Billion-Dollar Brain Billion-Dollar Brain Billion-Dollar Brain is a 1966 Cold War spy novel by Len Deighton. It was the fourth to feature an unnamed secret agent working for the British WOOC(P) intelligence agency. It follows "The IPCRESS File" (1962), "Horse Under Water" (1963), and "Funeral in Berlin" (1964). As in most of the author's novels, the plot of "Billion-Dollar Brain" (1967) is intricate, with many dead ends. The unnamed protagonist is ordered to Helsinki by Dawlish, his boss, to suppress a newspaper article, potentially embarrassing to the U.K. government, about to be published by a Finnish journalist. He finds the journalist murdered
The IPCRESS File headings have a "feature". In "The IPCRESS File" these take the form of each chapter being headed with a quote from a horoscope, which relates to the action in the chapter, though vaguely, as in most horoscopes. The front cover, by Deighton's friend Raymond Hawkey, has been described as "the template for the covers of all subsequent airport novels". A film adaptation starring Michael Caine was released in 1965 and produced by the James Bond co-producer Harry Saltzman, assisted by several prominent members of the Bond production family. The film medium made it difficult to maintain the anonymity of Deighton's