Chess and Spies

 

During the Civil War, there were rumors that Paul Morphy was working for General Pierre G.T. Beauregard (1818-1893) as a confederate spy. In October, 1861, Morphy travelled to Richmond, Virginia, the capitol of the Confederacy. He met with General Beauregard , a friend of the Morphy family. Morphy was seeking to obtain an appointment in the diplomatic service of the southern confederacy because of his foreign language skills. (Frances Parkinson Keyes, in her novel The Chess Players, has Morphy an agent for the Confederacy in Europe.)

In 1870, Joseph Henry Blackburne (1841-1924) was placed under house-arrest overnight as a suspected spy while playing in the Baden-Baden chess tournament. It was during the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and the German authorities thought that Blackburne was a French spy in Germany. A German officer came to the hotel where he was staying in Radstadt and told him that he was under arrest and was not permitted to communicate to anyone.

In 1891, world champion William Steinitz was playing a chess game with the Russian player Mikhail Chigorin by cable using abbreviated code for the chess moves. Shortly afterward, the New York police arrested Steinitz as a Russian spy. They assumed that the chess code being sent over cable was a secret spy code. The incident was later cleared up.

In 1916, there was fear that Germans in America were communicating with aides in Canada, through the code used by chess clubs in postal chess.  This fear resulted in a rigid censorship of mail between chess clubs in the USA and Canada.  [source: "Spies Using Chess Claim," St. Joseph News (St. Joseph. MO). May 15 1916, p. 8]

In 1919, Alexander Alekhine was suspected of being a spy and was arrested by the Odessa Cheka. He spent two weeks in the Odessa death cell. He was released when the authorities realized that he was a famous chess player.

In August 1936, Botvinnik tied for 1^st place with Capablanca at the International Tournament in Nottingham.  This was the first tournament victory of a Soviet player outside of the USSR.  After the tournament, Botvinnik sent a telegram to Joseph Stalin thanking him for his victory.  The telegram was printed in Pravda two days after the event ended, thanking the whole nation, the party and Stalin.  It was later learned that the telegram was written in Moscow by Krylenko and that the KGB told Botvinnik to sign it.

In August 1939, the British Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) moved to Bletchley Park (B.P.) in Buckinghamshire, and became known as the Golf Club and Chess Society. The Bletchley Park grounds were fenced in and huts were completed for cryptographers to work in. The guards were told their purpose was to keep the “inmates” of this purported lunatic asylum from wandering away. Bletchley Park was chosen because it was halfway between Cambridge and Oxford, the two universities that would serve as the primary sources of cryptoanalytic trainees. Bletchley Park was built to appear as a hospital to deter bombing.

The GCCS was directed by Commander Alastair Denniston, who was convinced of the inevitability of war with Germany. His mission was to decode the German ENIGMA (pictured) messages. The team created the world’s first electronic computer (COLOSSUS), which was kept secret until the 1970s. Denniston believed that chess players had an aptitude for cryptanalysis and tried to recruit chess players and mathematicians.

Sir Philip Stuart Milner-Berry (1906-1995) was a strong international chess player and was hired to be a code breaker when World War II broke out. Milner-Berry was the first to be recruited by Bletchley Park. He then recruited Hugh Alexander and Harry Golombek. Milner-Berry was head of “Hut 6,” a section responsible for deciphering messages which had been encrypted using the German enigma machine. Milner-Berry expressed the intensity of code-breaking in terms of chess. “It was rather like playing a tournament game (sometimes several games) every day for five and a half years.”

One of the members of the Golf Club and Chess Society was Jack Good (1916-2009). He was considered a mathematical genius and the Cambridgeshire chess champion. He was later the technical and scientific advisor for Stanley Kubrick for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Good was recruited by Hugh Alexander, the reigning British chess champion (British champion in 1938 and 1956), to work at Bletchley Park. Good found himself working for Alan Turing deciphering German naval codes. Good and Turing also worked together in Manchester on the first ever computer controlled by an internally stored program.

Harry Golombek, another top British chess player, was hired to work at Bletchley Park as a code breaker. Golombek, Alexander, and Miler-Berry all abandoned the 1939 Chess Olympiad in Buenos Aires to return to Britain and became code breakers.

Another chess player hired to work at Bletchley Park was James McRae Aitken, 10-time Scottish chess champion. He worked in Hut 6.

Another chess player at Bletchley included Donald Michie, who later became involved in artificial intelligence and chess computers.

Shaun Wylie was another strong chess player and mathematician that worked at Bletchley Park.

In view of the chess talent at Bletchley Park, newcomers were advised not to play chess for money with any of the staff.

In 1943, Humphrey Bogart played correspondence chess with military members overseas until the FBI visited him.  The FBI thought that the chess moves were secret codes being sent abroad.  The US and Canadian censors began targeting postal chess games out of fear that the games were being used to send secret messages to enemy forces.  [source: Oberhaus, "The Spy Who Checkmated Me: Why Postal Chess Was Banned During Wartime." vice.com, Mar 25, 2017[

During World War II intercepted communiqués called the Venona files were used to find a pattern of espionage and betrayal in the United States.  One of the agents who was later arrested in 1944 was a chess player who’s cover name was Chess Knight.  He was a KGB officer in Mexico City.

