The Real-Life Inspirations Behind ILVED TRUST
Where Truth Ends and Fiction Begins. What if a handful of terrifying facts weren’t random at all? What if they were all threads of the same horrifying tapestry? This is the question that inspired my debut thriller, ILVED TRUST: GERMS.
My career as a factual television editor taught me how to connect disparate facts into a coherent narrative. With fiction, however, I had the freedom to explore the terrifying ‘what ifs’ that hide in the gaps between the headlines. For me, the journey began not with a grand thesis, but with a single, unsettling finding.
In a matter of months, during the early 2000s, thirteen of the world’s leading microbiologists had been found dead in violent or suspicious circumstances. Many were world-renowned experts in gene sequencing—the technology used to create both life-saving cures and devastating pathogens. But it was a single implication noted in a review that I found truly chilling—the idea that whether they knew it or not, their combined, separate research could potentially pave the way to manufacturing a racially specific bioweapon.
This discovery sparked a long and unnerving journey of connecting the dots between real-world events. Initial research uncovered a series of vaccine scandals in which major aid organisations had been accused of running tetanus campaigns—in the Philippines, Mexico, and Nicaragua in the 1990s, and in Kenya as recently as 2014—using vaccines allegedly laced with HCG, an anti- fertility hormone.
Government Betrayals
Then I came upon a history of documented government betrayals: the horrific Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which ran for forty years from 1932; and the stark reality of the US military releasing bacteria from lightbulbs in the New York subway in 1966 and from Samsonite briefcases in a crowded Washington D.C. bus terminal, one year earlier, to test dispersal patterns on an unsuspecting public.
During this time, an American colleague pointed me toward the Georgia Guidestones. Erected anonymously in 1980, the monument’s first guideline stated: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.” All these strands started to meld and the ‘why’ of my conspiracy crystallised.
Then I found the National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), a declassified 1974 US government document which framed population growth in thirteen developing countries as a direct threat to American national security. A later analysis in the Executive Intelligence Review paraphrased its chilling implications: ‘Reduce world population by two billion through war, famine, disease… and any other means necessary.’ That phrase became the ideological basis of the novel.
Two Kinds of Conspiracy
It was after this, on reading John Perkins’ explosive account, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, that a chilling new layer emerged. Suddenly, the two different kinds of conspiracy I was following—population control and economic supremacy—began to converge.
My research also led me to Plum Island, the real-life government facility established in 1954, home to the world’s largest collection of animal viruses, and its sinister links to Nazi biowarfare scientists brought to the US after WWII under Operation Paperclip.
Standing back, the connections felt too stark to be mere coincidence. I believe the best thrillers must do more than just entertain; they must also inform. This is a book for anyone who loves a classic David and Goliath whistleblower tale. John le Carré proved that a thriller could be a ‘powerful moral instrument,’ and it’s in the spirit of works like The Constant Gardener or The Night Manager that ILVED TRUST was written.
ILVED TRUST: GERMS
ILVED TRUST: GERMS is an international thriller that plunges an ordinary man into an extraordinary conspiracy. When his sister Kate, an academic researcher, is found dead in an apparent suicide, world-class sailor Joe Porter refuses to believe the official story. He is convinced she was murdered for what she was investigating. His search for the truth throws him into a shadow world of powerful, hidden forces, where he must uncover the secrets behind the lies before he becomes the next victim. The hero is not a trained spy or a lawyer; he’s an everyman, and that’s precisely what makes him so dangerous to them.
My goal was to build a fictional ‘what if’ world, so firmly anchored in these shocking, documented facts that the reader is forced to ask not just, ‘Could this actually happen?’, but to wonder where the truth ends and the fiction begins. For the inquisitive reader, the real game is separating the documented truth from the fictional connective tissue. My favourite early reviews are from readers who say they had one hand on the book, the other on Google.
While a good thriller doesn’t give you all the answers; it can arm the reader with the right questions. It encourages us to look at the world, at the stories peddled by those in power, and to ask the most important question of all: Who is telling us what, and why?
That is the decade-long journey I undertook in writing ILVED TRUST: GERMS. It is the exhilarating, unsettling, and dangerous journey of discovery I hope to take every reader on.
(c) P.C. Dinan
You can find out more about Paula Dinan at her website www.pcdinan.com.
About ILVED TRUST: GERMS
IN A WORLD RULED BY THE 1% — THEIR GREED IS THE ULTIMATE BETRAYAL
A sister’s fight for truth. A brother’s quest for revenge. When yachtsman Joe Porter learns his sister Kate is missing after uncovering a link between tainted vaccines and population control, he vows to find the truth.
Thrust into a world of espionage, Joe must outwit ruthless assassins to uncover the ILVED TRUST — a clandestine organization developing racially specific bioweapons and a human variant of the deadly H5N1 virus.
Trust no-one. Question everything.
ILVED TRUST: GERMS – An explosive thriller inspired by real events.
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