1971年10月下旬苏联放话林彪座机坠毁或因机上发生枪战

1971年10月下旬，苏联放话9.13事件中飞机坠毁或与机内发生争斗有关

 

按：自1971.10.21到1971.11.1，英国在派驻中国、法国、加拿大的外交官分别从不同消息来源获得来自苏联政府的消息，称1971.9.13在蒙古失事的中国飞机坠毁原因可能起自飞机内部人员的争斗。

根据Kyodo News（日本共同社）2006年9月13日发自蒙古首都ULAN BATOR的报道<Mongolia doubted fuel shortage theory in Lin Biao plane crash>（见本文附件2），蒙古方面在苏联的配合下组成了调查组于1971年10月8日至18日就中方飞机失事的原因进行调查，当年11月20日写出调查报告"The final document concerning the reason for the crash of a Chinese plane in Mongolia"，结论是“导致这架飞机坠毁的直接原因是导航问题”，报告对飞机迫降是因为机上燃油不够的说法表示怀疑，还说“没有证据证明机上人员由于紧急原因作出了降落的决定”，报告说“在坠毁现场发现的8支枪中，有一支子弹已经上了膛”。中国新华网于2006年9月15日以<林彪坠机蒙方报告曝光：怀疑机上发生搏斗>为题报道了共同社的消息，这个标题其实有误，因为共同社的报道中没有说蒙方在调查报告写上怀疑机上发生搏斗，共同社只是引用蒙古消息来源指“当时的调查人员一致认为，一定是机上人员之间发生了搏斗，支持林彪的一方想逃去苏联；另一方则想返回中国。”

根据下面所引英国外交部的档案，早在蒙方调查刚结束而最终报告出台前，苏联就已经开始向外界放风说中国飞机失事与机上人员内斗有关：

（一）1971.10.21英国驻北京外交官说苏联外交官先是拐弯抹角的暗示有迹象表明中国飞机坠毁前机内发生争斗，后又试图撤回这种说法；英国人的印象是苏联驻华使馆认为林彪更可能是生病或者亡故而非失势，权力斗争是发生在军方和文官系统之间；自1969年来首次有外交官获准参观香山。

（二）1971.10.25 英国驻巴黎外交官说最近从法国外交部获得关于中国飞机失事的消息。俄国人告诉法国人说他们的专家仔细检查了飞机残骸，尸检表明飞机乘客都很年轻而且携带有枪支，有的枪有开火过。俄国人认为机上或许有某种争斗以致飞机坠毁。俄国人认为刘少奇不会在这架飞机上，因为乘客没有人超过70岁，而且俄国不喜欢刘少奇，即便刘出现在苏联也会被送回中国。 

    这份电报中苏联人关于256号飞机乘客年龄的说法明显有误，在1994年彼得·汉纳姆（Hannam, Peter）等人关于“林彪之死”的著名报道中提到 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. （见本文附件1： Hannam, Peter, and Lawrence, Susan V. “Solving a Chinese Puzzle: Lin Biao's Final Days and Death, After Two Decades of Intrigue”. U.S. News & World Report. 1/31/94, Vol. 116 Issue 4, p51）也就是说1994年时任蒙古民主议会议员的根登山布金·祖奈1971年在失事现场帮助撰写了第一份医疗报告。他说：“作为一个在场的医疗专家，我确认没有一个人年龄超过50岁。”看来很有可能是祖奈的误判误导了苏联人。

（三） 1971.10.28 英国驻加拿大人员说在苏联总理柯西金来访后，他们从加拿大方面得知柯西金对中国失事飞机非常感兴趣，俄国人说有证据表明中国遇难军官的枪支被使用过，这或许意味着飞机失事前机上发生争斗。

（四） 1971.11.1 英国驻加拿大人员说在苏联总理柯西金访问加拿大后，他们获得了一些信息：苏联官方确信在中方三叉戟飞机失事前，机上发生了暴力争斗。飞机坠毁后现场到处是枪，而且有几只枪的子弹被打光了。现在还不能确认乘客身份。

