The following day, there was an audience of 2,500 people, some of whom had arrived early to guarantee a good seat and all of whom had paid $5 in the expectation of witnessing an exciting denouement. Fischer bounded in late, looking confident but, surprising for one who normally took care to appear impeccable, dressed in a hastily selected and still unpressed blood-red suit. For a change, Spassky’s seat was the one empty.
Two hours earlier, at 12:50 P.M., the champion had put in a call to the arbiter Lothar Schmid. He officially informed Schmid of his resignation; he would not go to the adjourned session. Schmid had had to phone Euwe: Could he accept a resignation by telephone? Euwe ruled this was permissible. Fischer was not informed and might not have found out until later, had the Life photographer Harry Benson not bumped into Spassky at the Saga hotel as the now ex-champion was on his way out for a walk. There followed a flurry of calls. Benson rang Fischer, who rang Schmid, insisting that, if true, this resignation must be put in writing. Schmid wrote something out himself but said Fischer would still have to show up at the scheduled hour for the adjourned session.
The match was over.
This was no grand finale, no knockout punch sending the champion to the mat, no winning hit into the stand or breasting of the tape. There were no hats thrown into the air, no stamping or cheering. This was the way the crown passed, not with a bang but a formal announcement. Once Fischer had arrived, Schmid walked to the front of the stage and addressed the hall: “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Spassky has resigned by telephone.” Polite applause broke out around the room. The spectators had seen no action for their entrance fee, but they were witnesses to chess history. The new world champion gave a gawky wave but rejected Schmid’s proposal to take a bow. The Italian daily Corriere della Sera severely disapproved of Spassky’s nonappearance: “He missed the salute he deserved. But he no longer deserves it. One should fight until the end. It is the law of sport, and he has betrayed it.”
Icelandic government cars were parked in front of the hall alongside the U.S. ambassador’s car. Victor Jackovich was also waiting there.
It was all a ploy, because Fischer did not want to talk to anyone or be accosted by the press. So the plan was that he would come out of the side door and hop into my car—a pretty nondescript yellow and black Ford Maverick. I had been told, “Don’t stop for anybody. As soon as he gets in, just take off for the base.” So I drove him to the base, where he had a celebratory steak and a glass of milk, it was always a glass of milk. I don’t recall him being jubilant; he was a bundle of nerves, still high like a sportsman at the end of a game. It was the same Fischer I’d always taken to the base.
In victory, Fischer was at least magnanimous about his defeated opponent. Spassky was “the best player” he had met. “All the other players I’ve played crumpled at a certain point. I never felt that with Spassky.” President Nixon sent Fischer a telegram of congratulations. Spassky himself gave some interviews. He looked exhausted and said he needed to “sleep and sleep and sleep.”
The New York Times deployed Nietzschean rhetoric in their investigation of what they called “the aura of a killer.” “Basically the Fischer aura is the will to dominate, to humiliate, to take over an opponent’s mind.” It was uncanny, they pointed out, how players defeated by Fischer never fully recovered. A loss to another opponent could be excused away, put down to a bad day or a rare oversight. “But a loss to Fischer somehow diminishes a player. Part of him has been eaten, and he is that much less a whole man.” Fischer was guilty of serial “psychic murder.”
For their part, the Soviets were asking whether Fischer was guilty of other crimes.
20. EXTRA-CHESS MEANS AND HIDDEN HANDS
Sniff out, suck up, and survive.
—KGB MANTRA, CHRISTOPHER ANDREW AND OLEG GORDIEVSKY
It is striking how, to this day, some Soviet participants believe dirty tricks played a part in Spassky’s defeat.
On arrival in Iceland on 10 August, Larisa Spasskaia was conscious of the overwrought atmosphere in her husband’s suite on the seventh floor of the Saga hotel. With the wives of his team members, she had left Moscow at a time when a heavy brown haze covered the city from the heathland fire that had been steadily creeping toward the suburbs for more than a month, engulfing thousands of acres. It had reached to within fifteen miles of the suburbs and had taken the military as well as firefighters to control it. So dense was the smoke that their flight had been switched to the domestic airport, Vnukovo, because planes could not depart from the international airport at Sheremet’evo.
