King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game

by Paul Hoffman

  In a chess world full of oversize characters, Wojtkiewicz was still a standout. He was equal part hustler and naïf, and the stories about him were endless and amusing. Like the time he wandered unknowingly into a gay bar with a male friend and a woman. At some point the woman had a nosebleed and Wojt got the attention of the place when he anxiously and loudly asked the bartender for Vaseline, an old Polish remedy for her affliction. There was also the time that he was staying with friends, disappeared for a weekend without telling them, and returned with no explanation, as if he had just stepped out to buy a paper, except that he was now on crutches.

  Most Tuesdays, when their classes at UMBC were over, Pascal would drive all the way from Baltimore to the New York Masters with Wojt and Jaan Ehlvest,7 an Estonian grandmaster who was Wojt’s roommate. They’d play four games of chess at the Marshall between 7 P.M. and midnight. “I always tried to take my own car,” said Pascal, “so I knew I could get back after the tournament by 3:00 A.M. because I had class again at 9:30 A.M.” Once the two GMs persuaded Pascal to drive Wojt’s car instead. “I was doing seventy to eighty miles per hour on the highway so we’d get there and Wojt says, ‘I have something you’ll like’ and pops a hard-core French porn film into a DVD player that he’s placed on the dash. I couldn’t drive and watch. Anyway, my idea of fun was not raunchy movies with two drunk middle-aged grandmasters.”

  The trip got worse. Wojt and Ehlvest disappeared at midnight, leaving Pascal with the car. “I didn’t feel right driving his car back without them,” he said. They wouldn’t answer their cell phones, and Pascal missed a day of classes. “The next day I went from bar to bar in Manhattan until, after a tip from someone at a social club called Estonia House, I found them, arguing. Wojt can be a loud drunk, and he was accusing Ehlvest of being an Estonian Nazi.”

  Wojtkiewicz lived up to the stereotype of the scheming Russian. To maintain his chess scholarship at UMBC, he signed up for courses like Russian Choir, which he assumed he could pass without attending by just making an arrangement with the teacher, who was Russian. When Wojt was away from UMBC playing chess during the last week of classes, he realized that he had forgotten to speak to the teacher. He contacted Pascal and another student and asked them to forge a note from him and leave it along with a $100 bottle of cognac in the teacher’s faculty mailbox. “We felt a bit strange doing this,” Pascal admitted. “The mailboxes were open, and I had doubts about whether the cognac would ever make it to the teacher.” When Wojt received an F, he sent a letter of appeal, claiming that he had missed choir because the Baltimore air, unlike the moist Baltic air he was used to, was bad for his vocal cords. He lost his scholarship.

  On July 14, 2006, Wojtkiewicz, forty-three, died in Baltimore of complications of alcoholism. He won his last five tournaments, including the prestigious World Open, played just a few days earlier, over the Fourth of July weekend. At the memorial service in Baltimore, his chess students fondly recalled his tough-love approach to teaching. Kevin McPherson, a rated expert, described how he had proudly shown Wojt some games from the World Open. Wojt laughed as he played through them and asked after almost every move, “Why didn’t you play here?” Finally, at one particular juncture, he paused respectfully. “Kevin,” he said, “I’ve been teaching you for four years, you’ve spent thousands on chess lessons and finally, you play a good move!”

  PASCAL AT LAST HAD KNEE SURGERY, AFTER HIS FRESHMAN YEAR, BACK IN Montreal. That ended any dreams he had of a tennis career, but he claimed that the accident was one of the best things to happen to his chess. During the period of recuperation—he was the youngest person in a facility that catered to amputees—he diligently studied chess for the first time in his life. “I was fuzzy from painkillers,” he said, “but some of what I studied must have sunk in.” In August 2003, ten weeks after the operation, he achieved two grandmaster norms in a single month, at the Montreal International and at the prestigious Continental Championships for the Americas in Buenos Aires, where he tied for third through eighth place in a strong 151-person field that included thirty grandmasters. His performance in Buenos Aires qualified him for the second time for the 2004 World Championship in Tripoli.

