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* Israel was still dependent on French weaponry, though de Gaulle had ended any nuclear assistance. America was just starting to supply Israel with weaponry but JFK was infuriated by its nuclear programme. When Shimon Peres, its mastermind, visited the White House, JFK asked him about the nuclear weapons; he replied with deliberate vagueness, ‘I can tell you clearly that we shall not introduce atomic weapons to the region. We shan’t be the first to do so.’

Hashemites and Kennedys, Maos, Nehruvians and Assads

LYONIA THE BALLERINA: BREZHNEV IN POWER

Brezhnev was energetic and sharp, good-natured and humorous, a cautious realist, always making jokes, giving nicknames and laughing loudly. His judgements on American politics and foreign leaders were surprisingly on point, and in the Kremlin he tried ‘to win over his interlocutors and create a free and open atmosphere for conversation’, recalled the young secretary of Stavropol, Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he always teased about his ‘sheep empire’. A hard-drinking, hard-hunting muzhik and womanizer, both vainglorious and self-deprecating, Brezhnev collected fast cars and undeserved medals: visiting Berlin, when given a new Mercedes by his East German vassal Honecker, he drove so recklessly he crashed it on a sharp right turn.

After promoting himself to the marshalate, he was derided for bellowing, ‘Make way for the marshal,’ but on Marxist scholarship he joked, ‘You don’t expect Lyonia Brezhnev to have actually read all that.’ He kept a diary, Habsburgian in its dullness: ‘Killed 34 geese’ was a typical entry. ‘With Lyonia, all I had to do was tell a few jokes,’ recalled KGB chief Semichastny, ‘and that was it.’ While the Americans were convinced that the Soviets were the puppet masters, the Vietnamese made their own decisions, and Mao was now asserting himself.

In Hanoi, as the venerable Ho retired, Le Duan escalated their war, infiltrating 40,000 regular troops into the south to join 800,000 Viet Cong guerrillas. ‘The Communist threat,’ said Johnson ‘must be crushed with strength.’^* By the end of 1965, he had deployed 200,000 troops and was bombing the north. He underplayed US escalation: ‘If you have a mother-in-law with only one eye … in the center of her forehead,’ he explained, ‘you don’t keep her in the living room.’ Sihanouk, now Cambodian head of state, was at his height, ruling absolutely, giving long speeches, boasting of sexual conquests, performing his own jazz songs with his band and presenting ballets starring his own beautiful daughter. He also assassinated opponents, and allowed Monique’s family to make fortunes as the Vietnamese cauldron overflowed into Cambodia.

The Viet Cong used the Cambodian and Laotian borderlands as supply routes into South Vietnam – the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1964, Sihanouk, close to Zhou Enlai, who visited Phnom Penh, allowed Chinese supplies to be delivered through Cambodia to the Vietnamese – the Sihanouk Trail – in return for a share of military equipment. As America deployed more troops, Sihanouk tacked left, recruiting into his government Khieu Samphan, a Marxist intellectual educated at the Sorbonne who was a member of the secret Maoist faction led by the teacher named Saloth Sar. When Sihanouk accused him of backing a peasant rebellion and arranged his public debagging, Khieu Samphan vanished. Many thought he was dead. He was joined in the jungle by Saloth Sar, who flew to Beijing where he was hosted by the deputy premier Deng Xiaoping. But it was Mao’s secret-police chief Kang Sheng who grasped his grim potential. In 1966, as China turned against Sihanouk, he realized something was happening in Beijing.

THE SCORPION’S BITE AND THE FALL OF LITTLE CANNON: MAO UNLEASHES JIANG QING

In November 1965, the seventy-one-year-old Mao, after enduring three years of rising opposition, summoned his wife Jiang Qing, the ex-actress turned cultural commissar who admired classical movies and operas yet had become the enforcer of Party kitsch, and ordered her to draft a manifesto of revolution. Culture was the tool, the aim ‘to punish this Party of ours’, the target ‘the black line opposed to Mao Zedong Thought’. Watching him cavorting with his harem of dancers, Jiang was hurt. ‘In political struggle,’ she remarked, ‘no leaders can beat him,’ but ‘in private conduct, nobody can restrain him either’. When she discovered Mao, in his mid-sixties, in bed with a nurse, she yelled at him and left. On reflection she sent him a note from the novel Journey to the West: ‘My body is in Water Curtain Cave, but my heart is following you.’ Mao had his lovers, she wanted a career. Mao had privately come to loathe Jiang – ‘poisonous as a scorpion’ – but for years she had been disdained by Party grandees. Now she had her revenge. ‘I was Chairman Mao’s dog,’ she said later. ‘Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit.’