During World War II, the Japanese confiscated chess books from prisoners, thinking they were military code used by spies.

Soviet chess master Georgy Schneiderman-Stepanov was shot just after World War II began by the Soviets. He was shot on suspicion of being a German spy only because there was a German general named Schneiderman.

After the war, Cold War spies in Germany sent postcards back to MI5 containing coded messages written in cryptic text base around a series of postal chess games.  Gordon Thomas, historian for MI5 and MI6, said that chess moves were a common way of communicating during the Cold War.  He also said the Russians in particular favored using chess as a method of communicating.  It was their great national pastime and information would often be disguised as chess moves.  [source: "Correspondence Chess, Code-Breaking, and Espionage," serialbox.com, June 9, 2016]

From the 1940s to the 1980s, the FBI was watching Bobby Fischer’s family, including his mother, Regina.  They followed her, read her mail, and quizzed her neighbors when they suspected that she might be a communist or a spy.

In 1945, Boris Vainstein was the President of the Soviet Chess Federation.  He was also a Colonel in the KGB.    In 1945, he objected to a world championship match between Botvinnik and Alekhine, declaring Alekhine a traitor.  After World War II, the KGB wanted to execute Paul Keres for treason after the Soviet Union acquired Estonia.  In a KGB handbook, a section described how to use chess moves when communicating.  For example, one move could ascertain what was happening and another could give instructions.  Agents would be trained to understand chess moves.

In 1952, a KGB officer accompanied the Soviets (Kotov, Taimanov, Petrosian, Geller, Averbakh) at the 1952 Interzonal in Saltjobaden near Stockholm.

In 1953, a KGB officer accompanied the Soviets at the Candidates tournament in Zurich.  The KGB put a lot of pressure on the Soviet players to assure that Samuel Reshevsky would not win the Candidates tournament.  Bronstein’s second was not allowed to travel to Switzerland because he was known as an officer in the KGB.

In 1955, Boris Spassky played in the World Junior Chess Championship in Antwerp and was accompanied by a KGB officer for fear that he might defect.

In the 1950s, a section in a KGB handbook described how to use chess moves when communicating.  For example, one move could ascertain what was happening and another could give instructions.  Agents would be trained to understand chess moves.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a KGB officer always accompanied chess players who played outside the USSR, including the Interzonals and Candidates tournaments.

In 1956, the Canadian government suspected that the Soviet chess players in Canada were there to spy.  Several Soviets joined chess clubs throughout Canada and were suspected of spying.  All of the Soviet chess players were representatives of the Soviet embassy in Canada.  [source: Brown, "Staples Thinks Reds Played Chess to Spy,"  Ottawa Journal, Sep 25, 1956. p. 2]

In 1958, the FBI and the CIA worried that the Soviets might recruit Bobby Fischer when he made a trip to Moscow that year.  Frank Brady wrote in Endgame, “What no one knew was that the FBI was investigating Bobby, and had been for years.  Their interest in him may have been triggered by their belief that his mother was a Communist, in part because she’d spent six years in Moscow attending medical school; they’d been investigating Regina since Bobby was a child.  When Bobby went to Moscow in 1958, when he was fifteen, the FBI presumed that Regina had sent him there to be indoctrinated.”  Just after Bobby Fischer appeared on I’ve Got a Secret and won a trip to Moscow in 1958, the FBI immediately phoned their CIA contact in Moscow to make sure Bobby’s activities were monitored while he was in the USSR.

The Central Chess Club in Moscow had a KGB officer assigned to it.

In 1962, at the Curacao Candidates Tournament, a KGB officer accompanied the Soviet grandmasters (Petrosian, Keres, Geller, Korchnoi, Tal).

In Washington, D.C. during the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet embassy had a resident chess expert on staff that was later identified as a KGB agent.  He was Lev Zaitsev, the Soviet cultural attaché, a chess expert and a KGB colonel.  He had been assigned to the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada and in Washington, DC.

In 1968, Yuri Linev, a KGB agent, gained Ludek Pachman’s trust after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.  Pachman made secret radio broadcasts against the Soviets and Linev passed that information to the authorities and arrested Pachman.

In the 1970s, Viktor D. Baturinsky  (1914-2002) was the Vice President of the USSR Chess Federation and former director of Moscow’s Chess Club.  He headed up Karpov’s delegation from 1974 to 1984.  He was a KGB Colonel.  

In 1971, Boris Spassky was invited to a small town in the USSR to give a lecture and a simul.  After the lecture, a secret report denouncing Spassky was sent to the KGB.   Spassky had made the mistake of saying one of his favorite authors was Solzhenitsyn and that Spassky complained of his salary and mentioned that his grandfather was a priest.  During the lecture, he also mentioned that if he had not become a chess player, he preferred to be a priest.

