Institute for the Study of Conflict

This article is part of the Propaganda Portal project of Spinwatch.

The Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) was a right-wing propaganda group established by Brian Crozier in 1970 and backed by the CIA. According to its prospectus it was dedicated to ‘the defence of free industrial societies against totalitarian encroachment. It ran until 1989 and produced a series of reports on terrorism, guerrilla war, union activism and other topics.

Covert origins

The Institute for the Study of Conflict grew out of a small library and research group called the Current Affairs Research Services Centre. The 'Service' was run by the anti-communist crusader Brian Crozier, and was part of a London based CIA propaganda operation called Forum World Features, which operated as a professional news service. ISC documents leaked to Time Out provided evidence that the Institute for the Study of Conflict had grown out of this operation:

...a weary postman trundled up to Time Out with several bundles of documents which appeared to have come from the internal files of Crozier's other operation, the Institute for the Study of Conflict. Who had sent them? And more important, were they real? Time Out's staff were wary, and as one of the journalists on the story, I can report that we all had visions of our favorite intelligence agency doctoring up phony documents just to entrap us in criminal libel. But again Crozier saved the story. Hearing that Time Out had the documents, he charged that someone had stolen them from the Institute, and within hours two highly embarrassed police detectives—"We don't like to get involved in these journalistic disputes," they explained —were calling at my flat. The documents, it seemed, were very real indeed.

As the story later appeared in Time Out, the documents showed in intimate detail how the Institute had grown directly out of the small library and research staff that the CIA's Kern House Enterprises had financed within Forum World Features. By 1968, Crozier was calling this his Current Affairs Research Services Center, and in January 1970 he wrote to Sir Peter Wilkinson (later Coordinator of Intelligence and Security in the British Cabinet Office) and asked his help in transforming the Forum research unit into a full-fledged Institute for the Study of Conflict.

Peter Wilkinson who was at the time the administrative head of the Foreign Office as well as a former chief of the Information Research Department, did not join ISC because of his position in the Civil Service. He did, however, recommend to Crozier the man who would become the ISC's fundraiser - a retired Major General called Fergus Ling. Another government figure reportedly supportive of ISC’s establishment was Thomas Pearson, then military secretary to the Secretary of State for Defence Denis Healey.

Steve Weissman in his 1976 essay 'The CIA makes the News', states that the Crozier's Institute was not necessarily an American operation, some evidence suggested that it was actually run by the British, but "the Institute worked hand in glove with Forum and the CIA." The two operations shared writers, and certain staff, the money to start the Institute and its monthly Conflict Studies came from the CIA's Kern House Enterprises. Many of Forum's internal records ended up in the Institute's files which were delivered to Time Out.

Weissman also states that Forum World Features was established to replace an earlier news service set up by another CIA front group, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, after the latter's lead publication Encounter had come under suspicion.

Further evidence that ISC was an official intelligence operation comes from New York Times journalist Bernard Nossiter who wrote in 1975 that he had "learned from responsible officials that ISC is also the creature of an intelligence service, British this time."

Official beginnings and early years

Personnel

The Institute's director Brian Crozier in 1957

The Institute for the Study of Conflict was incorporated as a limited company on 5 May 1970 and was launched in June that year. The main figures behind the Institute were the right-wing journalist Brian Crozier and the Russian expert Leonard Schapiro. They were identified by The Times as the group’s founders and became Director and Chairman respectively. Both men had connections with intelligence and propaganda agencies. Crozier had worked for the CIA and British intelligence, and Schapiro had worked at the Intelligence Division of the German Control Commission immediately after the Second World War.

Other figures listed in the company’s earliest corporate filings are the Oxford historian and neo-liberal thinker Max Beloff, the Australian professor John Miller, and a retired Major-General called Fergus Ling. The former British diplomat and counter-insurgency expert Robert Thompson was also reportedly involved from the offset.

