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

APPENDIX

We have mentioned Regina Fischer, Bobby’s mother, only in passing. The FBI suspected that she was a Soviet agent. The Bureau’s files, the fruit of three decades of surveillance, present a fascinating portrait of a woman possessed of extraordinary force of character and unconventional attitudes. They also tell of the secret at the heart of her family.

Regina’s parents were of Polish-Jewish origin. Her father, Jacob Wender, was a dress cutter by profession. The family had moved first to Switzerland, where Regina was born on 31 March 1913, and then, when she was only a few months old, to St. Louis in the American Midwest. Her mother, Natalie, died when Regina was ten; Jacob married Ethel Greenberg, with whom Regina did not get along. Jacob and Regina were naturalized as Americans on 12 November 1926.

After graduating from high school in St. Louis, Regina attended Washington University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Denver. In 1932, nineteen years old and without a degree, she went to Berlin to study and to work as a governess. There she fell in love with Gerhardt Fischer, five years her senior; he was also known by another name, Gerardo Liebscher.

In early 1933, the couple made the decision to uproot to Moscow. Regina claimed later they had done so to get married: Of course, with the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, she might have felt increasingly uncomfortable there. But that Russia was the chosen destination probably indicates the true reason for their leaving Germany. Gerhardt was a communist. He might even have been a Comintern agent.

In any case, they married in Moscow on 4 November 1933 and lived on in the city for five years. Their daughter, Joan, was born there in 1937. Regina studied at the First Moscow Medical Institute. Gerhardt was associated with the Moscow Brain Institute. For some of the time, they occupied apartment 42 at Zemlianoi Val 14/16, in a neighborhood of substantial Stalin-era apartments, with big living rooms and kitchens. Their choice of refuge from Nazi power scarcely offered peace and security; this was the height of the Great Terror. But unlike many other foreign communists who sought sanctuary in the Soviet Union, Gerhardt was not among Stalin’s victims.

Toward the end of that five-year period, there is evidence that the marriage might have become rocky. When Regina went to renew her passport at the American embassy on 29 July 1938, she informed a member of staff that she had separated from her husband. But this could well have been a cover-up. It is likely that Gerhardt had left (or been sent) to operate on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war.

Regina departed for France later that year, meeting up with Gerhardt in Paris (whether he arrived in France from the USSR or Spain is unclear). Peace in Europe was looking increasingly uncertain, and Regina was now determined to return to the United States: She did so on 23 January 1939. Gerhardt, who did not have a U.S. passport, stayed on in Europe; he had somehow managed to acquire a Spanish passport, number 5999, evidence of his involvement in civil war Spain. But it remains a mystery why he was denied access to the States when he was married to a U.S. citizen. In any case, on 4 January 1940, he landed in Chile, where he eventually set up a shop selling and installing fluorescent lighting, and dabbled in photographic work.

Until Bobby was seventeen, Regina was omnipresent in his life. What she almost certainly did not know, and what Bobby could not have known, is that the family was closely monitored by the FBI, which amassed a nine-hundred-page file on her. The dossier reveals that some factual details routinely offered in biographical accounts of Bobby’s early life are wrong.

Regina was first brought to the attention of the FBI on 3 October 1942, when she was working as a student instructor at the U.S. Air Force’s Radio Instructors’ School at St. Louis University. She expected her second child the following March. Regina was financially desperate, so much so that, through a Jewish charity, she attempted to place her daughter, Joan, with another family.

The arrangement quickly collapsed, the foster mother asking Regina to take Joan back. The woman did not tell Regina that she had contacted the authorities. America was at war. She had discovered some “suspicious” items and documents among belongings Regina had left with Joan and considered that these posed a potential threat to the “national welfare.” The suspect possessions included several pages of scribbled “chemical formulas,” [sic] as well as a B-2 Cadet camera with a state-of-the-art lens and a collapsible umbrella. There was also a letter from a left-wing friend that included the sentence, “Washington is really a fascinating city, although right now it is getting too hot for comfort.” The woman considered it worthy of note that Regina owned “a heavy black rubber apron and two heavy rubber sheets.”

