The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  My assessment is that Lin Biao’s jet did not accidently fall from the sky. The weather was clear, the plane was at its cruising altitude, there was no evidence of a fuel shortage, and there were no distress calls. A more plausible explanation is that Mao had intervened to make certain that Marshal Lin never reached Moscow alive, and that a timed explosive had been planted aboard the plane. This bomb would account for why the plane was allowed to take off, why Chinese fighters did not attempt to intercept it, and why Mao told Chou that “The rain must fall.” Quite possibly, the explosion was planned to occur over Chinese territory, where the cover-up could be managed, but because of the lack of headwinds, the plane made it to Mongolia. In any case, I believe that the plane crashed because of Chinese sabotage.

  The obvious lesson here is that a regime in a closed society can control the shape and timing of the information about a crime. Even though the information in this case concerned a political leader as prominent as Marshal Lin Biao, the regime managed to suppress any mention of it in public for two years. To be sure, this crime occurred more than four decades ago, but the regime in China still retains that same power over information, as is illustrated by the murder of Neil Heywood in Chongqing, China, on November 14, 2011. Heywood, who was a British consultant to Bo Xilai, then a powerful member of the China’s ruling politburo, was found dead in his hotel room. His death was officially attributed to his alcohol consumption, even though a secret police report showed that he had been poisoned by potassium cyanide. His body was cremated before an autopsy could be performed. The natural-death verdict went unchallenged for three months, and it would have remained largely forgotten if not for the defection of Wang Lijun, the local police chief and vice-mayor, to the U.S. Embassy in February 2012. After Wang revealed that Heywood was murdered by Gu Kailai, the wife of Bo Xilai, the Chinese regime decided to reveal the murder. It purged Bo Xilai, and, after extracting a confession from Gu, convicted her of the murder. Yet it still controlled all the evidence, and it may have used the portions of it that it elected to release, as it did in the Lin Biao case, to justify political changes.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE ELIMINATION OF GENERAL ZIA

  The death of President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan and his top deputies in August 1988 altered the face of the country’s politics in Pakistan in a way in which no simple coup d’état could have done. Pakistan is the only country named after an acronym: “P” stands for Punjab, “A” for Afghanistan, and the “K” for Kashmiri. It once reflected the dream of a trans-Asia Islamic state; only the “P” actually became part of Pakistan when it was carved out of British India in 1947 as a haven for Muslims. General Zia was mindful of this dream when he organized a military coup in 1977 and seized power. Zia moved almost immediately to placate the mullahs in his country by pursuing a policy of “Islamization” and reinstating the law of the Koran. In an extraordinary balancing act, he also strove to build an ultra-modern military machine, complete with nuclear arms, and also to use his intelligence service, the ISI, to wage war against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan and the Indian army in Kashmiri. This great game, and his regime, came to an abrupt end on August 17, 1988.

  I went to Pakistan in the winter of 1989 on a Vanity Fair assignment to investigate Zia’s death. Soon after I arrived in Islamabad, I found that the Pakistani officials I had made arrangements to interview were no longer available to me, either on or off the record. One aide to the foreign minister said that the subject of the “tragic accident,” as he termed the plane crash that had killed General Zia, was now off limits. Since the Pakistan government was stonewalling, I turned for assistance to the only other source I could find: the children of the generals killed in the crash. My assumption that they had a motive to discover what was behind the death of their fathers proved correct. A number of these young men, including the sons of General Zia and General Akhtar Abdur Rahman (who for ten years had headed Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI), most of whom were in their mid-twenties, not only proved enormously eager to help but, through the medium of their fathers’ military aides, had access to key officials, including the airport security officers at the control towers who had actually taped the final conversation from Zia’s plane, and the medical officers who had superintended the disposal of the bodies after the crash. With their help, I was able to gradually piece together the story.

  On August 17, General Zia boarded Pak One, an American-built Hercules C-130 transport plane, at the military air base outside of Bahawalpur, Pakistan. He had reluctantly gone to Bahawalpur that morning, on his first trip aboard Pak One since May 29, to witness a demonstration of the new American Abrams tank. The plane took off at 3:46 p.m., precisely on schedule for the trip back to the capital city of Islamabad. Seated next to Zia in the air-conditioned VIP capsule was General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, after Zia, the second most powerful man in Pakistan. Among the other passengers were General Mohamed Afzal, Zia’s chief of the General Staff; eight other Pakistan generals; Zia’s top aides; and two American guests: Ambassador Arnold L. Raphel, and General Herbert M. Wassom, the head of the U.S. military-aid mission to Pakistan.

  Shortly after takeoff, only eighteen miles from the airport, on a bright clear day, the giant aircraft lurched up and down three times in the sky, as if were on an invisible roller coaster, and then plunged straight into the desert and exploded in a fireball. All thirty persons on board, including four crew members, were dead. Within hours, army tanks sealed off public buildings and television stations, signifying a change in power. But the mystery remained: What caused the plane to crash?