It was chiefly Fergus Ling and Robert Thompson who acquired the initial corporate funding for the group. Fergus Ling also negotiated charitable status for the Institute, which was granted by the Charities Commission on 23 September 1970. Another former diplomat involved in the Institute in its first few years was J. H. Adam Watson who resigned from the Council of Management in March 1974 to take up his post as Director-General of the International Association for Cultural Freedom. The Institute’s first Administrative Director was Michael Goodwin, a former BBC director who had run propaganda operations for the CIA and the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department.

Several more figures from academia were recruited during the 1970s, including Geoffrey Fairburn, a lecturer in History at Australian National University; Samuel Finer, who was Beloff's successor at Oxford; Laurence Martin of the Department of War Studies at Kings College London and Hugh Seton-Watson, Professor of Russian History at the University of London (who according to Crozier had intelligence connections).

William Thompson the Security Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph also joined the Council of Management, as did the former British diplomat Edward Peck, and the counter-insurgency expert Richard Clutterbuck. The Institute biggest coup in this period was probably recruiting Louis Le Bailly who became Vice-Chairman in 1976. Le Bailly joined the Council of Management in October 1975, immediately after leaving his post as Director-General of Intelligence at the Ministry of Defence.

On 23 October 1978, Harry Tuzo joined the Council of Management. A former Major-General and Director of Royal Artillery, Tuzo would also Chair the Royal United Services Institute during his time at ISC.

Activities and output

Where the CIA used Forum World Features to reach newspaper readers, and the earlier Congress for Cultural Freedom to woo intellectuals, Crozier's Institute offered professional and authoritative-sounding analyses, both for the general public and for more specialised audiences of academics, policy makers, police officials, and military commanders. It provided respectability to right-wing and repressive policies, primarily through its dissemination of pseudo-academic studies. It also developed connections with other right-wing organisations and offered training on 'subversives' to police and the military.

Few, if any, of the Institute's widely quoted publications broke any new ground intellectually. But they did give academic respectability to old anti-Communist cliches, whether on Vietnam or Angola. They also pushed a revival of Cold War thinking in the face of detente, and a stiffening of preemptive police and military measures to combat "subversion" and industrial unrest. ISC encouraged pre-emptive surveillance and other measures against a broad range of "subversives", to extend the term to include law-abiding trade union militants and anti-establishment intellectuals. The theory being that the police have to deal with subversion because it might lead to terrorism.

The general message of the Institute's myriad of publications is well summed up by a Times editorial from March 1973:

It is now widely assumed that the Soviet Union has postponed world revolution indefinitely and is mainly interested in stability, prosperity, defence against China, shoring up its empire in Eastern Europe, and keeping its own apparatus in power at home.

There is, however, no shortage of voices warning us that this is a dangerous illusion, and that the Soviet Union, balked of direct conquest by Nato, has turned to subtler tactics based principally on lulling the west into a false sense of security and then undermining its societies from within. Among the most consistent of these voices is that of the Institute for the Study of Conflict in London.

Analysis of the Institute's own correspondence from the documents leaked to Time Out revealed that most of the evidence for the anti-left allegations came from the files of well-known and widely disregarded right-wing organisations.

On 7 February 1974 Clutterbuck wrote to Peter Janke asking for “sources of specific evidence” for statements in the report that the International Socialists, the Socialist Labour League and the Worker’ Revolutionary Party were associated with violent industrial disputes. Janke wrote back saying: ‘I have rung Frank Broadway (who was responsible for the research) and as I feared he relied on other people’s work and had no references.’ Broadway was the director of Facts about Business, a company that supplied classroom materials, claimed that “apathy and hostility towards free enterprise begin in the schools”. He argued that this was not because teachers were Marxists but rather because they didn’t know enough to provide children with a good understanding of free enterprise and its benefits. The solution was to provide teachers with this material and his experience was that most teachers were willing to use “quality material supplied by business”.