So began an operation lasting two decades and costing tens of thousands of U.S. government dollars, though there were perfectly plausible explanations for the items Regina left among Joan’s belongings. After returning to the United States, Regina had completed her BA degree at the University of Denver, where she majored in French, German, biology, and chemistry. The last would account for the “chemical formulas” and perhaps the rubber sheet and gloves. As for the camera and collapsible umbrella, her absent husband, Gerhardt, was a professional photographer.

Although the evidence was circumstantial, the FBI came to believe Gerhardt was something more sinister—that he was a Soviet agent. Why did he spend those years in Russia? Why did he have that mysterious Spanish passport? In Chile, had he not joined the Communist Party and fraternized with fellow left-wingers? But most significant of all, in the eyes of the FBI, was a letter also found among Regina’s belongings in 1942. It had been posted in June 1941 and was written in a stilted style; the FBI described it as “cryptic” (though English was not Gerhardt’s mother tongue). In the letter, Gerhardt explained how he had taken pictures of fishing boats and fishermen at the port of San Antonio about an hour and a half west of the capital, Santiago. The FBI observed that at the same time, three Germans, posing as fishermen at the port, were charged with transmitting espionage information by radio.

If Gerhardt was a Soviet agent, what about his wife? It made no difference to the FBI that Regina was granted a divorce from Gerhardt on 14 September 1945 on the grounds of willful neglect to provide for her and their two children—she had received no financial support since July 1942. (At the time, she was living in Moscow, Idaho. The local paper, the Daily Idahonian, had fun with the story—married in Moscow, divorced in Moscow.)

The FBI files contain half a dozen physical descriptions of Regina; one from this period states that she was five feet four, with dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, thick eyebrows, full lips, olive complexion, heavy legs, a low and heavy bust, and a “scruffy” appearance. Her nose features in another description—long and “a little crooked.”

According to an informer, in the same year that her divorce came through, Regina was recruited to the Communist Political Association (CPA) in Oregon. The CPA was described under Executive Order 9835 as a communist and subversive organization that sought to “alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means” President Truman issued Executive Order 9835 on 22 March 1947, initiating a program to seek out any “infiltration of disloyal persons” in the U.S. government. By December 1952, over 6.6 million people had been secretly investigated—no case of espionage was uncovered.

Was Regina an active member of the CPA? The FBI believe she was expelled in 1950 for being “unfaithful.” But she was certainly politically engaged, at different times belonging to or associated with a variety of left-wing organizations and causes, from the International Workers Order to American Women for Peace and, much later, the Committee for Non-Violent Action. Over the years, the Bureau accumulated further “incriminating evidence” against her. On 15 May 1945, she contacted a Russian employee at the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission in Portland about the possibility of working as a translator. A plumber notified the FBI that he had once found Regina playing what he described as “communist records” and that she tried to influence him to become a member of the Communist Party. A source “with whom contact is insufficient to judge his reliability” told the FBI that Regina had taken her child (singular) to a communist summer camp. And in a judgment demonstrating the institutional politics of Hoover’s FBI, she was accused of exhibiting communist sympathies by picketing an apartment block near her home in a protest against the removal of “a colored family.”

The Bureau judged Regina bright and articulate, but also, in the words of one informer, a “real pain in the neck.” A source described her as “antagonistic” and “argumentative.” It was said that all the tenants in their Brooklyn block disliked the Fischers, and that Regina had a “suit complex,” often initiating legal action against the landlord for “imagined grievances.”

