Bobby Fischer Goes to War

by David Edmonds

  The book Marshall brokered is called Both Sides of the Chess Board. It includes an introduction by Euwe in which the FIDE president notes that Nei was privy to inside information, both technical and psychological. Just so, and from Nei’s viewpoint a more apt title would have been Farewell to Reykjavik.

  Immediately after game seventeen on 22 August, Nei left the match so abruptly that he had to kick his heels in Copenhagen waiting for an onward flight to Moscow. Today he says that his job was done and he was needed for the beginning of the academic year in Estonia, where he was head of the chess school. The match was as good as over. He was no longer engaged in serious analysis with Spassky’s other seconds, and Geller thought it was pointless for him to stay. Spassky agreed.

  Krogius’s version differs. Certain Soviet embassy personnel informed him and Geller that “Nei is behaving oddly.” The Estonian was spending a long time alone with Byrne. In turn, the two seconds told Spassky. The same evening, Nei was put under hostile interrogation. He did not deny his contacts with Byrne, that he and the American were analyzing the match and that he was passing Byrne his comments on the games for future publication in the United States. His dubious listeners pressed Nei: “Why was he engaged in outside work of such a suspicious nature, and in secret, without Spassky’s permission? And in the material passed to the American, what had he said about Spassky’s condition and his own assessment of Spassky’s chess to date?” They were not satisfied with Nei’s responses. The conversation grew extremely heated. Nei was told that his services were no longer required and that he must leave. (Spassky says members of his team had no right to engage in business.)

  On the following day, the Estonian flew out. He changed planes in Moscow, flying straight to his home city of Tallinn, thus avoiding a visit to the Sports Committee, where he was due to hand in his foreign travel passport.

  Nei says that many people in the chess world were surprised to see him return to Estonia; they thought he would end up in Siberia or the West. But, he asks, why? He had not behaved incorrectly. From Tallinn, he went on to send his final contributions for the book to the States, in seven parts. He must have had some trepidation about the project: he posted each of these sections to separate addresses in Canada as well as the United States.

  For transgressing the rules—he had not informed the KGB or the authorities about the book—Nei had earned official displeasure. Upon his return, he was banned from foreign travel for two years, a relatively light punishment signifying that the critical charge of disclosing secrets was not taken seriously. It was highly incorrect, says Ivonin, to talk about the match during the match, but Nei could not be punished, as nothing was proved. “There was only suspicion.”

  There was more than enough of that to go around. The KGB was even focusing on Spassky himself.

  As the match approached its climax, Reykjavik was swept by gossip that Spassky was about to defect. The American chargé d’affaires, Theodore Tremblay, recalls how the Yugoslavs at the match “kept coming to me and saying, ‘Spassky wants to defect, Spassky wants to defect.’ Well, by that time, I had developed a rather close relationship with Boris. I kept telling them, ‘Look, if Boris wants to defect, all he has to do is tell me. We’ll see what we can do.’”

  Tremblay had met Spassky at the reception following the official opening, and they had talked amicably over the champagne. According to Tremblay, they became good friends and “just kept running into each other.” The American diplomat sometimes dined at Spassky’s hotel, and when the world champion spotted him, he would come over to chat. Tremblay found the atmosphere around the Soviets much more relaxed than in his previous posting in Bangkok. No one circled around, keeping people away from Spassky—though if he spoke for any length of time in the hotel or on the street, somebody would deliberately break it up. Naturally, the American denies cultivating Spassky professionally, though without sounding wholehearted about it: “Actually, we could have got him out of the country in a hurry if he had wanted to, but I knew he had no intention of defecting.”