The Boris she encountered in Reykjavik shocked her. That day, Spassky was defeated—a massive psychological knock after his victory four days earlier that finally seemed to have stalled Fischer’s momentum. “He looked lost and strained, his nervous system out of order.” The immediate problem was the accommodation. “For Boris, the whole atmosphere in the Saga was difficult. There was something unhealthy about it; it depressed him. He couldn’t sleep and became very irritable. His mattress irritated him. Perhaps there was something in it.” This had nothing to do with the champion suffering an allergy to its composition. The dark suspicion was of a substance planted to affect his nerves.
Larisa was not alone in suspecting mischief afoot. “Geller was sure that somebody entered their rooms in their absence. Someone from the American camp. Our team was very naive. Geller left his notes for the games in his suitcase—when he opened it, he saw that everything was in a different order. He had a sealed box with a special medicine from bees, Royal Jelly. Once when he came back, the box was open. Someone had taken a pinch.”
On returning to Moscow ten days later, Geller’s wife, Oksana, reported her husband’s worries to the authorities, telling them that the score was not a reflection of Spassky’s chess ability. “Their misfortune was not a chess misfortune.” She informed them that her husband had lost eight kilos and that Spassky felt as though his mind was in a fog. Something was up with Nei, too. He had become inert, lethargic. Because of this lassitude, he had basically withdrawn from the preparations.
Mistrust was not confined to conditions in the hotel. According to Larisa, “Boris believed things were happening that were surprising and worrying. All of a sudden, in the first or second hour of the day, he would feel drowsy. At first, he thought he must have eaten too much. He cut down on the food and just took snacks, but still he was sleepy. Twice when he left for the game, his pulse rate was normal, measured at sixty-eight to seventy, and within an hour he was in a state of prostration. He couldn’t drink the coffee or juice supplied to him for fear it had been spiked.”
After spending a few days in the embassy, Larisa and Boris moved into a house in the country, ten kilometers from Reykjavik. The Soviet ambassador Sergei Astavin had arranged it for them. “We managed to escape,” is how Larisa puts it. Owned by the hotel, it resembled a dacha. There her husband slept well for the first time in weeks. His eyes became brighter and he started to talk in his normal lively manner. He also began to take more heed of Krogius and Geller, whose advice he tended to dismiss when he was wound up. Helped by the embassy cook, Vitali Yeremenko, a great admirer of Spassky as a man as well as a chess player, Larisa took care of the meals. “First I made them lunch, then a thermos of coffee and a flask of juice.” She squeezed fresh oranges, a pleasing change from the sickly sweet ersatz version in Moscow. “With those two flasks, he went to the match.” She adds, “He had never been this disturbed before. There was nothing like it in other matches. Nothing like it.” Larisa Spasskaia has a technical background; she is highly educated, an engineer by profession. She is not a woman susceptible to idle speculation. Yet to this day she is convinced that psychotropic drugs were used against her husband. “I don’t know how they did it, but I’m sure there was something. Maybe it was a special light; maybe it was in the hall, in the food.”
The conviction that Fischer’s team had taken stringent security precautions served to heighten Soviet paranoia that the champion was being
got at—the only possible explanation for his not being himself, not being on form. Geller later remarked on the Americans’ preparations for the match: “They had a technical team. What did they need this for? They had a psychological team, a security service, an information service.” Larisa Spasskaia is not the only Russian who says she remembers Fischer’s house being encircled by armed U.S. Marine guards.
