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 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