There was also a psychiatric report. Shortly after Bobby was born, Regina took advantage of a Chicago charity, going to stay in the Sarah Hackett Memorial Home for indigent single women with babies. When she wanted her daughter, Joan, to join her and Bobby—since Joan’s fostering had not worked—the charity told her there was no room and that in any event, Joan had a perfectly satisfactory home. (Joan was in St. Louis, perhaps with her grandfather.) Regina smuggled Joan in; the resulting dispute then escalated as Regina tried to rouse the other residents against the managers. She was eventually arrested for disturbing the peace. The judge found her not guilty but ordered a mental health examination. The Municipal Psychiatric Institute diagnosed her as a “stilted (paranoid) personality, querulent [sic] but not psychotic.” The report recommended, “If her small children should suffer because of her obstinacy, juvenile court intervention should be initiated.”

The FBI investigation was not limited to Regina. Special agents gathered information on Jacob, her father, also a left-winger, as well as her brother, Max, “a known Commie” who had moved to Detroit. Because Regina and Ethel, Jacob’s second wife, loathed each other, the FBI approached Ethel for information on her stepdaughter (this was many years after the two women had stopped speaking). On one occasion, in October 1953, the FBI even approached Regina directly—calculating that because she had abandoned the Communist Party, she might be willing to dish the dirt on former comrades. Regina, however, was “uncooperative” she was prepared to be interviewed, but only with a lawyer present.

In the mid-1950s, the file became relatively inactive. But when, in March 1957, Regina contacted the Soviet embassy about Bobby’s trip to Moscow, the case sprang back into life—and with a vengeance. On 21 May 1957, an agent wrote to the director of the FBI:

Now her bank accounts were checked, fellow nurses at her hospital were surreptitiously taken to one side and questioned, the make of her car was jotted down (a 1957 Chrysler Sedan), her father’s will was examined (Regina inherited a tidy sum—around $40,000), and all previously collated documents were excavated and old sources reinterviewed.

By this stage, Bobby had become a celebrity, and the relationship between him and his mother was placed under the official microscope. The FBI director was reassured that the inquiry was being handled with “the utmost discretion,” so as not to arouse Regina’s attention. One source told the FBI that Regina could not control her son. She “lives in terror of him [Bobby] but at the same time seems to ‘gloat’ over his publicity.”

Bobby’s movements were tracked to and from Moscow via Brussels and Prague. Agents were asked to discover why he was so disgusted with his Soviet hosts. Did they make some kind of communist “approach” to him? After Moscow, and before the Interzonal at Portoroz, an informer described Bobby as “a very sick boy emotionally and in such a mental state at the present time that losing the tournament may cause him to become violent and may cause him to be confined to a mental institution.”

In 1959, Bobby and Regina went to Argentina and then Chile. Bobby was playing chess. What was Regina doing? Was she trying to contact her ex-husband? (She may not have known that two years earlier, “Don Gerardo Fischer Liebscher” had remarried, to a Mrs. Renata Sternaux Meyer in Algarrobo in Chile.) The question was considered of such import that on 22 May, Hoover wrote to his counterpart, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles, to request assistance and collaboration: “Inasmuch as Mrs. Regina Fischer accompanied her son to South America, it is believed probable that she was with him in Santiago, Chile, during the chess tournament in that city. Accordingly, the possibility exists that Mrs. Fischer may have been in contact with her estranged husband, Gerardo Fischer.”

By the end of September 1959, the FBI at last acknowledged its failure to unearth any real subversion: “It appears the only logical investigation remaining would be an interview of the subject, but due to her mental instability, this line of action is not recommended. Therefore, it is recommended that no further investigation be conducted and this case be closed.”

In spite of that recommendation, a residual watchfulness continued. In 1960, Regina picketed the White House because the State Department refused the U.S. chess team permission to play in that year’s Olympiad in East Germany. Her demonstration provoked many column inches in papers across the nation. A secret service agent reported her movements: She arrived at 10:30 A.M. and departed at 2:33 P.M. She returned to the White House at 4:52 P.M., staying until 5:30 P.M. In the autumn, when Regina moved out of her long-standing Brooklyn home, the FBI dispatched an agent, disguised as a deliveryman, to confirm that she really had settled into her new abode in the Bronx.