Annual of Power and Conflict

Reporting on ISC's December 1970 conference, The Times, said the Institute was planning its first major project in conjunction with the U.S. National Strategy Information Center which was to produce “a yearly 60,000-word report entitled the Annual Political Balance and the Survey of Conflict, based loosely on the two annual documents produced by the Institute for Strategic Studies.” The first was due in 1972. What became the Annual of Power and Conflict ran until 1982, and included country-by-country reports, chronologies, and regional surveys.

Conflict Studies

The Institute's more regular publication was the journal Conflict Studies; the first five issues of which had been published by Forum World Features. In August 1970 ISC published the sixth issue of the journal. The new issue was entitled 'The Irish Tangle', and was written by Iain Hamilton (a former editor of The Spectator and managing director of Kern House Enterprises). A special notice drew attention to the new publishers. It stated: "the main object of the Institute is the systematic and comparative study of the causes and manifestations of conflict, with special but not exclusive reference to social and political unrest, urban terrorism, guerrilla war, revolutionary war and related phenomena." The Conflict Studies series was published six to ten times annual, and monthly from 1976. Until 1975 it was edited by Crozier. By 1978 ISC had published over eighty issues including Terrorism versus Liberal Democracy by Paul Wilkinson. According to an article pubished that year, interest in the journal had grown steadily and ISC enjoyed "regular subscriptions from government. departments, universities, army and police establishments, and leading commercial concerns in over sixty countries as well as individuals often influential in public life."

Conferences and other events

In December 1970 the Institute held its first event, a conference at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge to discuss the “Arab-Israeli problem”.

Following the Time Out exposé Paddy Prendeville, a press officer with the Troops Out Movement, wrote to The Guardian claiming that ISC had sent individuals spy on a conference the group had organised. The conference was held in May 1975 and was attended by 326 delegates. According to Prendeville members of ISC brought ‘clandestine recording devices into the audience’ whilst a photographer posing as a newspaper journalist ‘spent most of his time taking mugshots of members of the audience.’

Crozier was a featured speaker at the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism organised by the Jonathan Institute and held in July 1979. He "implied repeatedly that the Soviet Union was behind most, if not all, of the world's political unrest, including the troubles in Northern Ireland."

Training on 'subversives' to police and the military

The Institute's records also showed close contacts with top police officials Britain, Rhodesia, South Africa, as well as with other leaders around the world.

One of the documents leaked to Time Out was a letter to Peter Janke from Claud Greathead of the Rhodesian Secret Service. The two men were on first name terms. There was also a letter to Janke from a Mr P. J. de Wit of the South African Secret Service (BOSS) noting that Janke was in contact with their ‘man in London’.

By the early 1970's the British Army were bringing in outside experts in 'subversion' to extend their programme of political education, and ISC became involved. John Alderson, the director of the Bramshill Police College in 1972, asked ISC's Peter Janke to help the college develop a course on terrorism and counter-subversion. The ISC's "Manual on Counter-Insurgency" was developed and used at the Police College and elsewhere. In July 1972 Janke stated in ISC documents that: ‘This would be the first time that policemen in this country were introduced to the idea that political terrorism grew out of the early stages of subversion and it was the responsibility of the police to detect these phases…’

At Bramshill Janke met the commandant John Alderson who he said was ‘clearly aware that the whole topic of police concern with subversion was a delicate one and that the Home Office felt particularly strongly about this.’ This was a reference to the Home Secretary Reginald Maudling blocking an invitation to Frank Kitson to lecture at the college. Despite this, according to Janke: ‘Alderson felt that the police college itself had a certain autonomy derived from daily decision taking and that small steps along new paths could in fact be made without prior consultation.’ In a subsequent visit Janke urged Alderson to take out a corporate subscription to ISC publications for the college, but according to Janke Alderson was concerned that, ‘on the face of it ISC would appear to others as very right-wing.’ Janke reassured Alderson that ISC was an academic outfit and was financially independent and ‘unattached to any political or government body’. Alderson was later promoted to assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard and stayed in touch with ISC. His successor at the college declined to take out a corporate subscription after consulting the Home Office but agreed to continued lectures.