This was not so. The American records reveal that Fischer’s people requested marine guards and the request was summarily turned down by the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Reykjavik, Theodore Tremblay. He loathed Fischer’s discourtesy, was embarrassed by it, could not wait for him to get off the island, and had deliberately kept embassy assistance down to a minimum in the face of Fred Cramer’s attempts at intimidation. Cramer had warned that he would take matters all the way to the White House. Tremblay had prayed that the “damned thing” would not come to Reykjavik at all because of the trouble Fischer might cause for the Icelanders. “I had no doubts they—the Icelanders—could handle it. But Fischer even before the match had quite a reputation, which even I as a non—chess player was aware of, and I could just see problems ahead.” When Fischer’s praetorian guard arrived and demanded that the embassy help financially, Tremblay had a cast-iron defense: “I wasn’t inclined to be very cooperative with any of these people, and frankly it didn’t matter to me what they threatened. Indeed, I had been instructed by the State Department not to spend one cent of American taxpayers’ money on Bobby Fischer, since he had been so disrespectful of everything. So that was the way it was.”
Larisa Spasskaia reunited with Boris. He feared his food was tampered with, but home cooking is safe cooking. TASS
However, the Soviet “recollections” are significant, showing the depth of insecurity and suspicion that USSR citizens carried everywhere they went. The idea that extra-chess means were used against the team in Reykjavik runs like a threnody through the postmortem four months after the match, albeit in a minor key, perhaps because the participants had more immediate, personal scores to settle. Stalinism had left the people of the Soviet Union permanently on the lookout for conspiracy, internal and external, and for culprits, someone to blame. The KGB handbook for its employees, The KGB Lexicon: The Official Soviet Intelligence Officer’s Handbook, states that “the political vigilance of the Soviet people is represented by their unfailing mindfulness of possible dangers threatening the country.”
This vigilance existed even prior to the match, as evidenced in the official report to the Sports Committee on Spassky’s preparation, drawn up on 16 October 1971 by Viktor Baturinskii. In the report, he warned that the Americans would try to hold the match on the American continent, conferring on Fischer “certain advantages.” The report went on:
Furthermore, in connection with the results of Fischer’s matches against Taimanov, Larsen and Petrosian, there has been some conjecture about the influence on these results of non-chess factors (hypnosis, telepathy, tampering with food, listening in on domestic analysis, etc.).
In the wake of Taimanov’s crushing defeat, his team manager, Aleksandr Kotov, raised the issue of external, non-chess influences on Spassky: “It appears that this has happened before. At the Taimanov-Fischer match, I had the feeling the whole time that people were eavesdropping on us.”
Mikhail Botvinnik also mistrusted the Americans; he thought Spassky should not play in any country in which there was an American base. That was why he recommended against Iceland. An electrical engineer with an early and passionate interest in computer science, Botvinnik feared baleful computer manipulation of Spassky and help to Fischer—presumably controlled by U.S. military intelligence facilities. When Reykjavik was confirmed as the match site, some Sports Committee officials even suggested a Soviet ship should be moored there, on which the Soviet team could live in a security cocoon. That idea did not progress beyond the committee’s offices, probably just as well for Spassky’s blood pressure.
Then, during the match itself, otherwise rational Soviets were alarmed by the way Spassky was prone to error and threw away promising positions. Were there sinister explanations, hypnotic rays, parapsychology, chemicals?
Once back in Moscow, Spassky himself questioned his mental state over the chessboard. “Can it really be that my chess powers fell so sharply only as the result of some small incidents and confusion? Can my psyche really have been so unstable? Either my psychology was made of glass or there were external influences.” Before we shrug our shoulders in amused disbelief, we should recall Soviet use of toxicology against opponents. When the KGB wanted to bug the apartment of Colonel Oleg Penkovskii, whom they suspected of spying for the British, they smeared a poison on his chair that sent him briefly to hospital. Why should others not have access to the same technology?
Of course, not all the Soviet insiders were disposed to blame Spassky’s apparent loss of form on American dirty tricks. But even those who dismissed the possibility of an “outside agency” charged Fischer with using non-chess tactics—that is, psychological warfare. Spassky’s trainer and second, Nikolai Krogius, was head of the Psychology Department in Saratov University as well as a grandmaster. Looking back, he gives this diagnosis:
The psychological war waged by Fischer against Spassky and his (Fischer’s) attempts at self-assertion (by crushing the will of the other player) were linked; they were two sides of a single process of struggle against Spassky…. Note that in the 1970s Fischer began to place great significance on the psychological aspects of the game. He would openly declare that he was trying to crush the will of his opponent. To this end, all means were justified. In Fischer’s opinion, the psychological subjugation of the opponent inevitably led to a reduction in the strength of the opponent’s game. Fischer carried out such a program consistently, both before and during the match.
