The Art of Chesspionage

Espionage has been around for millennia. From the Ancient Egyptians to modern day intelligence services, every country/kingdom/state has been trying to gather information on their enemies. Sun Tzu stated, "One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in a hundred engagements." From infiltrating enemy lines to bugging phone calls, there are many ways espionage can be conducted. One of the most prominent users of espionage was the Soviet Union (USSR). 

The Soviet obsession with chess is not an unknown thing. In Vishwanathan Anand's own words, "it felt like every taxi-driver could beat you with a smirk on his face." Many world champions have come from the Soviet Union, and their impact can be felt with strong chess countries today such as Russia, Uzbekistan, and India (The Soviets made chess clubs there.)

However, did you know they also used chess as a way of espionage? In fact, did you know they weren't even the first to do it? In today's article, we will look at all the details.

The First Case of Chess Espionage

In World War I, there were many attempts on getting information about the other side in offhand ways. In one case, Germany recruited a French actress to tell them about French military positions using a land survey. Basically, a German pilot had conducted a land survey, been shot down, captured, and sent to a hospital. The actress then went to the German pilot, who then gave her the chess position, which was then given to a diplomat. 

However, the French government eventually intercepted it and noticed the piece positions lined up with those in real life when France divided into 64 parts. While this is a basic example, this is the first recorded case. 

Steganography is symbolizing a text somehow, and in the case of espionage, hiding information so that only certain people can see it. An example of this would be encoding messages into an images metadata.

Chess players are often famous for being codebreakers. As an example, Alan Turing, a famous British mathematician and codebreaker, loved chess. In fact, many other codebreakers used by the British were champion chess players in World War II. Stuart Milner-Barry is a famous example of this, a member of the Hut 6 team. They would decipher messages from the German Enigma encryption machine.

In fact, chess boards were censored during World War II! Chess boards were suspected to be secret ways to communicate with enemies. In a US Chess article summary on chess.com, I found the following. 

“I doubt that someone who understands the game of chess and how the pieces move would be able to detect anything fishy,” said Joan DuBois, author of the Chess Life article. “But I also think that anyone can come up with some kind of code for anything if they put in the time. In war, everything arouses suspicion.” - M Vanitas

Censors would just blot the whole board. Imagine pre-computer era server crashes.

The Soviets have also been suspected to use chess as a way of communications in some of their covert operations. While most Soviet-era intelligence collection using chess remains clouded in mystery, the KGB was known for following top Soviet chess players. In the 1972 World Championship, many agents followed Spassky, and even bugged Fischer's chair (no wonder he was so paranoid). 

How To Send Your Own Secret Messages Using Chess Notation

Obviously, there isn't too much information on how to create and read chess ciphers (otherwise their not secret.) However, in 2009, Abdelrahman Desoky and Muhammad Younis came up with a system known as Chestega.

While placing pieces on the chessboard isn't very effective (there are only 64 squares), using algebraic notation can increase the complexity of the message being sent. How would this work? Below is the basic idea. 

We can then convert from binary if needed to get a decimal number. From there, we use ASCII to get alphabet letters. Here is an ASCII to letter conversion table.

Now, using this, 1. a4 would give us !, and 1. a4 a8 would give us !A. While this is obviously a crude example, it can get more complex. Try deciphering the example given in the paper. 

This would give us "he doesn't love you". Interesting, right? And it's also very hard to detect. Not many people can read chess notation, and even if they could, are they really going to go sift. through each individual game to go find what they correspond to? 

Final Thoughts

There you have it. This is a basic breakdown of how chess can be used for espionage. Next time you see a chess position that looks fishy, look deeper. Maybe you'll find something hidden. The image below is suspected to be an encrypted communication but has never been deciphered. Can you solve the mystery?