Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

20. EXTRA-CHESS MEANS AND HIDDEN HANDS

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.”

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:

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:

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 Ministry 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.”

He considered the champion to be balanced. Their only meeting with Spassky came at an embassy reception, and Zharikov was impressed: “A very clever young man, maybe a bit solemn—a person in whom psychosis would not develop easily. He was very self-possessed and liked to show off, like to talk.” The professors assured Ambassador Astavin there was nothing to worry about. They repeated that view in the official document to the Sports Committee: “We wrote a short report dismissing the speculations and confirming that the participants in the match were in an absolutely proper condition.”

Soviet paranoia was by no means one-sided. The second secretary at the Soviet embassy, Dmitri Vasil’iev, has a recollection of Fischer complaining of KGB men in the hall trying to hypnotize him. It was the expression of what Victor Jackovich described as Fischer’s anti-Soviet mind-set.

The tension was such that it even got to the New York lawyer Paul Marshall. He recalls how his and his wife’s passports were missing from their hotel desk and then suddenly appeared back in their room. “And we started to feel the same pressures, thinking, ‘That’s odd.’ This and several other things made us believe that Bobby’s idea of Russian trickery may have some merit.” However, the atmosphere could also be used to provide some wholesome American fun. He and his wife, Bette, were in the public entrance to the hall when Nikolai Krogius was passing. Bette called out: “‘Grandmaster Krogius, friends and contacts in America wanted me to give you these papers.’ And Krogius turned and ran.”

With the probability of a KGB watcher loitering there, who could blame him?

However, Spassky and Geller were not completely mistaken. Outsiders did try to influence the proceedings.

What we now know is that the KGB was active during the match—active in investigating possible attacks on the world champion, active in attempting a preemptive propaganda coup against the Americans, working with the connivance of the Moscow chess authorities, perhaps active too in spreading a rumor that Spassky was planning to defect.

Soviet grandmasters of the era assumed that the KGB was involved in chess, as in all pursuits deemed important by the state. Chess players sized up one another. Which of them had a role beyond chess? Which of them was receiving an extra stipend—had a so-called side job? Which of them was informing? Who was holding a chess position while actually a KGB officer?

To this day, many in the former Soviet Union will contend that the KGB’s work in defending the state was an honorable undertaking—so there was no dishonor in collaborating with them. The KGB was the real travel authority, lurking behind all the committees of Party faithful who had the task of initially vetting applications to travel. Through its informants, the KGB was tipped off as to what was going on in chess circles and would “suggest” to the authorities who should be encouraged, who should be discouraged, who should be banned from leaving the Soviet Union, who should be allowed to go abroad. It was a common practice to suggest to would-be travelers that their passports might be more readily available if they agreed to act as the eyes and ears of the organization.

Some even claim that the KGB had an office in the Central Chess Club in Moscow—though an officer is more likely. Yuri Averbakh professes ignorance of any such thing: “I had an office there, and if so, I did not know about it.” Nonetheless, he fully understood how the system operated, even if his deeply embedded instinct—or perhaps superstitious habit—is to avoid speaking directly of the KGB. “In the Stalin era, usually if a team were traveling, an obvious representative of this organization was sent along. This person would observe the participants. In 1952, I played in the Interzonal tournament, and there was such a person there. In 1953 at the Candidates tournament in Zurich, there was such a person. In 1955, when Spassky traveled to the World Junior Chess Championship—I was his coach at the time—there was also a representative of that organization with us. After 1956, for about three years, no one was sent. This was the time of the thaw. Then, at the beginning of the 1960s, such people began to appear again. In Curaçao, for example, a KGB person accompanied us.”

“Such people” were scarcely secret. Garry Kasparov’s former coach Aleksandr Nikitin records, “From the first time Garry went abroad, he had a companion who was not a professional trainer. He was a KGB lieutenant colonel, Viktor Litvinov. Litvinov kept an eye on Garry and his mother wherever they went.” Even Karpov was “protected.” “From 1975, Vladimir Pichtchenko, a prominent KGB agent, followed Karpov like a shadow on all his foreign trips.”

Nikitin wrote that these agents fulfilled a useful role: “Today everyone is in the habit of condemning this organization. We should not, however, think that people who worked in the KGB were monsters. Those with whom we dealt were cordial and competent, and of high intellectual caliber. The organization operated within all the sport federations. Sport as an aspect of culture had to reflect the success of our system….” The high level of intellect is accurate: the KGB creamed off the brightest for its ranks.

Given the official view of Spassky’s political “immaturity,” given his earlier brushes with the KGB in Leningrad, given this was a U.S.-Soviet contest on an island with a major American air base, it would have been little short of a miracle if there had been no KGB operatives there. Nikolai Krogius allows the possibility: “As far as I know, official representatives of the KGB were not present. There were rumors that there were two or three KGB workers. But they simply watched, of course. Nothing more.” Nei thought there were many. Now only recently retired from the Russian Foreign Ministry, then second secretary in the Soviet embassy, Dmitri Vasil’iev remembers two or three such persons inside the hall in Reykjavik, watching the match: “I can’t be sure they were KGB, but they were a bit strange. You know, these people, CIA or KGB, they were always a bit strange.” Members of these secret organizations—whether CIA or KGB—were dissimilar, of course, but something about them made identification easy. To an observer, in the Russian idiom, they were “men with identical shoes.”