In the Sports Committee, too, Fischer’s mind games were seen to be at the root of Spassky’s problems. The committee considered the possibility of hypnosis as early as the beginning of August but dismissed it. The former women’s world champion, Elizaveta Bykova, claimed to Viktor Ivonin that Fischer had a telepathist among his lawyers. This was not true. In any case, the committee did not believe in telepathy.
From Reykjavik, the Soviet ambassador had complained to the Sports Committee that the press, Soviet as well as Western, misrepresented Fischer when they wrote of his “eccentricities.” They were not such, he said, but deliberate, well-planned nonsporting techniques to undermine the champion. In Moscow, they analyzed Fischer and concluded that he was a psychopath, a personality for whom the norm was a conflict situation—something with which Spassky could not cope.
The crisis for Spassky was caused, they concluded, by his inability to manage the psychological pressure. This conveniently dovetailed with criticism of his refusal to accept a leader for the delegation. After the match, Viktor Baturinskii put his view roundly: “If we are talking seriously, then we should not regard external factors as the most important, especially since we have no proof.” However, driving home his point that Spassky was wrong not to have had a proper team (in other words, one that might have included a KGB translator or doctor), he hedged his bets: “The question of whether certain chemical components were introduced into the food is another matter. The delegation was warned about this. We sent Comrade Krogius especially to Reykjavik for several days to explore the security issues. We offered to send a cook, a doctor. But all this was refused by Spassky.”
Whatever the degree of incredulity in Moscow over external tampering, backs had to be guarded, appropriate action seen to be taken. For instance, to investigate possible interference with Spassky’s food, a sample of the juice the Icelanders supplied to Spassky was carried to the Soviet capital for laboratory analysis.
The charge that the Americans were deploying psychological warfare was also examined. Spassky’s refusal to take a doctor to Reykjavik did not stop the Sports Committee from deciding on 10 August that certain specialists should go anyway. The Health Mi
nistry was asked for help. So, somewhat to his surprise, an eminent psychiatrist, Professor Vartanian, received a request to meet Ivonin on 21 August at the committee’s offices. He was invited to travel to Iceland with a colleague of his choosing, make observations, and then report back. Discretion was the order of the day: they would go as Ambassador Astavin’s guests. “We didn’t want to upset Spassky,” says Ivonin, “so we arranged for the psychiatrists to go as the ambassador’s friends.” Their mission was to assess the personalities of each player and whether Spassky was being “influenced.”
The late professor Vartanian was then general director of the Mental Health Center. He approached Professor Zharikov, a psychiatrist at the Medical Institute, where today he is dean of the Department of Psychological Medicine. The bait was the trip to Iceland, an exotic location they might otherwise never visit. Professor Zharikov is a survivor of the epic tank battle of Kursk, where he was wounded. Above the entrance to his office is a plaque recording his status as a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Inside, a picture of Lenin dominates the room.
On arrival, Vartanian and Zharikov were immediately briefed by embassy staff; the allegations were repeated about hypnosis, parapsychology, and interference from a device in Fischer’s chair. They leafed through the press, looking at cartoons of the match. Professor Zharikov was in a skeptical mood. He did not believe in parapsychology, and rumors were to be expected with so much at stake. Amusement flickers in the professor’s eyes as he remembers sitting in the hall, observing the players through binoculars. He regarded the episode as a joyride. The trip made few professional demands. He had no opportunity to get to know the subjects of his studies, and given the stress of the situation, diagnosing their characters and distinguishing normal from abnormal behavior was nearly impossible. “Each person involved in such a difficult psychological situation would respond differently,” Zharikov says. “There were no standards. You wouldn’t say such-and-such behavior is a problem and such-and-such behavior is not.”
Bobby Fischer Goes to War Page 26