  LIBYA, WITH NO KNOWN CHESS TRADITION AND A QUARTER CENTURY OF isolation, was a peculiar place to stage an international chess championship, particularly because players from Israel, a powerhouse of ex-Soviet talent, did not seem to be welcome.8 Not many Americans had been to Libya since 1969, when Muammar Gadhafi, a twenty-seven-year-old army officer, staged a coup against the ruling constitutional monarch. My view of Gadhafi was shaped in the 1980s, when the United States considered Libya to be more of a threat than the Soviet Union. Gadhafi, whom Ronald Reagan famously called “the mad dog of the Middle East,” had all but invented global terrorism. By funding guerilla organizations around the world, Gadhafi hoped to undermine countries allied with Israel, which he pledged “to drive into the sea.” In 1972, he reportedly financed the Palestinian massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich. In 1986, Libyan agents blew up a Berlin nightclub that was frequented by U.S. servicemen, and Reagan retaliated by bombing Gadhafi’s compound in Tripoli. Gadhafi narrowly survived, but his fifteen-month-old adopted daughter and fifteen others died. The United States held him responsible for the era’s deadliest terrorist attack, the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people.

  By the summer of 2004, when Gadhafi put up $1.5 million for the World Championship, the Libyan leader had apparently mellowed. He was suggesting that Jews and Palestinians live together harmoniously in a land called Israetine. While not admitting that he was involved in Lockerbie, he paid $2.7 billion to the families of the deceased. And most significant of all for the world community, he renounced his quest for weapons of mass destruction (even if he did not account for missing nuclear equipment) and permitted international inspectors to oversee the dismantling of his weapons laboratories.

  Gadhafi’s conversion to nuclear pacifism was a coup for the Bush administration. Washington claimed that Gadhafi disarmed because he didn’t want to go the way of Saddam Hussein. In October 2003, the United Nations rewarded Gadhafi by lifting the sanctions that had left his country economically and culturally isolated. Four months later the Bush administration ended the ban on U.S. citizens traveling to Libya, but did not remove the country from the list of states that sponsored terrorism. In May 2004, when Pascal and I were planning our trip to Tripoli, the United States seemed on the verge of resuming diplomatic ties with Libya. The chess championship would be the benign new Libya’s first international sporting event, a high-profile opportunity for Gadhafi to show the world that his country was now a peace-loving Mediterranean paradise with a lot of history, where hostilities would be confined strictly to the chessboard.9 Not everyone bought the conversion: the United States Chess Federation declared Libya unsafe for American players and discouraged them from going.

  Despite the USCF’s warning, I was excited about the trip. However, there was the practical issue of money: Washington made it hard to spend any in Tripoli. The Web site of the U.S. State Department said that Americans were free to visit Libya, but could not use credit cards or write personal checks—and ATMs did not exist. I assumed traveler’s checks were permitted, and I called the State Department to make sure. “Cash only,” an expert on Libya told me. Even though UN sanctions had been lifted, the U.S. Treasury Department had not yet eased monetary restrictions. “But, don’t worry,” the expert added, “you probably won’t have to spend money. Gadhafi will treat you like royalty and keep you safe.”

  The Libyan organizers had promised bodyguards to all the players. I was hoping they’d look like Gadhafi’s own reputed security detail, gorgeous machine-gun-toting women in skintight outfits and stiletto high heels. As an added safety measure, the State Department advised me to register before my trip with the Belgian embassy in Tripoli, which, in the absence of a U.S. embassy, had some limited power to handle the needs of Americans wh
o got in trouble. As a Canadian citizen, Pascal was fortunately not bound by U.S. Treasury Department regulations. We presumed that if we ran low on money he could use a credit card. We did not know that in Tripoli none of the restaurants, and only a single hotel, actually accepted credit cards.

