that all of his spare time was spent in winter sports, which he would pursue world-wide wherever the climate and whenever the financial situation
permitted. There were several girlfriends, none of them serious affairs.
Then, holidaying in the Harz when he was twenty-three, Jazz had met a British Army Major on a Winter Warfare course. This new friend was a member of the Intelligence Corps serving in BAOR and the meeting proved to be a big turning point. A year later Jazz was in Berlin as an NCO of that same low-profile corps. But Berlin and BRIXMIS hadnât suited him, and by then the Secret Service had its eye on him anyway and didnât want him over-exposed; he was field agent material and should now start to learn the real tricks of the trade. His demobilization was arranged, as would be the next six years of his life, all greatly to Michael J. Simmonsâs satisfaction.
From then on it had been training, and training, and more training. He trained in surveillance, close protection, escape and evasion, winter warfare, survival, weapons handling (up to marksman), demolition and unarmed combat. The only thing they couldnât give him was experience â¦
Jazz had been all set to fly to Moscow as a âdiplomatic interpreterâ when PiII came up, or âwent downâ as the CIA had it. His original task was reassigned (it had in any case been little more than a training exercise) and he was given Operation Pill. The Service had been setting it up ever since the Soviets got the Perchorsk Projekt underway, and âlocal servicesâ were all well established and in full working order. Jazz was briefed from head to heels, went out to Moscow 2nd Class as Henry Parsons, an ordinary tourist, got issued with his Russian ID within an hour of de-planing. An intelligence agent already in the USSR would assume his Parsons identity (along with his passport, etc.) and use his return flight back to London. âOne in, one out, and shake it all about!â as Jazzâs Chief Briefing Officer had explained. âLike the hokey-cokey except there are no left feet, only right ones.â
Jazz hadnât known much about the Moscow end of the network; heâd been deliberately kept in the dark on that, just in case. Ditto for the Magnitogorsk set-up, which had a line on shipments by rail destined for the Perchorsk Projekt. He hadnât quite been able to figure out why his DO should feel peeved that he didnât know more about these things. That was definitely the impression that came over: that even though heâd given as much detail as he could, still the DO would have liked him to have known more. But the simple fact was that all of that stuff had been on a need-to-know basis, and Jazz hadnât needed to know.
As for âlocal servicesâ: heâd known all about them! And during the many debriefing sessions, Jazz had told everything.
Back in the 1950s Khruschev had broken up a politically suspect pocket of Ukranian Jewish peasants and âresettledâ them from an area near Kiev to the eastern slopes and valleys of the upper Urals. Maybe heâd hoped the cold would kill them off. There theyâd been allocated land and a work quota. The business: logging, and in winter trapping, all generally to be carried out under the supervision and guidance of old-guard âKomsomolâ officials from the West Siberian oil and natural gas fields. It wasnât quite a forced labour camp, but in the beginning it wasnât a hell of a lot better.
But the Ukranian dissidents were a funny lot; they stuck it out, filled their quotas, made a going concern of it and actually settled the district. Their success, coupled with the rapid expansion of the far more important oil and natural gas industries in the east, made strict control of the Jewish settlements unwieldy, even unnecessary. Their overseers had better things to do. It could plainly be seen how a previously untamed region was