综上所述，苏联政府根据256号飞机乘客所带枪支被使用过就推断飞机坠毁前机上发生冲突，但这个推断恐怕很难成立。首先林立果在登机前就在北戴河和林彪的卫士长李文普开枪对射过，没有任何材料说林立果把他用过的这把枪在登机前丢掉了，也就是说256号飞机上出现的枪支确实有被击发过，但是上飞机前开的枪；其次，如果飞机上发生枪战，那在机身或者遇难者身上总得有弹痕才是，但共同社2006年的报道中提到另一份苏联和蒙古的联合调查报告中说林彪的身上没有弹痕（见本文附件2）；最后，至于前苏联外交官顾达寿2008年出版的回忆录《我的中国生涯》（俄文版）声称，“九·一三”事件后顾达寿受苏联驻华使馆委派去实地查看现场，“在飞机的舱壁上发现了子弹的弹孔，这说明机舱内曾经发生了搏斗，还使用了武器”，余汝信已发表了专文《林彪座机是被蒙方击落的吗？——对阎明复转述的苏外交官回忆录的质疑》，证明顾达寿根本没有去坠机现场考察，完全是在说谎话。（见王海光：30年来林彪事件之研究（上），《战略与管理》2013年第1/2期合编本）

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C O N F I D E N T I A L

FM PEKIN 1028 0CT21/71

TO OTT EXT GPE

INFO HKONG TOKYO WSHDC LDN PARIS TT MOSCO DE LDN

—-CHINA: INTERNAL DEVELOPMENTS-MORE STRAWS

SOVIET COLLEAGUE TODAY PROVIDED FURTHER DETAIL ON GREAT MONGOLIAN AIR CRASH MYSTERY.AFTER INITIALLY DENYING PLANE WAS THEIRS CHINESE LATER ACCEPTED RESPONSIBILITY, ISSUED APOLOGY, AND REQUESTED RETURN OF NINE BODIES PLUS EFFECTS.MONGOLIANS AGREED ON CONDITION CHINESE PROVIDED NAMES OF THOSE ON BOARD.

CHINESE HAVE THUS FAR REFUSED TO DO SO AND NO/NO PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE. (SOVIET ALSO OBLIQUELY HINTED, AND THEN TRIED TO BACKTRACK, THAT THERE WERE SIGNS STRUGGLE HAD TAKEN PLACE ON BOARD).

2. AS MUCH BY INFERENCE AS ANYTHING ELSE WE WERE LEFT WITH

IMPRESSION THAT ANALYSIS OF SOVIET EMB HERE IS THAT LIN PIAO MORE LIKELY ILL OR DEAD THAN IN DISGRACE (SINCE HE WAS ALWAYS CLOSE TO CHAIRMAN),THAT POWER STRUGGLE IS TAKING PLACE, ENTAILING BASICALLY CLASH BETWEEN MILITARY AND CIVILIANS. CLASH IN SOVIET VIEW IS OVER BOTH INTERNAL POLICY (WHERE MILITARY WISH GREATER SHARE OF FINANCIAL PIE) AND EXTERNAL POLICY (WHERE MILITARY LOGICALLY NEED TO PROVE CHOUS PRAGMATIC POLICY OF DEVELOPING RESLNS WITH ALL COUNTRIES IF THEY ARE TO HAVE SUFFICIENT GROUNDS TO DEMAND LARGER SLICE OF BUDGET).

3. ANOTHER DEVELOPMENT OF SOME INTEREST IS THAT(AS FAR AS WE KNOW)FOR FIRST TIME SINCE 1969 DIPLOS HERE HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO VISIT FRAGRANT HILLS(PART OF WESTERN HILLS).AFTER APPLYING LAST WEEK TO MFA DIPLOS FROM NEPAL,CEYLON,AND AFGHAN MBS WERE INVITED TO BANQUET IN HILLS OCT 19.

