TOKYO – Bobby Fischer, the chess world’s most eccentric star, was taken into custody after trying to fly out of Japan with an invalid passport.
His arrest may involve the United States and Japan in a series of moves and countermoves.
Wanted by U.S. authorities for attending a 1992 match in Yugoslavia despite international sanctions, the American former world champion had managed to stay one move ahead of the law by living abroad and being sheltered by chess devotees.
It was not immediately clear if Fischer would be handed over to the United States under its extradition treaty with Japan. But his detention gives Japan a chance to show its cooperation with the United States just days before officials plan to bring an accused U.S. Army deserter, Charles Robert Jenkins, to Tokyo for urgent medical treatment – a case Japanese officials want Washington to overlook.
Jenkins, whose Japanese wife was kidnapped by North Korea in 1978 and returned home in 2002, is wanted by Washington on desertion charges for allegedly defecting to North Korea in 1965. He is suffering from complications after abdominal surgery in North Korea.
Fischer was detained at Narita Airport outside Tokyo after trying to board a Japan Airlines flight to the Philippines on Tuesday, according to friends and airport officials. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Friday a U.S. consular official had visited Fischer in detention but that he could reveal no further information.
Fischer “didn’t know that his passport had been revoked,” said Japan Chess Association member Miyoko Watai. “He had been traveling frequently over the past 10 years, and there was never a problem. I don’t understand why his passport was revoked.”
Watai said she had talked to Fischer in custody. She said he was told he would be deported and was planning to appeal.
Considered by many the best chess player ever, Fischer, now 61, became a grandmaster at age 15. In 1972, he became the first American world champion and a Cold War hero for his defeat of Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union in a series of matches in Iceland.
The event was given tremendous symbolic importance, pitting the intensely individualistic young American against a product of the grim and soulless Soviet Union.
It also was marked by Fischer’s odd behavior – possibly calculated psychological warfare against Spassky – that ranged from arriving two days late to complaining about the lighting, TV cameras, the spectators, even the shine on the table.
Fischer was world champion until 1975, when he forfeited the title and withdrew from competition because conditions he demanded proved unacceptable to the International Chess Federation.
After that, he lived in secret outside the United States. He emerged in 1992 to confront Spassky again, in a highly publicized match in Yugoslavia. Fischer beat Spassky 10-5 to win $3.35 million.
The U.S. government said Fischer’s playing the match violated U.N. sanctions against Yugoslavia, imposed for Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic’s role in fomenting war in the Balkans.
Over the years, Fischer gave occasional interviews with a radio station in the Philippines, often digressing into anti-Semitic rants and accusing American officials of hounding him.
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