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
Harry Palmer been theorised that the protagonist in another of Deighton's spy novels, "An Expensive Place to Die" (1967), also written in the first-person-anonymous narrative, is also 'Harry Palmer'; however, differences in characterisation and plotting indicate this is someone else other than Palmer. "The IPCRESS File" novel came out just after the release of the first James Bond film "Dr. No" (1962). When the novel reached best-seller status, Eon producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli approached Deighton to write the script for the second Bond film, "From Russia With Love" (1963). Little of Deighton's screenplay was actually used on the shoot. Saltzman