Funeral in Berlin Funeral in Berlin Funeral in Berlin is a 1964 spy novel by Len Deighton set between Saturday October 5th and Sunday November 10th 1963. It was the third of four novels about an unnamed British agent. It was preceded by "The IPCRESS File" (1962) and "Horse Under Water" (1963), and followed by "Billion-Dollar Brain" (1966). The protagonist, who is unnamed, travels to Berlin to arrange the defection of a Soviet scientist named Semitsa, this being brokered by Johnny Vulkan of the Berlin intelligence community. Despite the protagonist's initial scepticism, the deal seems to have the support of Russian security-chief Colonel
The IPCRESS File Deighton's mother cooked for Wolkoff's dinner parties and he said that he "vividly" remembered when British MI5 agents came to arrest her: "The experience was a major factor in my decision to write a spy story at my first attempt at fiction." The plot involves mind control, the acronym IPCRESS of the title standing for "Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under Stress". The brainwashing is similar to a shock technique called psychic driving pioneered by Donald Ewen Cameron in the 1950s, originally on unwitting mental hospital patients, which was used and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency's secret MKULTRA