In 1972, the Soviets accused the CIA of  bugging Boris Spassky’s chair during the Fischer-Spassky world chess championship match in Iceland.  Both chairs were later X-rayed and no electronic bugs were found.  During the world championship match, Fischer complained that KGB men were in the hall trying to hypnotize him.  There were KGB agents at the event as well as Viktor Bubnov, who was from the Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, and had different priorities because of the NATO and American bases at Iceland. At one point, Fischer complained that KGB men in the playing hall were trying to hypnotize him. After Bobby Fischer won the world chess championship in 1972, he stated that he feared assassination by the KGB, which was one of the reasons why he refused to play chess after his match with Boris Spassky.  

In the 1970s, preventing dissident Soviet chess players from winning matches and tournaments was a priority of KGB foreign operations.  One of their missions was to discredit dissident chess players who had emigrated to the West.

In 1974, there may have been an effort by the CIA to entice Soviet grandmasters  to defect to “the West.”

In 1975, Karpov was accompanied by Vladimir Pichtchenko, a KGB agent, when Karpov played in tournaments outside the USSR.

In July 1976, the KGB spied on Boris Spassky during his visit to Singapore.

In 1977, Natan Sharansky was sent to prison by Soviets on a trumped up charge of spying for the Americans.  He spent 9 years in a Siberian prison.  He kept sane by playing chess.  [source: "Natan Sharansky: How chess kept one man sane,: BBC News, Jan 3, 2014]

During the 1978 world chess championship in the Philippines, there were at least 18 KGB officers in attendance trying to ensure Korchnoi’s defeat against Karpov.   Korchnoi claimed he was “hypnotized” by KGB agents to play badly.

In 1979, Grandmaster Lev Alburt defected from the USSR.  Speaking at Harvard’s Russian Research Center, Alburt said some Soviet grandmasters were “used as KGB infiltrators.”

In 1980, Igor Ivanov was part of a Russian chess team that played in a Cuban chess event.  On a returning refueling stop in Newfoundland, Igor Ivanov ran from the plane, chased by KGB agents.  He successfully defected from the USSR.

In 1982, Boris Gulko was beaten up and arrested by KGB agents for demonstrating in front of the Moscow Interzonal.

In 1983, when Garry Kasparov first went abroad to play in chess tournaments, he was accompanied by Viktor Litvinov, a KGB lieutenant colonel from Azerbaijan and Kasparov’s former “manager.”  While in London, Litvinov was seen talking to dissident Viktor Korchnoi as was later reprimanded by the high command.  In the first Karpov-Kasparov match held in Moscow, some American journalists brought a pile of chess newspapers to the press room.  One of the newspapers carried a cartoon of a boxing match between Karpov and Kasparov, with Karpov having been knocked to the canvas.   The KGB was there to quickly confiscate the newspaper.

In 1984, Josif Dorfman worked as a second to Garry Kasparov.  In august 1984, before the first Karpov-Kasparov world championship match, Dorfman offered to sell information to Karpov.  He was paid 1,600 rubles.  When Dorfman demanded more money, Karpov refused.  

In 1985, Josif Dorfman was offered up to $150,000 to continue spying on Kasparov.  When he hesitated, Dorfman was shadowed and blackmailed, and his family got death threats.  [source: Evans, "Writer Documents Russian Chess Scandal," Sun Sentinel (Florida), Nov 21, 1993]

In 1991, the KGB was disbanded and the Federal Security Service (FSB) was created afterward.

In 1998, Regina Fischer’s 750-page FBI file became publicly available after her death in 1997.

In 2006, VesselinTopalov was reprimanded and faced a chess ban from FIDE for violating the Code of Ethics by linking Vladimir Kramnik to the KGB in an interview for a Spanish newspaper.

In 2008, RoustanKamsky, father of Gata Kamsky, wrote an article on how the KGB influenced the world of chess and politics thru advertising and the press. According to The KGB Plays Chess by Boris Gulko, Vladimir Popov (ex-KGB), and Yuri Felshtinsky, chess players that were recruited by the KGB include: Yuri Averbakh, Viktor Baturinsky, Florencio Campomanes, Eduard Gufeld, Nikolai Krogius, Alexander Nikitin, Tigran Petrosian, Lev Polugaevsky, Alexander Roshal, and Rafael Vaganian.  

Alexander Kotov was reported as a KGB agent in Fyodor Bogatyrchuk’s book, My Way to General Vlasov. The widow of Kotov wrote to Averbakh, a friend of Kotov,  asking why he allowed the publication of this book in is chess magazine Chess in Russia.  Averbakh responded, “since when has it been considered that shameful to be a KGB agent?”

In 2009, a book was published in Russia called The KGB Plays Chess. The authors are a Russian-American historian, a former KGB lieutenant colonel, Viktor Korchnoi, and Boris Gulko. The book describes the interferences of the Russian KGB in the course of world chess.