Bobby Fischer FBI Files Released Under FOIA

An anonymous reader writes: "Philidelphia Inquirer has a stroy detailing the results of a FOIA request for chess great Bobby Fischer." Turns out they thought the anti-semitic chess grandmaster(and his mother) was a soviet spy.

Comments

The worth of Bobby Fischer

[King of the World]

Just in case anyone was wondering whether the FBI were getting this guy all wrong here's Bobby Fischer's radio call-in on 9/11 applauding the terrorists [mp3] [Newspaper report on Bobby Fischer's 9/11 radio call].

Consider this...

[rufusdufus]

Bobby Fischer's wild paranoid anti-semitic rants really make him come across as a total asshole.
Some time after he was locked out of the USA by the state department, he would go onto foreign radio shows and say the most outrageous things.

In his own opinion, he did more for the image of the US during the cold war than any other individual. Indeed.

And they fucked his family and him over. Instead of respect he got suspicion and hounding.

So perhaps in his own opinion, he can do more to damage the image of the USA by spouting off. Retracting and degrading everything he did for the US image.

Trying to take back what he gave them.

National Security

[Detritus]

The FBI did have a legitimate national security interest in the Fischers. His mother lived and attended medical school in the Soviet Union. The KGB and GRU recruited agents from foreign students attending schools in the Soviet Union. His father fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. That in itself isn't a problem, but it puts him in a group that was heavily infiltrated and influenced by the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence operations. The FBI didn't have the right to harass the Fischers, but I think they had a legitimate national security interest in investigating their activities to see if they were involved in espionage or other crimes. The CPUSA (Communist Party USA) was heavily involved in Soviet espionage operations.

Re:In the words of Ben Kingsley,

[LinuxGeek]

A truely great movie, I've watched it about ten times over the last few years. It has a great Bobby Fischer narrative woven into the story of Josh Waitzkin that prompted me to read more about Mr. Fischer. I have gotten the impression that he and his family were hounded enough by the FBI to drive them towards the mindset that they were being investigated for in the first place.

Bobby Fischer seemed to drop his interaction with most people when the FBI would investigate the people he came into contact with. It would be enough to make me very paranoid at a minimum. When I try to emulate his perspective based on his approach to chess, it gets more interesting.

Look at a chess board and see a massive parallel and deep attack. The pieces only represent positions, the real battle is mental between two powers. Victory comes from overpowering and outlasting your opponent. If you loose concentration and perspective, it is easy for your opponent to start using your own pieces against you by limiting your movments with your pieces. That seems to explain his withdrawal from public interaction, he limited the liability of having others around that would be a liability. He would have seen the FBI as an opponent with thousands of pieces that had to be controlled. If most of those that would be considered his opponents could only focus on him, then they became the ones that had limited movment and got in each others way.

It is late and I may be rambling a bit, but for a perspective on the different level of mental capability Bobby Fischer has over the average person,
read this google cached page about Josh Waitzkin and try to relate. Josh has studied Bobby Fischer in great depth and can see many of the flaws in Bobby's game/life. From what I can see from Bobby Fischers perspective, I would have become a paraniod freak from the pressures that he and his family endured.