Editing The IPCRESS File (section)

==Background==
Deighton wrote in 1966, "I was earning enough money as an artist to write anything I chose. I chose a spy novel":<ref name="deighton196605">{{Cite magazine |last=Deighton |first=Len |date=May 1966 |title=Why Does My Art Go Boom? |url=https://archive.org/details/playboy-magazines-1953-2013/PlayBoy/Playboy%201966/5%20-%20May%201966/page/103/mode/1up?view=theater |access-date=2024-12-25 |magazine=Playboy |pages=103,182-184}}</ref>

{{quote|I liked to have a problem or enigma that could follow the action of the book, but I wanted the book to be ragged and untidy, as life is. I wanted the characterization and the dialog to control the enigma, rather than the other way around as had been the case with the [[Golden Age of Detective Fiction|detective novels of the Thirties]], which had become puzzles rather than stories. Above all, I was interested in the permutations of deceit and mistake.<br>
Too many people in the fiction I had read told the whole truth all the time and never seemed to make a mistake of judgment. I decided to write a first-person narrative in which the narrator would lie to anyone if it would suit his purpose[, and] chose a secret-agent format so that I could use the political background that interested me.}}

"It owed a debt to [[Raymond Chandler|Chandler]], but was inspired by ''[[Beat the Devil (1953 film)|Beat the Devil]]'', an old [[Humphrey Bogart|Bogart]]-[[Peter Lorre|Lorre]] film", Deighton added.{{r|deighton196605}} In 1992 he said that the inspiration to write the novel came from his real-life neighbour [[Anna Wolkoff]], a [[White émigré|White Russian]] émigrée who collaborated with a cipher clerk from the American embassy to spy for Germany in [[World War II]]. Deighton's mother cooked for Wolkoff's dinner parties and he said that he "vividly" remembered when [[MI5]] officers came to arrest her: "The experience was a major factor in my decision to write a spy story at my first attempt at fiction."<ref>{{cite news|title=Spies With Class: Two of our best-loved, but vastly different, fictional spies, James Bond and Harry Palmer, have reached pensionable age|last=Campbell|first=Christy|work=[[The Sunday Telegraph]]|location=London|date=21 June 1992|page=101}}</ref> The plot involves [[Brainwashing|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]] program in Canada.