The IPCRESS File The IPCRESS File The IPCRESS File is Len Deighton's first spy novel, published in 1962. It was made into a film in 1965 produced by Harry Saltzman, directed by Sidney J. Furie and starring Michael Caine. The novel, which involves Cold War brainwashing, includes scenes in Lebanon and on an atoll for a United States atomic weapon test, as well as information about Joe One, the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb, although these elements did not appear in the film version. The novel is framed as the unnamed protagonist delivering his personal report on "the IPCRESS affair" directly to the
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