Bobby arrived in Bern at the end of October 2003, checked into an inexpensive hotel, and the next afternoon went to the U.S. embassy on Sulgeneckstrasse. Although he didn’t know the Bernese dialect, his German was fluent enough to be understood easily, and since it was the U.S. embassy, everybody spoke English anyway. He was told that his passport would be taken apart and then new pages would be inserted. The process would take about ten days. Bobby gave the authorities the address of his hotel and his cell phone number and asked if they could call him when the reconstructed passport was ready.
When he returned to the hotel, he checked out immediately. A short time later, he took the train to Zurich about one hour away and registered at an upscale hotel there, using an assumed name. All of this cloak-and-dagger movement was a way of hiding his whereabouts should the embassy at Bern be informed by Washington that a warrant had been issued for his arrest and his passport should be confiscated. It’s true that the embassy had his cell phone number, but he’d left no forwarding address at the Bern hotel. If the authorities came after him in Zurich, he could probably make an escape before they arrived. As it developed, after about a week he called the embassy himself and discovered that all was welclass="underline" His passport was waiting for him.
Back at Bern he wondered if it was a trap, if the moment he entered the embassy he’d be arrested. He took the chance and walked into the building as nonchalantly as he could. Voilà! The documents clerk handed him his passport, and he remarked to her how nice it looked with the twenty-four new pages perfectly sewn in. With the knowledge that his old passport was good until 2007, he then flew “home” to Tokyo.
Barely six weeks later the Department of Justice sent him a letter revoking his passport, stating that the revocation was issued because he was “the subject of an outstanding federal warrant of arrest for a felony,” which didn’t refer by name to the Fischer-Spassky match of 1992, but made reference to the U.S. Code under which Fischer was accused: the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Title 50, Sections 1701, 1702, and 1705, signed by President George H. W. Bush.
There were problems with the revocation of the passport, however. Fischer never received the notice and therefore couldn’t appeal it, which according to law he had the right to do. The Justice Department claimed that the letter had been sent to the hotel in Bern (the location Bobby had given to the embassy) and was returned to them with no forwarding address appended. It was dated December 11, 2003, and when a faxed copy of the letter was ultimately examined, it didn’t have an address for Fischer on it, the implication being that the embassy had never sent the letter to Bern. According to law, Bobby would have had sixty days for a hearing and perhaps another sixty days to confront the appeal if it didn’t go his way. Such a hearing would only determine whether he was the subject of the warrant for arrest and whether the proper procedures for his application had been in effect when he applied for the passport renewal in 1997. The law stated that a passport “shall not be issued to an applicant subject to a federal arrest warrant or subpoena for any matter involving a felony.” One of two things had to be operative in Bern in 1997: Either the State Department made a clerical mistake in issuing him a renewed passport at that time, or else Fischer didn’t indicate on his application that he was a wanted felon. If he’d lied by omission, he would have been guilty of fraud, a charge that could have been added to his sanction violation and his income tax evasion.
Had he received the notice, his appeal—had he attempted it—would probably have been denied, but it might have given him some time to travel to another country, or to some hideout—perhaps somewhere in Switzerland, such as the Alps—to avoid arrest.
Not knowing that his arrest was imminent, and believing that his passport was legal, on July 13, 2004, he went to Narita Airport in Tokyo to board a plane bound for Manila. He was arrested and shackled in chains.
One of the first things Fischer tried to do while he was behind bars was to ask permission to call someone—perhaps an attorney who could assist with setting bail. The authorities wouldn’t permit him access to a telephone, however. People who violate Japanese law, even unknowingly, may be arrested, imprisoned, and deported. They may also be held in detention for a minor offense, without bail, for months or more during investigation and legal proceedings. Bobby’s claim that he was an American citizen and had a right to make a phone call was ignored.
Twenty-four hours later, an immigration official at the airport called Miyoko to tell her what had happened, and she immediately contacted an attorney and headed for the airport detention facility to see Bobby—but when she arrived there, visiting hours were over. She did see him the next day, for thirty minutes. “He was so upset, and I didn’t know what to say to console him,” she told a journalist.
Fischer was kept in the Narita Airport Detention Center for illegal immigrants for almost a month on the initial charge that he was attempting to travel on an invalid passport, but the more serious charge echoed back to 1992, for defying the American trade embargo and participating in the match with Spassky in the former Yugoslavia. It’s possible that Fischer’s broadcasts were the fuel that sparked the U.S. government to activate the decade-old charge against him. Certainly, the Department of Justice wanted him deported back to the United States to stand trial for his violations, possibly in concert with the Department of the Treasury, for income tax evasion. Miyoko, for her part, thought that U.S. authorities could have arrested Bobby anytime post-1992, but they didn’t and only went after him when “suddenly he started to attack America and it made the government very angry.”
Bobby was like a caged panther, pacing up and down, continually complaining about everything, from the food, to the temperature, to the disrespect his captors showed him, and screaming at the guards. He wasn’t the ideal prisoner; he was the type of person who couldn’t be incarcerated indefinitely without doing harm to himself or others. As it was, he sparked fights with the jailers and eventually was transferred to the East Japan Immigration Detention Center in Ushiku, forty miles northeast of Tokyo. The center had all of the trappings of a high-security prison, and its inmates were incarcerated there for relatively long periods. Fischer claimed that at sixty-one he was the oldest prisoner in the center and therefore deserved more deference. But his seniority and chess credentials counted little with the guards. Once, when he told the guard who brought him his breakfast that his soft-boiled eggs were really hard-boiled and that he wanted an additional egg, they got into a scuffle. He ended up in solitary confinement for several days and wasn’t permitted visits or even allowed to leave his cell. Another time, he purposely stepped on the glasses of a guard he didn’t like and was given solitary again.
Miyoko visited him a few times each week—a two-hour trip each way from Tokyo—and she brought him newspapers and some money so he could buy extra food (usually natto, which was fermented soybeans) from the jailers. Several people immediately tried to assist Bobby in securing his release, most prominently Masako Suzuki, a brilliant young lawyer who became his chief counsel and most determined advocate, and John Bosnitch, a forty-three-year-old Canadian journalist of Bosnian origin who was stationed in Tokyo. They formed a committee called “Free Bobby Fischer” and worked with others trying to extricate Fischer from his cell. Suzuki filed proceedings to address what she claimed was an illegal arrest. Fischer called it a “kidnapping.”
It isn’t known how much Fischer paid for his legal defense, but it probably wasn’t all that much since Suzuki was receiving pro bono advice and assistance from those who felt Bobby was being persecuted. His plight had become a cause. And although Bosnitch was not a lawyer, he seemed to know the intricacies of the Japanese legal system and was both pleasantly aggressive and courteous, which impressed the lawmakers and officials he had to deal with. He was subsequently named an amicus curiae in Fischer’s case and sat in on and participated in all of the legal proceedings. One of the first orders of business was to prevent Fischer’s deportation to the United States. Bobby believed that if he were brought back and forced to stand trial, he’d be convicted. But that was the least of it. He was convinced that he was so hated by the government that he’d be murdered while serving time. One of the ways he thought the deportation might be prevented, or at least delayed, was for him to become stateless by legally renouncing his citizenship. Then the United States would have less jurisdiction over him. He wanted to stay in Japan.