who were ‘straightforward’ if ‘sometimes extremely stupid’. Nixon was not the first to underestimate Indira, although he did realize how ruthless she could be. When Shastri died of a heart attack in January 1966, the Congress powerbrokers chose Nehru’s attractive daughter, now forty-eight, as their puppet prime minister: a socialist politician nicknamed her Dumb Doll. But the Doll outplayed them all and then won an election.

Neglected during her lonely childhood when her father was often in prison or on campaign, she was born to rule, combining a longing for love with the entitlement of power. She had sat with her grandfather Motilal, with Gandhi and then with Nehru hosting world leaders; she had studied at Oxford and had followed her father’s advice: ‘Be brave and the rest follows.’ When asked what the US president should call her, she replied, ‘He can call me Prime Minister or Mr Prime Minister. You can tell him my ministers call me Sir.’ But Indira’s grandeur, recalled Kissinger, ‘brought out Nixon’s insecurities’. Graceful in her saris with her greying hair, she was masterful but paranoid and suspicious. When the press tried to find out if Indira had a lover, she reflected privately, ‘I don’t behave like a woman; the lack of sex in me partly explains this.’