210900Z

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BRITISH KMBASSY

PARIS

25 October 1971

J A L Morgan Esq

Far East Department

Foreign & Commonwealth Office

When I called the other day on Jurgensen (the deputy Director of Political Affairs in the Quai) he told me that the French had heard something quite interesting from the Russians about the Chinese aeroplane that crashed in mysterious circumstances recently in Mongolia. The Russians said that their experts had been over the wreckage with a toothcomb. The autopsies on the occupants of the aircraft had shown that they were all young. They had also been armed, and some of the guns had been fired. It thus seemed to the Russians that there had been some kind of battle inside the aircraft which might have caused it to crash. They believed that, contrary to the stories that have been going around, Liu Shao-Chi had not been on the aircraft, both because none of the bodies could have been his (he is in his '70s) and also because they believed that he would not be likely to try to seek refuge in Russia. He was not their man, whatever the Chinese said, and had he turned up in the Soviet Union they would have sent him back.

C T E Ewart-Bigges

c c Chanceries: Peking

Moscow

Washington

CONFIDENTIAL

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S E C R E T

BRITISH HIGH COMMISSION

8O ELGIN STREET

OTTAWA 4

28 October 1971

Sir Stanley Tomlinson KCMG

Foreign & Commonwealth Office

London S W 1

My dear Tommy

You may be interested to know that when I discussed the Kosygin visit with Ed Ritchie yesterday, he told me that Kosygin and his advisers were intensely interested in the Chinese aircraft which crashed in Mongolia. Kosygin had nothing new to add on this subject except that, according to Russian information, a fight seemed to have taken place in the aircraft before it crashed. There was evidence that the side-arms of some of the dead Chinese officers had been used.

P T Hayman

S E C R E T

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OFFICE OF THE

HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR CANADA,          HAUT COMMISSARIAT DU CANADA,

CANADA HOUSE,                            MAISON DU CANADA,

LONDON,S.W.1.                                LONDRES, S O.1.

                        November 1, 1971

S E C R E T

Dear Hugh,

The following information concerning the crash of the Chinese aircraft in Mongolia was made known to us in the course of the visit of Premier Kosygin and his party to Ottawa recently. You and your colleagues may find it of interest.

The USSR authorities were satisfied that there had been a violent struggle on board the Trident aircraft prior to the crash. The wreckage revealed that the aircraft had been "full of" weapons, and that a large number of small arms found in the wreckage had been fired until they had run out of ammunition. It apparently was not possible to make identification of any of the passengers.

Yours sincerely,

Donald W. Campbell,

First Secretary.

Mr. Hugh Davies,

Far Eastern Department,

Foreign and Commonwealth Office,

King Charles Street,

London, S.W. 1.

出处：FCO_21_805

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附件1：

Lin Biao's final days and death, after two decades of intrigue

U.S. News & World Report. 1/31/94, Vol. 116 Issue 4, p51

By Peter Hannam and Susan V. Lawrence

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.

CONSORTING WITH THE ARCHENEMY? 

By Peter Hannam

When Lin Biao vanished, American officials were relieved. They believed Lin to be pro-Soviet and anti-American, a strongman who had fostered a cult of personality around himself in the Chinese military. But new evidence suggests that America may have misread Lin.

Sources have told U.S. News that Lin twice put out feelers to the Communists' archenemies, the Kuomintang, who in defeat had fled the mainland for Taiwan in 1949. Once in 1945 and once in 1966, Lin reportedly told the KMT that he distrusted Mao and implied he was prepared to ally himself with Mao's nemesis, KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek.

Prof. Li Zi-yi, a former journalist who specializes in military affairs at Taipei's Tamkang University, says Lin met secretly with the KMT's deputy intelligence chief, Cheng Jieh-min, in China's wartime capital, Chongqing, in late 1945. Relying on the word of a close friend, Tao Shi-shen, a confidant of Chiang who read Cheng's report on the meeting, Li says Lin complained that Mao's ``left hand doesn't trust his right hand.'' Tao died in 1989, but according to his friend Li, Lin further pledged, ``I'm willing to stay with the Communist Party and carry out some function [for you] in the future.''

