This phrase is correct and usable in written English
You can use it to refer to a group of people who are working together to achieve a certain goal, usually a secret or sinister one. For example, "The shadowy cabal behind the political scandal has finally been exposed."
Thank the shadowy cabal, Hornets fans.
Members of the shadowy cabal intent on discrediting the Uruguay striker shouldn't celebrate just yet.
To many liberals, the Federalist Society is like a shadowy cabal out of "The Da Vinci Code".
Even so, who are "they", the shadowy cabal of pop pickers who have decreed that Bonnie will sing Believe In Me at the contest in Malmö in May?
Or so says the shadowy cabal of style gurus that is always yanking the badge of newness from one thing and pinning it on another.
At the centre of Inherent Vice is a shadowy cabal called the Golden Fang, which may or not involve dope-smuggling, property development, private sanitoria and dentistry.
His second novel, Foucault's Pendulum (1988), was a thriller set amid shadowy cabals and conventicles such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Rosicrucian Society.
If well drawn, such theories share many of the same elements as good fiction: densely constructed plots; dark, shadowy cabals; and dashing, larger-than-life personalities.
Using a journalist rather than a spy, diplomat or politician allows Hitchcock to go places that a wartime thriller would normally avoid: beyond the dispatch box and radio speeches to ask what is the motivation that brings countries and the shadowy cabals that influence them to a state of armed conflict.
It reminded me a bit of Vatican Shadow, Dominick Fernow's stark techno project that gets inspiration from shadowy cabals and international conflict.
Because of the vagueness of their job description and the fact that very few people do or have worked with one, think tanks attract a lot of attention predicated on the mistaken belief that they are a bunch of world-dominating, conspiracy-generating, shadowy-cabal sorts who are running the world.
