Chess Champ Fischer Maneuvers to Avoid Extradition

TOKYO, July 29 -- Chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer has been detained in an airport jail for about two weeks, facing deportation from Japan to the United States. But after 12 years of dodging U.S. law enforcement since playing a 1992 match in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions, Fischer, 61, has devised a strategy for his next move, a spokesman said Thursday.

Fischer, a U.S. citizen who has broadcast anti-American and anti-Jewish rants during his exile, might now seek German citizenship to avoid extradition to the United States for trial, his representatives in Tokyo said Thursday. Fischer's father was believed to have been born in Germany, and Fischer's mother was Jewish.

"He may have lost his queen . . . but this is not checkmate yet," said John Bosnitch, a Tokyo-based media representative now advising Fischer.

Though the probability of success is uncertain, authorities said Fischer's maneuvering could delay a final decision on his fate -- perhaps for months. It marks the latest twist in a saga as intricate as one of Fischer's own brain-twisting battles of wills -- this one designed to avoid a return trip to the United States.

It would undoubtedly be an unwelcome homecoming for the New York City boy who brought an unlikely pizazz to the bookish game of chess. A strategic genius and eccentric personality, he became a celebrated Cold War hero after besting Boris Spassky, the Soviet chess king, in a historic 1972 championship match in Reykjavik, Iceland. Noted for his bizarre behavior at matches and brief adherence to a religious cult, Fischer faded into moderate obscurity by the early 1980s.

He emerged from retirement for the fateful 1992 rematch with Spassky in Yugoslavia. Fischer won, but U.S. officials said Fischer's $3 million prize money was earned in violation of U.S. and U.N. bans on doing business there.

He was charged in the United States in 1992 with violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. He has been on the run ever since, avoiding a U.S. warrant while living off his earnings and the largess of his fans from Argentina to Switzerland. He also promoted a variation of chess that he designed, "Fischer Random Chess."

Often, Fischer would pop up in an exotic locale to condemn what he called the evils of "world Jewry" or rage against the "evil dictatorship" of the United States. On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio station in the Philippines that the attacks on New York and the Pentagon were "wonderful news. . . . I want to see the U.S. wiped out."

The chase for the champ ended in Japan, where Fischer was nabbed at Tokyo's Narita Airport on July 13 for traveling on an invalid passport. He had been darting in and out of the country since 2000, when he entered into talks with Seiko Watch Corp. to manufacture his design for a new chess clock, said Miyoko Watai, secretary general of the Japan Chess Club. The club provided him with an apartment when he was in Tokyo.

All sides acknowledge that the case against him is complicated. Fischer last entered Japan on a valid, 90-day visa in April, according to a copy of his passport available on his Web site and provided to reporters by his representatives in Tokyo. On Nov. 6, 2003, Fischer had gone to the U.S. Embassy in Bern, Switzerland, and was given additional pages to his passport.

A letter Fischer never received, according to his spokesman, and issued by the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines in December, advised him that his passport was being revoked. But it is unclear why U.S. authorities took so long to revoke his passport, given the outstanding warrant. A U.S. official, speaking on the condition he not be named, acknowledged that Fischer had been given the extra passport pages in Switzerland, but he said the act was contrary to U.S. law. He described Fischer's ability to use his U.S. passport for years as "a mystery."

Fischer's supporters allege that he is being sought in reprisal for his political beliefs and particularly for his comments in the Philippines about Sept. 11.

"This is unfair confinement," said Bosnitch, adding that Fischer considers himself a "political prisoner."

But Fischer may yet have a way out.