Old classmates. Lin's second contact with the KMT was a letter he allegedly wrote in November 1966. It bore nicknames that Lin and a close ally and fellow top Politburo member, Tao Zhu, had used when they attended China's elite Whampoa Military Academy in 1925-26, and it was addressed to one of their classmates, Chou You, a former KMT commander who was then living in Hong Kong. Lt. Gen. Chang Shih-chi, then chief of the Special Intelligence Bureau of Taiwan's Defense Ministry, told U.S. News that Chou forwarded the letter to him and that he delivered it to Chiang Kai-shek's son Chiang Ching-kuo, who was then Taiwan's defense minister.

In the letter, which has been published but little noticed in Taiwan, Lin and Tao describe themselves as being in ``a perilous and uncertain position.'' They say they have encountered a ``suspicious and jealous master'' (presumably Mao), who is ``tricky'' and ``unpredictable.'' Lin and Tao recall that the ``headmaster'' (presumably Chiang Kai-shek, who ran the Whampoa Military Academy when Lin, Tao and Chou were students there) always took good care of his students. ``If there is an opportunity to free ourselves, or if we will not be held accountable for our past mistakes,'' the letter says, then ``from the bottom of our hearts we beg that our gratitude be conveyed [to him].''

Lin and Tao ``felt their position in the Communist government was not very hopeful,'' claims Chang, 74, interviewed in his Los Angeles home. ``They tried to take sides with Taiwan.''

Although they do not doubt that Lin may have been dissatisfied with Mao, China scholars are skeptical that Lin and Tao would have risked a written communication -- especially one that bluntly criticized Mao and begged Chiang for amnesty -- and then entrusted its delivery to as many as four middlemen.

Col. Kao Long, then the Hong Kong station chief for Taiwan's Special Intelligence Bureau, says he was assigned to check the letter's authenticity. ``By that stage, we had already judged the letter was [Lin's] through our own well-connected channels,'' Kao says. He declines to say what those channels were.

Chang says he ordered a reply drafted, and Kao helped arrange its delivery to Lin. Chang believes his message reached Lin. But the contacts then broke down. After writing to Chou in Hong Kong confirming that Lin's and Tao's stance had not changed, Xiao Zhengyi, the courier who had delivered Lin's letter to Hong Kong, was never heard from again.

附件2：

Mongolia doubted fuel shortage theory in Lin Biao plane crash
Wednesday 2006 September 13, 9:40 PM
 (Kyodo) _ An investigation by Mongolia into the 1971 plane crash that killed Lin Biao, China's No. 2 leader at the time, concluded that the cause was unlikely to have been a lack of fuel as China says, records obtained by Kyodo News show.
Meanwhile, a Mongolian source knowledgeable about the investigation told Kyodo that the team of investigators had concluded that a struggle had probably taken place onboard as Lin tried to flee to the Soviet Union after the failure of his attempted coup.

The unreleased 16-page report, titled "The final document concerning the reason for the crash of a Chinese plane in Mongolia," is dated Nov. 20, 1971. It was obtained by Kyodo together with pictures of the plane crash site, which have also never been made public.

The report says the investigation into the plane crash on Sept. 13 that year was carried out about a month later, from Oct. 8 to 18, with the cooperation of Soviet experts.

It says the investigative team concluded that the direct reason for the crash was a navigation problem, rejecting the possibility that the plane was shot down.

It also cast doubt on the theory that the plane ran out of fuel, saying, "The fact that a fire broke out over a widespread area for a long period of time shows that there was enough fuel to continue the flight."
It adds that there is "no proof to conclude that a decision was made to land because of an urgent reason."

The Mongolian source said that at the time, investigators were united in the view that there must have been a struggle onboard between those who supported Lin's fleeing to the Soviet Union and those who wanted to return to China.

The Mongolian report says that of the eight guns found on the site, one was loaded with a bullet.

Whether there was any violence involving gunshots remains a mystery, as another report on the joint investigation of the Soviet Union and the Mongolian government, also obtained by Kyodo, says there were no bullet wounds on Lin's body.

While the power struggle in China that led to Lin's death has gone largely unexplained, some historians believe that leader Mao Zedong had become uncomfortable with Lin's power and had planned a purge.

According to that theory, Lin realized this and planned a pre-emptive coup, but when his plans failed, he and his family attempted to flee to the Soviet Union.