  The Soviet authorities did not share Tremblay’s confidence. In Ivonin’s office, there were expressions of unease and confusion over what would become of Spassky. The KGB was certainly aware of the rumors. Major General Nikashkin decided they needed a representative in Reykjavik and recommended to Ivonin that Spassky’s friend Stanislav Melen’tiev should return to Iceland. Ivonin was anxious not to provoke Spassky into feeling he was distrusted and warned Nikashkin that the champion could misunderstand Melen’tiev’s arrival. The Sports Minister Pavlov then intervened, ringing in to say that this was a lot of fuss over nothing and they simply had to rely on Spassky’s loyalty. Nikashkin coolly pointed to press reports that Spassky had ignored Pavlov’s advice at the beginning of the match, though all other sportsmen would have had to take it. (According to Ivonin, if they had thought there was a real danger of Spassky’s defecting, they would have taken precautionary measures—for instance, having someone escort him back or offering him an inducement to return.)

  Relief arrived on 4 September. Nikashkin informed Ivonin that Spassky had bought a car in Iceland and was planning to ship it to Leningrad. At first, he had wanted to transport it to Copenhagen and drive home, but he was persuaded that the journey would be too dangerous. More heartening news had come: He had attacked those journalists who had questioned him on whether he might defect. “This is a provocation,” he told them. He said he was thinking of buying a dacha outside Moscow. In the Central Committee, Aleksandr Yakovlev was duly told: Spassky is coming home.

  Tremblay’s judgment about Spassky proved correct. Spassky’s chess colleagues never doubted his patriotism—Russian, if not Soviet. Defection could not have been further from his mind, says Spassky today. So what was the source of the rumors, spread so assiduously by the Yugoslavs? With the match seemingly lost, could this have been another ham-fisted KGB operation—this time to discredit Spassky rather than bolster him, this time to explain why he seemed unable to make a breakthrough against the American?

  21. ADVERSARY PARTNERS

  On the whole, in 1972 U.S.-Soviet relations were at their best in many years.

  — HENRY KISSINGER

  Seen from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, was Fischer’s triumph a cold war victory—at least symbolically—for the United States over its long-term adversary the USSR?

  One flaw with a cold war interpretation of the match is immediately apparent. Fischer and Spassky had in common their sheer unsuitability to represent their countries’ political systems. Spassky was not a Soviet patriot—and he made no secret of it. Fischer’s idiosyncratic and asocial behavior marked him as un-American for many of his compatriots.

  In the London Sunday Times on 2 July, Arthur Koestler, the author of the terrifying study of Stalinism, Darkness at Noon, understatedly warned, “Bobby is a genius, but as a propagandist for the free world he is rather counter-productive.” The Washington Post ruminated that Fischer’s behavior had caused the match to escalate “from a sport into a revival of the Cold War.” One of the Post’s readers wrote that “Fischer is the only American who can make everyone in the U.S. root for the Russians.” In an article written in late July and passed around the Soviet embassy in Reykjavik, causing much merriment, Washington Post humorist Art Buchwald mused over a presidential dilemma: Would Nixon place a telephone call to Iceland if Fischer won? He foresaw the conversation:

  “Hello, Bobby, this is President Nixon. I just wanted to call and congratulate you on your victory in Iceland.”

  “Make it short, will you? I’m tired.”

  “This is a great day for America, Bobby.”

  “It’s a greater day for me. I won $150,000 and I showed these Icelandic creeps a thing or two.”

  Eventually the president hangs up and calls Richard Helms, the director of the CIA.

  “Dick. I’m sending the presidential plane to Iceland to pick up Bobby Fischer. Do me a favor. After he’s on board, will you see to it that
he’s hijacked to Cuba?”

  Victor Jackovich remembers the qualified rapture in the embassy when the match ended:

  When he won the crown for America, pride was not the first reaction in the embassy: our first reaction was one of relief that it was over. Our second reaction: we won. The U.S. has won. Our guy has won. An American born and bred winning—that was something. But our first reaction was one of great relief. This was quite an ordeal.