  Since it involved an American-built plane, and the CIA had been partners with Zia in the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the United States obtained permission for U.S. forensic experts to carry out the investigation for Pakistan’s board of inquiry. But Pakistan limited the number of U.S. experts to seven Air Force accident investigators and specifically excluded any criminal, counterterrorist, or sabotage experts. The team, headed by Colonel Daniel E. Sowada, issued a 365-page red-bound report, which I obtained from a source at the Pentagon. The team had worked to eliminate what was not possible, following the precept that once the impossible is eliminated, what remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth. First, they ruled out the possibility that the plane had blown up in midair. If it had exploded in this manner, the pieces of the plane, which had different shapes and therefore different resistance to wind, would have been strewn over a wide area—but that had not happened. By reassembling the plane in a giant jigsaw puzzle and scrutinizing with magnifying glasses the edges of each broken piece, they established that the plane was in one piece when it had hit the ground. They thus concluded that structural failure—i.e. the breaking-up of the plane in flight—was not the cause. Next, they eliminated the possibility of a missile attack. If the plane had been hit by a missile, intense heat would have melted the aluminum panels and, as the plane dived, the wind would have left telltale streaks in the molten metal. But there were no streaks on the panels, and no missile part or other ordnance had been found in the area.

  They further ruled out the possibility that there was an onboard fire while the plane was in the air since, if there had been one, the passengers would have breathed in soot before they died. Yet, the single autopsy performed, which was on the American general seated in the VIP capsule, showed that there was no soot in his trachea, indicating that he had died before, not after, the fire ignited by the crash.

  If it was not a missile or fire, another possibility was power failure. If that had happened, the propellers would not have been turning at their full torque when the plane crashed, which would have affected the way that their blades had broken off and curled on impact. But by examining the degree of curling on each broken propeller blade, the investigators determined that in fact the propellers were spinning at full speed when the plane hit the ground.

  Next th
ey turned to the fuel. They ruled out the possibility of contaminated fuel by taking samples of the diesel fuel from the refueling truck, and by analyzing the residues still left in the fuel pumps in the plane, which they determined had been operating normally at the time of the crash. They also ruled out any problem with the electric power on the plane because both electric clocks on board had stopped at the exact moment of impact. The final possibility for a mechanical failure was that the controls became inoperable. But the Hercules C-130 had not one but three redundant control system. The two sets of hydraulic controls were backed up, in case of leaks of fluid in both of them, by a mechanical system of cables. If any one of them worked, the pilots would have been able to fly the plane. By comparing the position of the controls with the mechanisms in the hydraulic valves and the stabilizers in the tail of the plane (which are moved through this system when the pilot moves the steering wheel), they established that the control system was working when the plane crashed. This was confirmed by a computer simulation of the flight performed by Lockheed, the builder of the C-130. They also ruled out the possibility that the controls had temporarily jammed by a microscopic examination of the mechanical parts to see if there were any signs of jamming or binding.

  That left the possibility of pilot error. But the crash had occurred after a routine and safe takeoff in perfectly clear daytime weather, and the hand-picked pilots were fully experienced with the C-130 and had medical checkups before the flight. Since the plane was not in any critical phase of flight, such as takeoff or landing, where poor judgment on the part of the pilots could have resulted in the mishap, the investigators ruled out pilot error as a possible cause. Since they precluded both a mechanical failure and pilot error, a conclusion of assassination was all but inescapable.

  Based on this investigation, Pakistan’s board of inquiry concluded that the cause of the crash of Pak One was a criminal act “leading to the loss of control of the aircraft.” It suggested that the pilots must have been incapacitated, but this was as far as it could go, since there was no black box or cockpit recorder on Pak One and no autopsies had been done on the remains of the pilots.

  What had happened to the pilots during the final minutes of the flight? When I went to Pakistan in February 1989, I attempted to answer that question by finding other planes in the area that might have intercepted radio reports from Pak One. There were three other planes in the area tuned to the same frequency for communications—a turbojet carrying General Aslam Beg, the Army’s vice chief of staff, which was waiting on the runway at Bahawalpur airport to take off next; Pak 379, which was the backup C-130 in case anything went wrong to delay Pak One; and a Cessna security plane that took off before Pak One to scout for terrorists. With the assistance of the families of the military leaders killed in the crash, I managed to locate the pilots of these planes—all of whom were well acquainted with the flight crew of Pak One and its procedures—who could listen to the conversation between Pak One and the control tower in Bahawalpur. They independently described the same sequence of events. First, Pak One reported its estimated time of arrival in the capital. Then, when the control tower asked its position, it failed to respond. At the same time Pak 379 was trying unsuccessfully to get in touch with Pak One to verify its arrival time. All they heard from Pak One was “Stand by,” but no message followed. When this silence persisted, the control tower became progressively more frantic in its efforts to contact Zia’s pilot, Wing Commander Mash’hood. Three or four minutes passed. Then, a faint voice in Pak One called out “Mash’hood, Mash’hood.” One of the pilots overhearing this conversation recognized the voice. It was Zia’s military secretary, Brigadier Najib Ahmed, who apparently, from the low volume of his voice, was in the back of the flight deck (where a door connected to the VIP capsule). If the radio was switched on and was picking up background sounds, it was the next-best thing to a cockpit flight recorder. Under these circumstances, the long silence between “Stand by” and the faint calls to Mash’hood, like the dog that didn’t bark, was the relevant fact. Why wouldn’t Mash’hood or any of the three other members of the flight crew have spoken if they were in trouble? The pilots aboard the other planes, who were fully familiar with Mash’hood, and the procedures he was trained in, explained that if Pak One’s crew was conscious and in trouble, they would not in any circumstances have remained silent for this period of time. If there had been difficulties with controls, Mash’hood would have instantly given the emergency “Mayday” signal so help would be dispatched to the scene. Even if he had for some reason chosen not to communicate with the control tower, he would have been heard shouting orders to his crew to prepare for an emergency landing. And if there had been an attempt at a hijacking in the cockpit or a scuffle between the pilots, it would also be overheard. In retrospect, the pilots of the other aircraft had only one explanation for the prolonged silence: Mash’hood and the other pilots were unconscious while the thumb switch that operated the microphone had been kept opened by the clenched hand of a pilot.

