Bobby Fischer Goes to War

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 charge 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.