  However, incontrovertibly, the common view was that the confrontation was an episode of the cold war. The new champion had certainly seen it this way. In April, the London Times noted: “Fischer believes that in some sense he is doing battle for the free world against the Soviet Union, in an atmosphere akin to the Berlin blockade of twenty years ago.” Fischer would have deleted the phrase in some sense. He told a BBC interviewer, James Burke:

  It is really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians…. This little thing between me and Spassky. It’s a microcosm of the whole world political situation. They always suggest that the world leaders should fight it out hand to hand. And this is the kind of thing that we are doing—not with bombs, but battling it out over the board.

  The Western public too was convinced of the geopolitical significance of the battle, and there were letters to the local and national press to this effect. Donald Kurtis, from Connecticut, wrote to The New York Times to point out that “chess is far more important to millions of people abroad than in the United States. A victory by Mr. Fischer can be more positively impressive to these people than all the trade, aid, and arms treaties.” A New York Times editorial makes a similar point, referring to the Soviets’ space achievement, with relish: “Unquestionably, Spassky’s loss of the title would be regarded as a major national setback; a Sputnik in reverse.” Just before the first game, The Washington Post claimed, “A Fischer victory would strike at a basic claim of Soviet ideology.” Decades later, many of the characters in our story concurred. For Icelandic cameraman Gissli Gestsson, this was not simply a chess match: “It was a battle for the minds of people all over the world; it was about the superpowers. I think it was a bit sad for chess, that it was used in this way.”

  Stereotyped contrasts between “us” and “them” abounded in articles and contemporary books by writers projecting the period through which they lived. The Soviet embassy interpreter Valeri Chamanin was used as an example of the Soviet lack of humanity. Francis Wyndham, coauthor of an instant account of the match, saw Chamanin as dummylike. (How animated should a professional interpreter be? In private life, Chamanin is warmly ebullient.)

  According to Brad Darrach, Chamanin was “one of many quasi-official Russian bureaucrats of the island whose faces appeared to have been restored to almost human form after a fatal accident.” The Soviet delegation, he noted, walked in single file, expressionless and uncommunicative, “like finalists in a self-effacement contest.” All except Spassky, that is, and Krogius, who was expressive enough to Westerners to seem sinister and who was accorded the character of a horror movie psychologist plotting the hero’s downfall through his cruel insights. However, to his Soviet contemporaries, let alone to Western reporters, Efim Geller seemed unusually paranoid about the West, and TASS correspondent Aleksandr Yermakov called him “Mr. No” for his unwillingness to share anything even with the Soviet agency. (In Icelandic, “no” was pronounced like “Nei,” so to the local population another Spassky aide was Mr. No.)

  The London Sunday Times perception of the two protagonists in Iceland revealed how, seen through the prism of ideological confrontation, reality was distorted: “Both are wonderfully cast for their roles. Fischer the rugged individualist, adventurous and occasionally reckless both in his life-style and chess style; Spassky the more benign type of Soviet bureaucrat, cautious, noncommittal, evasive.”

  GosKomSport officials would have greeted with incredulity the idea of Spassky as the benign bureaucrat. But for Moscow and the Soviet bloc, Fischer-Spassky was demonstrably a clash of systems. Naturally, red-clawed capitalism was held responsible for the American’s undesirable obsession with money, though it is not difficult to discern a note of envy over the way in which Fischer grasped riches from the game. But there was worry, too, about how this could transform the financial weather for Soviet players, making them less amenable to state control, diverting them from socialist priorities.

  Even so, once the match got under way, ideology vanished from the coverage. The turning point was Spassky’s disastrous third game, when the Soviet press settled down into straightforward chess analysis, with increasing hints that the champion was the author of his own misfortune. The match itself took second place to the Olympics in the use of limited hard currency and journalistic resources. Aleksandr Yermakov’s living expenses were severely restricted; he survived by finding student accommodations and cooking for himself. The TASS man’s task was to send the moves to Moscow. His editors had next to no interest in the anecdotes, drama, and human stories preoccupying Western journalists, though the facts were reported.

