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.
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. charge 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.”
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,
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