  The account of the eyewitnesses at the crash site dovetailed with the radio silence. They had seen the plane slowly pitching up and down. According to a C-130 expert to whom I spoke at Lockheed, a C-130 characteristically goes into a pattern known as a “phugoid” when no pilot is flying it. First, the unattended plane dives toward the ground then the mechanism in the tail automatically overcorrects for this downward motion, causing the plane to head momentarily upward. This pattern would continue, each swing becoming more pronounced until the plane crashed. Analyzing the weight on the plane, and how it had been loaded, this expert calculated that the plane would have made three roller-coaster turns before crashing, which is exactly what the witnesses had reported. He concluded from this pattern that had the pilots been conscious, they would have corrected the “phugoid”—or at least, would have made an effort, which would have been reflected in the settings of the controls. Since this had not happened, only one possibility remained: the pilots were paralyzed, unconscious, or dead.

  Meanwhile, an analysis of chemicals found in the plane’s wreckage, performed by the laboratory of the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco in Washington, D.C., found foreign traces of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PNET), a secondary high explosive commonly used by saboteurs as a detonator, as well as antimony and sulfur, which, in the compound antimony sulfide, is used in fuses to set off such a device. Using these same chemicals, Pakistan ordnance experts reconstructed a low-level explosive detonator that could have been used to burst a flask the size of a soda can. These tests showed that it was possible that such a device could have been used to dispense an odorless poison gas that incapacitated the pilots. Indeed, the ATF lab also found phosphorous residue in the cockpit, which could have come from poison gas.

  The problem in pursuing this lead was that no medical examinations or autopsies were performed on the bodies of the pilots and other members of the flight crew. Doctors at the military hospital in Bahawalpur reported that parts of the victims’ bodies had been brought there in plastic body bags from the crash site on the night of August 17, and stored there, so that autopsies could be performed by a team of American and Pakistani pathologists. But before the pathologists had arrived, the hospital received orders to return these plastic bags to the coffins for burial. The commanding officer ordered the medical preparations to cease and the bodies to be turned over for immediate burial. The official explanation given in the report is that Islamic law requires burial within twenty-four hours. But this could not have been the real reason, since the bodies were not returned to their families for burial until two days after the crash, as relatives confirmed to me. Nor were the families ever asked permission for autopsy examinations. And, as I learned from a doctor for the Pakistan Air Force, Islamic law notwithstanding, autopsies are routinely done on pilots in cases of air crashes. This intervention made it impossible to determine whether a nerve gas or other toxic agent had paralyzed the crew.

  These orders to literally bury the
evidence came directly from the Army, which was now under the authority of General Beg, who, after having his turbojet pilot circle over the burning wreckage of Pak One, flew immediately back to Islamabad, to assume command. For their part, Pakistani military authorities concentrated their investigation on the possibility that Shiite fanatics were responsible for the crash. The copilot of Pak One, Wing Commander Sajid, was a Shiite (as are more than ten percent of Pakistan’s Muslims), as was one of the pilots of the backup C-130. This pilot, though he protested his innocence, was kept in custody for more than two months and roughly interrogated about whether Wing Commander Sajid had discussed a suicide mission. Finally, the Army abandoned this effort after the Air Force demonstrated that it would have been physically impossible for the copilot alone to have caused a C-130 to crash in the way it did.

  The government then appointed a commission headed by Justice Shafiur Rehman, a well-respected judge on the Supreme Court, to establish the cause of the crash. Five years later, in 1993, it issued a secret report concluding that the Army had so effectively obstructed the investigation that the perpetrators behind the crash could not be brought to justice. The one uncounted casualty of Pak One was thus the truth.

  There is, to be sure, an abundance of theories based on who had a motive to kill General Zia. Not unlike the plot of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, in which, if one looked hard enough, everyone aboard the train had a motive for the murder, many parties, with the means to sabotage a plane, had a motive to eliminate Zia.

  First, there is the CIA. According to this theory, the CIA had become concerned that Zia was diverting a large share of the weapons it supplied to the ISI to an extreme Mujahideen group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Not only was this group anti-American, but its strategy appeared to be aimed at dividing the rest of the Afghan resistance so that it could take over in Kabul—with Zia’s support.