ISC arranged lectures at the Military College of Science in April, May and November 1974, and February 1975, as well at the army staff college in Camberley and the 23rd SAS in November 1974 and March 1975 respectively. A letter dated November 1972 showed that Colonel Barton of the National Defence College arranged to take 21 of his students to ISC’s headquarters for ‘individual briefings’.

Crozier's own memoir states that these training exercises also included: the Staff College at Camberley (where he spoke with John Gouriet of the Freedom Association and Ralph Harris of the Institute of Economic Affairs), the Joint Warfare Establishment at Old Sarum, Army Headquarters at Cardiff and the territorials at Harrogate.

Weissman draws a more sinister interpretation from a magazine article in which Crozier looked to the armed forces to step in following the breakdown of Western democracy. This has been confirmed to some extent by a recent BBC documentary where Major Alexander Greenwood told the program that he set up his own private army in 1974-75 and Crozier said that he lobbied the army, who "seriously considered the possibility of a military takeover".

Allies and collaborators

The Institute formed allegiances with other likeminded groups. As noted above the Institute struck up an early relationship with the National Strategy Information Center in the United States, and in 1972 the Institute joined with the Confederation of British Industry to launch a private campaign against "subversive elements." The Institute then published a special report on "Sources of Conflict in British Industry," and in early 1974, just as the striking miners forced Prime Minister Edward Heath to call elections, the London Observer ran a section of the report blaming left-wing militants for Britain's industrial unrest. In the Netherlands, Crozier and his colleagues work closely with the East-West Institute, Netherlands and its International Documentation and Information Centre, which had gained fame for its who's-who and what's-what listings of left-wing activities in Europe. An article published in 1978 stated that ISC had plans to publish through branch offices in Germany, France and Latin America.

The minutes of an ISC meeting in 1972 also linked the Institute to a small group around the former French prime minister Antoine Pinay. Now termed the 'Pinay Circle' or 'Le Cercle', the group helped pay for an ISC study on "European Security and the Soviet Problem". According to Weissman the aging Pinay and his friends were so delighted that they personally showed it to Nixon, Pompidou, Kissinger, and the Pope. One of the documents stated:

CONFIDENTIAL Council Minutes

21 JAN. 1972

Report on European Security and the Soviet Problem;

Visit of Maitre Jean Violet

The Chairman said that from what he had heard this report had been a remarkable success. He was impressed with the way in which M. Pinay had accepted the views of the ISC on how the Institute thought it should be handled and it was gratifying that the Pinay Committee had been so delighted with the finished result.

Mr Crozier said that M. Violet, who had commissioned the report on behalf of the Pinay Committee, had come to London with M. Pinay during that week and that he, with Mr Goodwin, had met then over lunch. Pinay had given Mr Crozier documents relating to their next project. M. Pinay had presented a copy of European Security and the Soviet Problem to President Nixon and Dr Kissinger in America. Earlier that week he had had a three hour session with President Pompidou, during which time he had presented him with a copy of the publication in French. Maitre Violet had also presented copies to a number of German politicians, mainly Christian Democrats, who are having the report translated into German. And he had shown a copy to the Spanish Minister and to the Pope. NSIC in New York had bought 500 of the ISC's initial print order, and another 500 had been bought by the American Bar Association. In effect we were out of print on the day of publication. Numerous orders were in hand for the reprint. A leader in the Daily Telegraph of 14 January spoke highly of the publication.

In March 1975, ISC launched a sister organisation in Washington chaired by former Secretary of State George Ball. Members of its committee included Robert Komer, who headed the US ‘pacification programme’ in Vietnam and Kermit Roosevelt, who had headed the CIA's worldwide propaganda operation at the time that Forum World Features was set up.

Gould Report

In 1977 ISC produced a report authored by Julius Gould – founder Chairman of the Social Affairs Unit and then a professor at Nottingham University – called The Attack on Higher Education: Marxist and Radical Penetration. The 'Gould Report' as it became known alleged a Marxist penetration into British sociology.

