Right up until publication, the Islamic State recruiters Sally Jones and Junaid Hussain kept in contact with the two fake identities we had created.
They were still hoping one of our characters, a girl, would attempt to assassinate the Queen and other members of the Royal Family with a pressure cooker bomb at this weekend's VJ commemorations.
Over a four-month period we invented then developed our characters and employed a freelance investigative reporter to "run" the characters - one male and one female.
Using these personas, we made contact with Islamic State recruiters initially using Twitter - then using anonymous online messaging services.
It led us to a married couple - Junaid, or Abu, Hussain, and Sally Jones, known as Umm Hussain. They're both from Britain and living in Raqqa.
Hussain, 21, is from Birmingham and is in charge of IS recruitment.
He is also a former computer hacker and has the dubious honour of being in the top five of IS operatives most likely to be killed by an American drone.
During the course of our initial contacts he realised he was talking to a female and suggested she talk to his wife.
Jones - originally from Chatham in Kent - recruits women and girls from Britain.
She sent a bomb-making manual to our female character via a secure-sharing site, telling us that she had another girl in Glasgow ready to attack.
Specifically, she mentioned the Royal Family and the date of 15 August - the day of the VJ commemorations in London.
She also told our character that two other girls had been recruited but had failed to carry out a promised attack.
Security contacts have confirmed to us that the existence of these three potential bombers is a genuine concern.
The key to running our characters has been to keep them "real".
Our investigator and I would talk at length every day or at least every day there was contact and we would agree a line of questioning or response.
Not asking too many questions and being apparently utterly committed to the jihadist cause was vital.
Perhaps our most successful move was to buy up all the items needed to make a bomb and prove to Jones that we had bought them and that day.
It was not difficult to do. A fact not lost on the authorities.
We suspect that she was testing our commitment but it is likely it was a test of our status.
If our characters were on a watch list and bought a pressure cooker we are pretty certain, as are the IS team, that we would have been lifted by the authorities.
The revelation from Jones, true or otherwise, that she was handling another three would-be bombers was our cue to contact the authorities immediately.
Sky News has always felt a moral obligation to do this, but there is quite simply a legal requirement to do so as well.
It was never in doubt we would make the call as soon as we realised there was a genuine risk that we were talking to people actively involved in a real terror plot.
The anti-terror officers met us and agreed we should continue our contacts with the IS people.
With the cyber operation slowly bubbling along, I made contact with our sources in Syria and Turkey to see if there was more to support a second strand to this story that IS has changed its policy towards European and, particularly, British jihadists.
No longer are they calling on "Brothers and Sisters" to come to their so-called caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
Rather, they are insisting that they stay at home and plot with their help to blow themselves up or to kill people here.
In Turkey, amid very, very high security concerns, we found our movements badly restricted.
Turkish security took to following our movements as soon as we arrived in the city of Urfa, not far from the Syrian border.
This is the route IS volunteers and defectors for that matter, pass through either going in or out.
My meeting with a former IS internal security officer took place in a secret location I arrived at by foot, having lost our tail in the teeming streets of the city's ancient souk.
His revelations that four or five British men have spent six weeks on a series of terror courses and have now returned to the UK on a "mission" has been passed to the authorities as well.
It's impossible to know if any of this is true, of course. But we suspect much of it is.
At the very least it indicates how determined IS are to strike in the UK and just how much work the authorities are faced with every day as they try to keep everyone safe.
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