Our Boor, Their Star -- Fischer to Iceland

On the face of it, Iceland’s decision to save Bobby Fischer from deportation to the United States by offering him citizenship is puzzling.

It’s true that Fischer defeated Soviet world champion Boris Spassky there in 1972 in perhaps the most famous chess match of all time. But since then, his life has descended into an abyss. As world champion, he insisted on so many conditions before he would defend his title that finally the International Chess Federation stripped him of it. He didn’t compete in public again until 1992, when he, arguably, breached U.S. sanctions against war-torn Yugoslavia by playing a rematch there against Spassky, pocketing $3.5 million. (The U.S. Treasury warned Fischer before the match that he risked prosecution.) He’s now considered a fugitive from justice in the United States.

Fischer is also a rabid anti-Semite (though his mother was Jewish). He has raved that “Yids” are taking over the world, that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are Jewish and that the Holocaust never occurred. On leaving Tokyo for Reykjavik on Wednesday, he accused the U.S. of hounding him because it was “Jew-controlled.” He exulted publicly in the Sept. 11 attacks, calling them “wonderful news.” On that day, he went on Filipino radio. “I want to see the U.S. wiped out,” he said.

During the last decade, the reclusive, mercurial chess grandmaster has been spotted only rarely. But last July, he tried to fly from Tokyo to Manila on an invalid U.S. passport and was taken into custody by Japanese authorities. He was held in a Japanese detention center until Wednesday while his attorney and supporters fought to avoid his deportation to the U.S.

So why would Iceland, a U.S. ally since the earliest days of the Cold War, provide this unpredictable, anti-American, anti-Semitic fugitive with a refuge?

The answer is twofold. First, Fischer put Iceland on the map. His chess brilliance and boorish off-the-board antics in the 1972 world championship captured the imagination of the world. Fischer presented his contest against Spassky as a microcosm of the Cold War, a flawed depiction but one accepted by much of the world. The Soviets had dominated the world chess championship since World War II. Now, here was Bobby Fischer, the lone American star, taking on the Soviet system. In the Los Angeles Times and across the U.S., the match in Reykjavik was front-page news for two months, jostling for space with the beginnings of Watergate, the Nixon-McGovern presidential race, Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda, violent protests in Chile, bloody riots in Northern Ireland and energetic Kissinger diplomacy on Vietnam.

Today, Iceland remains both grateful and nostalgic. “We’re a micro-state,” said Thordur Aegir Oskarsson, Iceland’s ambassador to Japan. “And Fischer gave us one of our two moments in history.” (The other, the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit.)

The second explanation for Iceland’s decision is that Fischer always has attracted sympathy. In his chess career, even his most outrageous acts met the response, “It’s only Bobby.”

In Iceland in 1972, his demands for increased prize money, his persistent objections to the lighting, the noise in the audience, the size and color of the chess board and pieces, the whirl of the TV cameras (which he alone could hear), tried the patience of even the most phlegmatic of Icelandic officials, turning the world championship match into a circus. Icelandic chess officials bent the rules -- with the connivance of a sympathetic and overconfident Boris Spassky -- so that the match could continue.

Icelanders can rationalize that Fischer’s state of mind is not that of a dangerous political manipulator but of a deeply disturbed individual. They can argue that his current plight has more to do with 9/11 than with his 13-year-old breach of U.S. sanctions. True, he defied sanctions, but his crime, they point out, only involved moving pieces around a chess board.

Iceland has long punched above its weight in the chess world -- chess provides solace and entertainment during long, dark, winter evenings. In Iceland, chess is more than just a board game, and Fischer is revered for the dazzling chess artist he once was.

Iceland is not going into this arrangement blind: It, of all nations, knows what to expect from Bobby Fischer. Still, its newest citizen is unlikely to take a vow of silence -- and even though the Icelanders are a uniquely generous and welcoming people, one can’t help but wonder if they may soon regret their hospitality.