  Back in Moscow, commentaries in the press made clear Soviet grandmasters’ dissatisfaction with Spassky’s standard of play. Although there was little coverage of the Fischer sideshow, an American journalist in Moscow, Robert Kaiser, was struck by the freedom of the coverage of the chess itself.

  All Russia seems transfixed…. The self-centered, unpredictable American is a puzzlement here, but he is also the object of admiration. His moves as well as Spassky’s are subjected to a rare form of public commentary—vivid, outspoken journalism. The grandmasters all write well, in a frank and lively style more like American political commentary than standard Soviet journalism. Phrases like “Then Spassky grossly miscalculated” may read like normal comment to an American eye, but it jumps out at a reader of the Soviet press.

  There was freedom among park bench experts, too. Another American reporter overheard a note of gloom: “Spassky is playing like a shoemaker.”

  But some two-thirds into the match, its prominence in the state newspaper Izvestia steadily declined. After game seventeen, the FIDE logo was removed from its place beside the articles (whether as official disapproval of the federation or simply to make the match less prominent—or both—is unclear), and the byline of grandmaster David Bronstein, who had provided the analysis, also disappeared. The final report from TASS was tucked away on the lower-left-hand corner of the sports page, overshadowed by pictures of Soviet athletes and gymnasts. It was one column, eleven lines:

  Not arriving for the game, Spassky admitted his defeat in yesterday’s adjourned twenty-first game of the chess world championship. This decision is explained by the fact that further resistance on the part of white, as analysis showed, was already hopeless. Thus Fischer won the match with a score of 12.5–8.5 and earned the title of World Champion of Chess.

  The newspaper Sovietskaia Rossia put the passing of the title from Russian hands in a black-bordered box used for an obituary. But the Munich Olympic games were now the lead story, and for good reason. As Fischer seized the title, a Russian sprinter, Valeri Borzov, took from the United States the crown of world’s fastest man. Just as an American had never before been world chess champion, a Russian had never before won the Olympic 100-meter sprint. (Pavlov had chosen the right event to mastermind.)

  A downplaying of the chess match was to be expected. The role of the Soviet press was to reflect official views and priorities, not to satisfy the appetites of readers. With the strength of Fischer’s challenge to Soviet hegemony, the news media’s response became pragmatically low-key.

  Significantly, there were neither political allegations nor recriminations against the West. There were no attempts to couch the match in strategic terms. While the loss of the title was a blow, it was to be presented as an internal chess issue, not a matter of direct international or ideological importance.

  But then this was not a time for unnecessary dissension toward the United States. Indeed, far from epitomizing Ea
st-West conflict, the championship took place in the high blossoming of détente. In Europe, the cockpit of the cold war, a postwar settlement had finally emerged, in effect the long-deferred World War II peace treaty. Though almost all Western accounts of Fischer-Spassky couch the match in geopolitical terms, they are, in this respect, curiously misleading. The encounter might have been seen by the public and written up in the press as a cold war showdown, but in the Kremlin and the White House, East-West showdowns were not on the agenda.

  Thus, on the Soviet side, the political level of interest in Spassky’s preparation was high, but not exceptionally so. One of the two secretaries of the Central Committee who ranked just below Brezhnev in authority, Mikhail Suslov was in ultimate charge of ideological matters and therefore chess. He apparently never officially discussed the match. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev does not appear to have involved himself in the match, though the figurehead president of the USSR, Nikolai Podgornii, sent a telegram of good wishes to Spassky. (It would have been unthinkable for Brezhnev himself to put his name to such a message.) When Spassky was plainly in trouble, Lev Abramov, the former head of the Chess Department of the State Sports Committee, wanted a team manager sent to Reykjavik. He went directly to one of Brezhnev’s aides, Konstantin Rusakov, to enlist his help. But Rusakov was abroad; there was no sense of urgency in the Kremlin, and Abramov’s initiative came to nothing.