  I had read an article about the abysmal state of health care in Libya. Poor Libyans who needed medical care went across the border into neighboring countries and wealthier Libyans flew to Europe. More than four hundred children had been infected with HIV through improperly screened blood transfusions. Rather than acknowledging and addressing the awful mistake, the government framed five Bulgarian nurses. A mock court convicted them on trumped-up charges and sentenced them to execution by firing squad. The Bulgarians had been on death row for two months before the chess championship. The incident became an international scandal and an impediment to the normalization of trade between Libya and the European Union. A host of European prime ministers and scientific superstars, such as Luc Montagnier, the co-discoverer of the HIV virus, had pleaded to no avail with Muammar Gadhafi to reverse the death sentences.

  When I registered by e-mail with the U.S. Interests Section of the Belgian embassy, I asked where I should go if I had a medical problem. I explained I had allergies that seemed under control but in the past had landed me in the emergency room. The Belgian attaché in Tripoli wrote back that Libya had fine English-speaking physicians and that, because my host was Gadhafi himself, he would undoubtedly make sure that I received the best care. But the attaché gave me his cell phone number just in case.

  The next step was obtaining a visa. I could not get one in the United States because of the absence of diplomatic relations. I was in contact by e-mail with Nijar Al El Haj, the head of the North African Chess Federation and chief organizer of the championship, who promised that a journalist’s visa would be waiting for me when I arrived. I asked Nijar if he could arrange for me to meet Gadhafi and play a friendly game of chess with him as a symbol of the emerging relationship between his country and mine. To grease the way for an interview, I shamelessly noted that many great world figures—Napoleon, Franklin, Trotsky, Lenin—had been fine chess players. Nijar quickly responded that Mohammed Gadhafi, Muammar’s son and presumed heir apparent, would certainly meet with me and that the two of them would try to set up an interview with Leader, as Gadhafi senior was called.

  My friend Matt was ecstatic that I would be meeting Gadhafi junior. “Mohammed the son!” he e-mailed me. “The weed of the desert! That is cool. I like the term Leader with no name attached. A little Hitlerish. You and junior can discuss your respective father-son issues.”

  Nijar and I stayed in touch by e-mail, and I kept gently pressing him to arrange the meeting with Leader and offered new reasons why Leader might want to speak to the American people through me. My pandering disgusted some of my Jewish friends. Others thought I was crazy to go to Libya at a time when, in the wake of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, kidnappings and beheadings of Americans were on the rise. Matt joked that it was a good thing I was already a two-fingered typist and suggested that my chess book be called Where’s the Rest of Me? An Iranian friend said that I might finally learn the identity of my dad’s father after Libyan intelligence agents tracked him down to see if he was Jewish. Joel Lautier told me to remember to say Salaam Aleikum not Shalom Alechem—“These few different letters could save your life or spell your doom.” My wife worried that it would be a mistake for me to try to crush Gadhafi at the chessboard.

  For my part, I had a nightmare about Bush having a sudden change of heart toward Gadhafi and following Reagan’s lead in blowing up his tent while I happened to be playing chess inside. I even called the State Department one last time to tell them which days I might be with Gadhafi and request that they keep the cruise missiles away. The woman who answered the phone laughed and promised to relay my itinerary to the commander in chief.

  Everything pointed to a smooth trip. Our plan was for Pascal to pick me up in Woodstock on his drive from Irina’s home in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, to Montreal, where we would say au revoir to his parents, take the red-eye to London, spend one night in an airport hotel, and catch a connecting British Airways flight to Tripoli on June 17, 2004, the day before the opening ceremony.

  A week before we set out, Bush complicated my travel plans by changing his mind. On June 9, the White House accused Gadhafi of masterminding a plot to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and hinted at the possibility of renewed sanctions. On June 13, the day before we left for Montreal, I received an unsigned e-mail from Tripoli addressed not to me personally, as Nijar’s chatty e-mails were, but to “Dear Sir.” It said my visa was ready at the Libyan embassy in the United States. The problem was that there was no such embassy. I thought maybe they meant the Libyan consulate to the United Nations, but a clerk there told me Tripoli hadn’t authorized a visa.

