We begin group chat with UK ‘defence chiefs’ together with John Terry to see what we discover
The Daily Star goes in search of vital people and institutions involved in the defence of England, going in search of the details for MI5, MI6, and the Ministry of Defence – and John Terry
It turns out the most powerful people in the world chat about launching missile strikes in Yemen the same way the rest of us talk about TV, or work, or the football… over text.
Key figures in the US government including national security adviser Mike Waltz and vice-president JD Dunce were in that group, patting one another on the back about firing rockets at Houthi rebels in Yemen and moaning about Europe not being as enthusiastic about spending money on weapons.
No one seems to have quite processed this yet, or what this means for international security, although there has been chat about US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth getting the lettuce treatment…
What we at the Daily Star do know, however, is that we want a piece of the action.
A lot of it was just looking at Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, wow, what a journalist. Clearly he has done enough right in his career to get him into the kinds of circles where some of the most powerful people in the world have him on speed dial.
The chances of being added to a UK equivalent seemed slim, for a number of reasons, and so we decided to make our own luck.
We went in looking for key people and institutions involved in the security of Britain, going in search of the details for MI5, MI6, and the Ministry of Defence.
It didn’t feel like it was enough. Who else has played a major role in the defence of this country? Churchill died in 1965, after all.
We thought long and hard about who else needed to be in this chat then, like a missile from a US warship, it hit us.
John Terry.
The former Chelsea man was at the heart of the best English defence most of our team have ever seen and the thought of him not being privy to our new group chat seemed nothing short of ridiculous.
The 78-cap hero is a hard man to track down, but we did manage to find the details of his agent, whose number we saved and added to our new group chat.
The illusive Mr Terry wasn’t the only problem, through.
Turns out MI6 doesn’t over advertise the phone numbers to its top directors online, and neither do MI5 – not very transparent in our opinion – and so we had to improvise.
Our next throught was to gather together the numbers for their press offices, and that of the Ministry of Defence.
Proceedings hit another bump though when it turned out that neither MI5 or MI6 even have these, so we followed their referrals to the press offices of the Home Office and the Foreign Office respectively.
What’s more, none of their press office phone numbers seemed to have WhatsApp, so we had to make do with an old fashioned text.
By this point, it felt rather like our dream of happening on a story as big and exciting as Mr Goldberg had was starting to die.
Still we made the chat and wrote a message asking “Hey Guys. Got any state secrets?” and added we fancied our own version of the US government Signal chat.
Don’t ask, you don’t get, we suppose…
