Spy Story (novel) Spy Story (novel) Spy Story is a 1974 spy novel by Len Deighton, which features minor characters from his earlier novels "The IPCRESS File", "Funeral in Berlin", "Horse Under Water", and "Billion Dollar Brain". In common with several of his other early novels, the chapter headings have a "feature". In "Spy Story" these take the form of excerpts from the fictional Studies Centre's rules. As in the earlier "Unnamed hero" novels, we never learn the protagonist's real name, only that he is living under the name Pat Armstrong. Armstrong works for the Studies Centre in London, where various tactical wargame
The IPCRESS File The protagonist reveals to Jean that Jay and Dalby were using a process called "Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned REflex with Stress" (IPCRESS) to brainwash the VIPs into loyalty to the Soviet Union, which they had also unsuccessfully attempted to subject the protagonist to. The seemingly irrelevant links that Carswell had discovered were in fact indicators of the personality traits that Jay had used to determine which VIPs would easily succumb to the process. Dalby was the one who had sabotaged the American bomb test, as part of Jay and Dalby's efforts to frame the protagonist. Colonel Ross reveals that