  The next morning I called Nijar, but the Libyan phone system was not reliable and it took me two hours to get through. Nijar apologized about the “silly new rules” that required all press to get visas in their country of origin, a seeming impossibility for an American. I told him I was on my way to Montreal and asked whether a visa could be issued at the Libyan embassy in London during my one-day stopover. Failing that, I proposed that I change my status from press to “accompanying person” and get my visa in Tripoli with Pascal. Nijar explained that it was too late to claim I wasn’t a journalist because my request to interview Leader was now “at the highest level.” He chuckled and said the government had read everything I’d ever written. He said that he would try to get a press visa issued in London and asked me to call him the next day before I boarded the plane in Montreal. I got up early, at 4:00 A.M., and started phoning Libya. It took four hours to get a clear connection. Nijar said he had arranged for me to attend the championship as Pascal’s second, or coach, and obtain my visa in Tripoli.

  I told Pascal about the new arrangement. “That’s very cool,” he said. “I’ve never had a second before. This will be great.”

  9

  GADHAFI’S GAMBIT AND MR. PAUL

  “The threat is mightier than the execution.”

  —ARON NIMZOWITSCH

  “We did not and will not invite the Zionist enemies to this [chess] championship.”

  —MOHAMMED GADHAFI

  EARLY ON IN OUR TRIP, IT WAS CLEAR THAT PASCAL WOULD do anything to avoid preparing for the World Championship. The first flight of our journey to Libya—a British Airways red-eye from Montreal to London—put us down in Heathrow at about 8:00 A.M. Pascal’s original plan was to check in early to the airport hotel, spend most of the day preparing for Etienne Bacrot, and then go downtown in the evening because, for all his international chess travel, he had never been to London before. But then we couldn’t get into our hotel room for a few hours, and when we did, he wanted to nap. And when he got up in the late afternoon, he decided to help me with my own chess.

  I was puzzled by a critical, razor-sharp line in the Dragon. He showed me an amazing continuation in which Black sacrificed his queen for a rook and a minor piece but effectively fought on because of the power of his two bishops raking the board.1 This was the first time we had done chess together, and I liked that he took my questions seriously and evidently enjoyed the positions we examined. I was grateful for his help, but wondered if it was the best time. “Shouldn’t you be working on your own chess?” I said. “If I remember correctly, you’re playing for the World Championship in three days.”

  “I know,” he said, laughing. “But I’m allergic to studying. I always put it off. If I weren’t helping you, I’d find another diversion.” Indeed, as soon as we were finished with the Dragon, he got on the Internet and smashed grandmasters at three-minute chess. Two hours and some twenty games later, it was time for dinner. We decided to eat nearby rather than go out on the town, in case the spirit finally moved him to prepare for Tripoli.

  It was raining hard, and the concierge recommended a
n old pub called the White Horse. “It’s five to ten minutes away, depending on how fast you walk, lads,” he said. “Just go through the door into the parking lot. Take an immediate left. When you reach the street, take another left. Follow the road and it will be on your right.” The directions could not have been simpler.

  Pascal and I headed out the door, and he started walking straight across the parking lot. I reminded him that the man had said to go left, and Pascal backtracked and followed me. When we reached the road, he wanted to turn right. Then, after I steered him in the proper direction, he was impatient when we didn’t immediately see the pub, and he persuaded me to abandon our search before ten minutes had passed. We went back to the hotel and asked the concierge to repeat the directions. This time when we reached the street where we were supposed to turn left, Pascal wanted to keep going straight. We needed to duck into a shop and confirm the directions before he was convinced we were heading the right way.

  He was amused now by his failure to find the pub. “I can be really stupid,” he said. I was delighted by his self-deprecating sense of humor, which set him apart in a chess world full of arrogant men who were too insecure ever to admit weakness. But I was also slightly taken aback: Pascal had neglected to tell me that one of my jobs as his second was to make sure he didn’t get lost.2 Here was someone who could beat me at chess blindfolded, ably navigate his way around a basketball or tennis court, but could not find his way to dinner.3 His inadequate sense of direction was surprising because spatial-relations ability and chess skill seemed to be closely linked (and numerous clinical studies had shown a strong correlation between spatial ability and athleticism). Moreover, by his own admission, it was the geometry of the chessboard, and mathematical motifs involving the respective ways the pieces moved, that he found so beguiling about the game.