Within any bureaucracy the size of that to which the government of the United States had grown there were inevitably those who had been in the same or similar roles for a number of administrations, if not decades. They had been hired or appointed to carry out certain tasks and implement certain policies and, whether intentionally or subliminally, they did their job each day as they had been hired to do it, often oblivious to the changes in policy by subsequent administrations. These men and women made up the shadow government. There were those in the print and broadcast media who reveled in referring to a so-called "deep state". But, for the most part, its members were nothing more than holdovers from previous administrations who, without any form of collusion or conspiracy, continued to perform their jobs and implement those policies which, by now, had become second nature. ISIS had not conducted a successful operation which had attracted worldwide attention and served to both improve recruitment or further their apocalyptic agenda for nearly three years. But what they had planned would bring the Western world to its knees and serve to promote the new caliphate in anticipation of the end of days. And to most in the FBI, CIA, NSA and the military establishment the indications and evidence would simply go unnoticed.