David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

According to an informer, in the same year that her divorce came through, Regina was recruited to the Communist Political Association (CPA) in Oregon. The CPA was described under Executive Order 9835 as a communist and subversive organization that sought to “alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means” President Truman issued Executive Order 9835 on 22 March 1947, initiating a program to seek out any “infiltration of disloyal persons” in the U.S. government. By December 1952, over 6.6 million people had been secretly investigated—no case of espionage was uncovered.

Was Regina an active member of the CPA? The FBI believe she was expelled in 1950 for being “unfaithful.” But she was certainly politically engaged, at different times belonging to or associated with a variety of left-wing organizations and causes, from the International Workers Order to American Women for Peace and, much later, the Committee for Non-Violent Action. Over the years, the Bureau accumulated further “incriminating evidence” against her. On 15 May 1945, she contacted a Russian employee at the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission in Portland about the possibility of working as a translator. A plumber notified the FBI that he had once found Regina playing what he described as “communist records” and that she tried to influence him to become a member of the Communist Party. A source “with whom contact is insufficient to judge his reliability” told the FBI that Regina had taken her child (singular) to a communist summer camp. And in a judgment demonstrating the institutional politics of Hoover’s FBI, she was accused of exhibiting communist sympathies by picketing an apartment block near her home in a protest against the removal of “a colored family.”

The Bureau judged Regina bright and articulate, but also, in the words of one informer, a “real pain in the neck.” A source described her as “antagonistic” and “argumentative.” It was said that all the tenants in their Brooklyn block disliked the Fischers, and that Regina had a “suit complex,” often initiating legal action against the landlord for “imagined grievances.”

There was also a psychiatric report. Shortly after Bobby was born, Regina took advantage of a Chicago charity, going to stay in the Sarah Hackett Memorial Home for indigent single women with babies. When she wanted her daughter, Joan, to join her and Bobby—since Joan’s fostering had not worked—the charity told her there was no room and that in any event, Joan had a perfectly satisfactory home. (Joan was in St. Louis, perhaps with her grandfather.) Regina smuggled Joan in; the resulting dispute then escalated as Regina tried to rouse the other residents against the managers. She was eventually arrested for disturbing the peace. The judge found her not guilty but ordered a mental health examination. The Municipal Psychiatric Institute diagnosed her as a “stilted (paranoid) personality, querulent [sic] but not psychotic.” The report recommended, “If her small children should suffer because of her obstinacy, juvenile court intervention should be initiated.”

The FBI investigation was not limited to Regina. Special agents gathered information on Jacob, her father, also a left-winger, as well as her brother, Max, “a known Commie” who had moved to Detroit. Because Regina and Ethel, Jacob’s second wife, loathed each other, the FBI approached Ethel for information on her stepdaughter (this was many years after the two women had stopped speaking). On one occasion, in October 1953, the FBI even approached Regina directly—calculating that because she had abandoned the Communist Party, she might be willing to dish the dirt on former comrades. Regina, however, was “uncooperative” she was prepared to be interviewed, but only with a lawyer present.

In the mid-1950s, the file became relatively inactive. But when, in March 1957, Regina contacted the Soviet embassy about Bobby’s trip to Moscow, the case sprang back into life—and with a vengeance. On 21 May 1957, an agent wrote to the director of the FBI:

It is to be noted that subject is a well-educated, widely travelled intelligent woman who has for years been associated with communists and persons of pro-communist leanings. In view of the foregoing and in light of her recent contact of an official of the Soviet Embassy, it is desired that this case be re-opened and that investigation be instituted in an effort to determine if subject has in the past or may presently be engaged in activities inimical to the interest of the United States.

Now her bank accounts were checked, fellow nurses at her hospital were surreptitiously taken to one side and questioned, the make of her car was jotted down (a 1957 Chrysler Sedan), her father’s will was examined (Regina inherited a tidy sum—around $40,000), and all previously collated documents were excavated and old sources reinterviewed.

By this stage, Bobby had become a celebrity, and the relationship between him and his mother was placed under the official microscope. The FBI director was reassured that the inquiry was being handled with “the utmost discretion,” so as not to arouse Regina’s attention. One source told the FBI that Regina could not control her son. She “lives in terror of him [Bobby] but at the same time seems to ‘gloat’ over his publicity.”

Bobby’s movements were tracked to and from Moscow via Brussels and Prague. Agents were asked to discover why he was so disgusted with his Soviet hosts. Did they make some kind of communist “approach” to him? After Moscow, and before the Interzonal at Portoroz, an informer described Bobby as “a very sick boy emotionally and in such a mental state at the present time that losing the tournament may cause him to become violent and may cause him to be confined to a mental institution.”

In 1959, Bobby and Regina went to Argentina and then Chile. Bobby was playing chess. What was Regina doing? Was she trying to contact her ex-husband? (She may not have known that two years earlier, “Don Gerardo Fischer Liebscher” had remarried, to a Mrs. Renata Sternaux Meyer in Algarrobo in Chile.) The question was considered of such import that on 22 May, Hoover wrote to his counterpart, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles, to request assistance and collaboration: “Inasmuch as Mrs. Regina Fischer accompanied her son to South America, it is believed probable that she was with him in Santiago, Chile, during the chess tournament in that city. Accordingly, the possibility exists that Mrs. Fischer may have been in contact with her estranged husband, Gerardo Fischer.”

By the end of September 1959, the FBI at last acknowledged its failure to unearth any real subversion: “It appears the only logical investigation remaining would be an interview of the subject, but due to her mental instability, this line of action is not recommended. Therefore, it is recommended that no further investigation be conducted and this case be closed.”

In spite of that recommendation, a residual watchfulness continued. In 1960, Regina picketed the White House because the State Department refused the U.S. chess team permission to play in that year’s Olympiad in East Germany. Her demonstration provoked many column inches in papers across the nation. A secret service agent reported her movements: She arrived at 10:30 A.M. and departed at 2:33 P.M. She returned to the White House at 4:52 P.M., staying until 5:30 P.M. In the autumn, when Regina moved out of her long-standing Brooklyn home, the FBI dispatched an agent, disguised as a deliveryman, to confirm that she really had settled into her new abode in the Bronx.

During a 1961 “Walk for Peace” from San Francisco to Moscow, sponsored by the Committee for Non-Violent Action, Regina met her second husband, an English left-wing teacher, Cyril Pustan. She relocated to Europe, where the Bureau still took note of her activities: her continued protests in France, West Germany, and Great Britain against the Vietnam War, her attendance in Stockholm on 24 July 1967 at a conference on Vietnam. Finally the FBI gave up, parting company with Regina after nearly a quarter of a century. Regina eventually returned to the United States, where she died of cancer in 1997. (Don Gerardo Fischer Liebscher died on 25 February 1993 in the city of his birth, Berlin.)