The Soviet embassy was already swollen beyond normal requirements for a sparsely populated island; during the two months of the match, there were an unusual number of Russian “tourists.” Some reports name an embassy official, Viktor Bubnov, as the head of the KGB in Reykjavik. But he was actually from Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, and so had quite different priorities. We can assume no shortage of KGB officers and informants in Reykjavik. And we now have reason to believe that some among them were not there simply, as Nikolai Krogius would have it, “to observe.”

In Moscow, at the end of July, apprehension over Spassky’s performance was running at a high level.

On 27 July, when the champion played his worst game to date, game eight, Viktor Baturinskii was summoned to the Central Committee to explain what was going on and in particular why Spassky did not react to Fischer’s late appearances at games. Present were the acting head of the Propaganda Department, Aleksandr Yakovlev; his deputy head, Yuri Skliarov; and the head of sports, Boris Goncharov—who apparently had not the least interest in sports. They discussed how they might help Spassky and how they might identify and neutralize the psychological pressures on him.

It was the beginning of a period that finds an array of senior KGB figures passing through Ivonin’s office. (Of course, this was also the run-up to the Olympics.) They included Viktor Chebrikov, deputy chairman of the KGB and a protégé of Brezhnev’s. Brezhnev had appointed him in 1968 under Yuri Andropov, following the Kremlin power struggle that saw Pavlov go to GosKomSport. Chebrikov would go on to become KGB chairman in 1982. Even more senior, the first deputy chairman of the KGB, appointed in the same reshuffle as Chebrikov, Semion Tsvigun, also turned up. There were visits from the deputy head of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate (which dealt with ideology and so covered sports), Major General Valentin Nikashkin. One of his staff, KGB agent Viktor Gostiev, will come into the story. He too worked in the Fifth Directorate of the KGB. Later, while remaining a KGB officer, Gostiev became deputy chairman of the Dynamo Sports Society, which provided physical training for the KGB and those employed in the Interior Ministry.

The senior rank of the KGB participants has probably more to do with Ivonin’s ministerial status than with the importance accorded Reykjavik. Viktor Ivonin is unable to recall anything of these visits. His normally unfailing memory for people and events lets him down when confronted with these KGB names. While his tone becomes decidedly more guarded, his mind is a blank.

What might they have discussed?

The theme of these comings and goings is less how to undermine Fischer and more how to prop up a rattled Spassky. (In this period, there is a proposal to send the champion Kogitum—a medicine against nervous tension—and some exasperation at his refusal to take it.) First, this requires investigating stories of possible interference with his playing. One report to have reached the KGB was that Fischer was being assisted by a computer (in Russian called an IBM—a Soviet tribute to American big business) and a device in his chair. (Whether the two are linked, a computer in Fischer’s chair, is unclear.) There have already been reports in the Western press of Fischer being computer aided, reports derisively dismissed in Reykjavik by Spassky, Geller, and Krogius. Back in Moscow, the KGB does not believe silicon-based shenanigans are any more practical. A Comrade Lvov, a KGB technical officer and a constant caller on Ivonin at this time, explains to the deputy minister that Fischer would have needed a full year to develop the requisite computer program and would have to have a portable receiver and a membrane in his ear to receive the signals.

Lvov is also the bearer of other shadowy news: he reports the possibility that Spassky has had a letter threatening his family if he returns to Moscow a winner. This is investigated, and no proof of its existence is found. The provenance of this letter is unclear; today, Spassky says he had no knowledge of it.

Other means of defending Spassky are afoot. As July turns into August, an unnamed forensic psychiatrist takes part in a meeting with Lvov and Gostiev. Lvov is all set to organize a check for radiation from radio waves and X-rays “on the spot”—presumably in the hall.

Throughout this period, the possibility of Spassky’s being the target of hypnosis and telepathy is being discussed. There is a hint that sending a psychiatrist to Reykjavik is Gostiev’s brainchild. The psychiatrists Vartanian and Zharikov are primed, and Gostiev arranges the logistics of their visit.

Then there is the alarm over Spassky’s refreshments—that on 15 August he drank some juice and was overcome with lethargy. Once more, the KGB and Gostiev are involved. Once more, Gostiev springs into action, ensuring a sample is sent to Moscow. KGB scientists check the sample. Later, Gostiev’s superior, Nikashkin, tells Ivonin that nothing untoward was found.

However, the KGB is not content to play a purely reactive role. The organization’s idea of a helping hand also involves taking the initiative, instigating its own rumor that Fischer is cheating through a device hidden in his chair—a device, so the rumor goes, that is impairing Spassky’s performance and/or benefiting Fischer. This idea is canvassed toward the end of July. It must have sounded convincing. As Ivonin listens to the “comrades” talking, he finds himself wondering whether there might really be something to it. On 29 July, Boris Goncharov, of the Central Committee, reports to Ivonin that the rumor has been “launched.” The rest is silence.