During a 1961 “Walk for Peace” from San Francisco to Moscow, sponsored by the Committee for Non-Violent Action, Regina met her second husband, an English left-wing teacher, Cyril Pustan. She relocated to Europe, where the Bureau still took note of her activities: her continued protests in France, West Germany, and Great Britain against the Vietnam War, her attendance in Stockholm on 24 July 1967 at a conference on Vietnam. Finally the FBI gave up, parting company with Regina after nearly a quarter of a century. Regina eventually returned to the United States, where she died of cancer in 1997. (Don Gerardo Fischer Liebscher died on 25 February 1993 in the city of his birth, Berlin.)

Intriguingly, the detailed information in the dossier puts a question mark over Bobby’s official parentage: If Gerhardt was his biological father, when did he and Regina conceive their son? Bobby was born in 1943. While Gerhardt and Regina divorced only in 1945, they were physically apart from 1939, though Regina is reported as saying—presumably in an attempt to explain Bobby—that she and Gerhardt had a 1942 rendezvous in Mexico.

Some continuing relationship between them is indicated by Regina’s making a move to visit her husband in 1944—though there is no hint as to her motive or intention. She applied for a visa to Chile, but the wartime Department of State returned the forms to her because some details were missing. In May 1945, she presented a statement from the University of Chile offering her a place as a student. She never took this up: the divorce came through four months later. The FBI files contain no evidence that Gerhardt tried to join her in the United States before or after Bobby’s birth. What is more, on several occasions she confessed to not having seen her husband since 1939.

If not Gerhardt, who? For reasons never elucidated—always blanked out—there are copious notes on Dr. Paul Felix Nemenyi in the files on Regina. He is described as having a large nose, large knobby fingers, and an awkward, slovenly walk and dress.

Born into a Jewish family in Fiume in Hungary on 5 June 1895, Nemenyi was educated at the Institute of Technology in Budapest and in Berlin. He then held research fellowships in Copenhagen and Imperial College, London. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States. There he worked as a mathematics teacher and later as a mechanical engineer in a highly sensitive post in the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. His expertise was in fluid mechanics. He died at a dance in Washington, D.C, on 1 March 1952. The FBI suspected that he too was a communist.

The notes offer an account of the relationship between Regina and Paul that points in one direction only: Nemenyi was Bobby’s biological father. A year before Bobby was born, Nemenyi befriended Regina when he was an assistant mathematics professor in Colorado. After Bobby was born, he took a special interest in the child. When Regina moved to Washington with her new baby, it looks as if it was Dr. Nemenyi who found her an apartment to stay in and paid the rent. After she relocated to New York, he paid for Bobby’s attendance at Brooklyn Community College and sent Regina $20 a week. He seemed to visit his son often enough for Bobby to become attached to him. At one stage, in 1948, the Bureau discovered Nemenyi telling a social worker that he was very upset about the way Bobby was being brought up, particularly because of the “instability of the mother.”

Letters written to and by Nemenyi’s son, Peter, who became a civil rights activist, are now available and appear to put the identity of Bobby’s biological father beyond doubt. In the month his father died, Peter wrote to Bobby’s psychiatrist, Dr. Kline, asking for advice on who should inform Bobby of Nemenyi’s death; he assumed the doctor knew that Nemenyi was Bobby Fischer’s father. The following month, Begina wrote to Peter complaining that she had no money for food or to repair Bobby’s shoes. Bobby had been feverish, but she could not afford a doctor. In an imploring tone, she asked whether Nemenyi had left Bobby any money. She told Peter that Bobby was still expecting Nemenyi’s visits; she had not told him of the death.

It seems unlikely that anybody ever told him. If the FBI had not delved so carefully into Regina’s life, and if Bobby Fischer, the world chess champion, had not remained an object of fascination for press and public to this day, his family secret would have remained just that.