Welcome to the latest edition of Breaker. We are Lachlan Cartwright and Ravi Somaiya. If this email has been forwarded to you can subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.

In today's edition: Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic story, detailing his invite into a Signal chat in which senior government officials including JD Vance and Pete Hegseth were planning airstrikes in Yemen, got us thinking. So we dug behind the story, with the help of current and former intelligence operatives, and found a world of spies and intrigue, fueled by the Trump administration's inimitable governing style.

Plus the New York Times’ eye watering price hike, the latest on the search for a new editor of Vanity Fair, and Walter Isaacson’s top secret new book project.

Also if you have a tip we now have the 24/7 Breaker Tip Hotline (manned by Lachlan) so please text or Signal +1 551 655 2343 with your tips. Anonymity guaranteed!

This week we come to you from Cha Cha Tang in the West Village, with special guest John McDonald, the owner of the restaurant, as well as Lure and Bar Mercer among others, and also a pretty successful media entrepreneur. (Not to mention an official Friend Of Breaker.) We talk about the runners and riders for the Vanity Fair editor's job, why Janice Min, David Haskell, Stella Bugbee and Sarah Ball don’t want the job and the editors who do, how shamelessness is vital for any journalist seeking to make a lot of money, why human beings enjoy stability, and how surprisingly good Tom Hardy is at rapping. (You can also listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and a bunch of others And if you have a bar, cafe or restaurant you’d like featured in the Breaker pod get in touch.)

When the Atlantic magazine detailed how its editor Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally added to a Signal chat group of the nation’s most senior officials as they planned strikes in Yemen, sparking an international outcry, a thought popped into our minds: this must be Christmas for anyone seeking to spy on America.

Because, if these people did this idiot thing, they must logically be doing a lot of other idiot things. And then they escalated a trade war against specifically China, masters of signals intelligence – twelve Chinese hackers were charged last month with crimes they were accused of committing on behalf of the Chinese government.

(There are just too many other examples to list, but it’s worth pointing out that they previously managed to hack the personnel records of the entire government, including security clearances.) 

But when we spoke to current and former intelligence operatives, we found we were wrong. It is much, much worse than that. The Chinese Ministry of State Security, a massive intelligence agency about which very little is known except that it is extraordinarily aggressive and capable, has been…