Given the launch date, it is a mystery whether there was any connection between this rumor and Geller’s statement to the press three weeks later, on 22 August, protesting about dirty tricks being used to influence Spassky, though Geller asserted that “letters had been received.” The story of the scenes that followed this statement has already been related. In Moscow, Major General Nikashkin informed Ivonin that the episode had received a lot of publicity; that Icelandic experts had checked everything and nothing had been found.

Was Geller obeying KGB orders? Had he been told the full details of the KGB plotting, or was he himself a victim of the plot, inveigled into believing and then publicly conveying the allegations of American high-tech machinations? Within Spassky’s chess team, Geller, who was ultrasuspicious of the West, acted alone. Krogius did not sign the controversial declaration, and today he categorizes the action as “unsuccessful and clumsy.” He attributes it entirely to “Geller’s tendency to act spontaneously.” Nei says he refused to put his name to the statement because it was evident to him that Geller had issued it under political instruction from Moscow. Ivonin declares that the first he heard of the letter was when news of it came from Reykjavik. Spassky now remembers that a letter before the match had warned about the chair and “this letter was fished out.” Perhaps, nearing the end of the contest, desperate to account for his failure to find a breakthrough at the board, he and Geller consciously or subconsciously cast about for non-chess explanations. Still ignorant of the KGB scheme, Spassky continues to believe that Fischer’s black leather swivel chair might have had something in it; he says he was not at all embarrassed by Geller’s pronouncement.

It remains an open question whether a KGB operative actually planted something in Fischer’s chair for the X-rays to pick up, part of an inept attempt to rescue the champion’s reputation, perhaps even to have Fischer disgraced and disqualified. Strikingly, even the American Don Schultz, an IBM engineer by profession and president of the USCF from 1996 to 1999, is suspicious. During the X-ray process, Fischer’s team sent Schultz along to act as an observer. He still has the contemporaneous notes he took, including a sketch of the object with the loop that he saw in the first X-ray. At the time, in public, he laughed off the Soviet allegations. But later he too admitted to doubts: “Everything wasn’t fully explained.” What puzzled him was the discrepancy between the two X-rays. He was there as the second set of X-rays was developed and saw that the looplike object, the “anomaly,” as he calls it, had disappeared.

This, he says, is “a very disconcerting possibility. I am convinced this is what had to have happened.” Of course, once the alarm was raised, the Soviets and the Icelanders might each have had their own reasons for ensuring nothing was found. Don Schultz was startled when Icelandic officials announced the all clear before the results from the second set of X-rays had been reported.

Whether or not the KGB did implant a device, what is clear is that Krogius is right to call the entire exploit clumsy and unsuccessful. The Icelandic organizers dismissed the accusation, the American media ridiculed it, and the Soviets were left humbled.

The possibility of a spy in the troubled Soviet camp also raised its head. The challenger’s unforeseen departure from a lifetime of opening predictability had thrown Spassky; that Fischer was the better prepared is indisputable. But Geller was convinced that Spassky’s prematch analysis had been leaked.

To suspicious Soviet minds, if there were a fifth columnist, who was the likely culprit? In the written record of the postmortem on the match, there is no direct accusation against any member of the Spassky team, but the wording of a comment by Viktor Baturinskii points a finger. Spassky had cited Ivo Nei as the weak link in his team. Evidently angry and on the defensive, the former prosecutor lashed out: “Here mention has been made of Nei, who proved to he all hut a spy. I objected to the inclusion of Nei in the training group, but Boris Vasilievich [Spassky] insisted on it. To cite Nei now as one of the reasons for his own performance is at the very least unscrupulous.”

In the minds of the Sports Committee, Nei had no real business in Reykjavik. From the moment Spassky’s team was first assembled, Nei was referred to as the champion’s “physical trainer.” Nei insists that he played a full part in the chess analysis, working at night alongside the rest of the team. He also spoke fluent German and some English, and in Reykjavik he interpreted for the chief arbiter, Lothar Schmid, and for Max Euwe, president of FIDE. He knew the president well.

No doubt it was a combination of Nei’s command of chess and his position as an “insider” that commended him to Paul Marshall as the possible author of a book on the match. Marshall recognized the market for such books—especially one written from inside Spassky’s camp. Nei says that as well as royalties, Marshall offered him anything he wanted from America. Nei then approached grandmaster Robert Byrne to be coauthor. This former U.S. champion was in Reykjavik as a commentator for a Dutch television station. Nei had been getting out and about, hobnobbing with match officials and the American visitors. The Soviet ambassador had not vetoed his extramural activities, but he advised Nei to be cautious in his contact with U.S. citizens. As Spassky’s coach, says Nei, his meeting the Americans was beneficial for Spassky: He was able to give his team some insight into how the U.S. camp was thinking.

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?