According to The Times the report was ‘the outcome of a study group, which began in November 1975 and continued at intervals into 1977’. The group consisted of the author Julius Gould, as well as number of other conservative academics, namely Caroline Cox, director of the Nursing Education Research Unit, Chelsea College, London University; Antony Flew of Reading University; David Martin and Kenneth Minogue both of LSE, the American sociologist Edward Shils, and Kenneth Watkins of Sheffield University. They were joined by the leading figures in ISC: Brian Crozier, Iain Hamilton and Michael Goodwin. The Conservative Education Spokesman Rhodes Boyson and John Vaizey (father of the British neo-con Ed Vaizey) were also consulted by the Group. Considering the ideological orientation of these individuals, The Observer commented that: ‘The study group seems to believe with Professor Hayek and his disciple, Sir Keith Joseph, that true liberty is possible only in a capitalist, free market civilisation.’

The rhetoric of the report was strikingly similar to that used later in response to alleged extremists during the so called ‘war on terror’. The Times reported Gould’s view that: ‘The radical minorities examined in the report often disagreed with each other, but they had a common distaste, bordering at times upon sheer hatred for the liberal, tolerant society in which they moved.’ The report stated, apparently without irony, that: ‘groups and individuals in the fields of education and culture have shown by their theory and, more importantly, by their practice that they reject key notions long associated with the idea of an open, plural society: notions such as freedom of expression and association.’

The report was particularly critical of the Open University, which was running courses which offered a critical analysis of the role of education, and had produced a text book called Schooling and Capitalism and another which it referred to as a ‘Marxist reader’.

The Times published extracts of the report and referred in its Leader Column to, ‘attacks on freedom of expression and inquiry in British universities and colleges.’ However, the paper also criticised the report as having an ‘alarmist tone which goes beyond his evidence.’ The Economist commented that: 'There is an odd slipperiness about [Gould's] his work,' and adding that, 'A refutation of a Marxist analysis in his field of specialisation would have been more in keeping with the academic tradition Mr Gould wants to defend than this document.'

Gould was subsequently asked to appear before the professional ethics committee of the British Sociological Association for questioning the academic integrity of the Association’s other members.

Robert Young, one of the academics targeted in the report, called it ‘the closest British academic life got to a McCarthy-ite witch-hunt of radicals.’ Young had written an piece on 'the ideological foundations of functionalist sociology' which was published in the Cambridge journal Science or Society? in June 1971. According to Young, the study group member Edward Shils had sent a copy to Gould who subsequently attacked Young in his ISC report. According to Young, 'Shils was a member of the set of American conservative intellectuals who made up the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which published Encounter and various other periodicals, all financed by the CIA.'

Edward Shils's Fellowship at King's College was subsequently terminated, partly as a result of Young's protest. Young claimed that Shils had 'made little contribution to the academic life of the college and used it as a base for CIA-related investigation of radicals. It was claimed on Shils' behalf that he was of considerable help to graduate students, and I was able (in my capacity as Tutor for Graduate Students) to show that he had made himself remarkably unavailable to them.'

1979-1989

Crozier's departure

The Economist describes "a palace coup [which] ousted Mr Crozier from his institute in 1979", a description later echoed by Crozier who wrote in 1999 that: 'I was ousted from the ISC by what could be described as a mini-coup.' Sources suggest that Louis Le Bailly was the main figure responsible for ousting Crozier. Le Bailly complained that Crozier’s ‘personal crusade against the forces of evil emanating largely from Russia’ was harming the Institute's reputation. Crozier’s own account in Free Agent however does not point to Le Bailly in particular. Of his dismissal Crozier stated:

I could hardly rule out a KGB hand, since the Soviets had tried to destroy me and the ISC during the preceeding years. The fact that the whole affair had clearly been masterminded by Leonard Schapiro, one of the world's leading Sovietologists, suggested however unlikely it might seem, that the distinguished professor was himself a 'mole' working for the KGB. This hypothesis turned out to be untrue, however. So did another, equally improbable.

Crozier's other hypothesis was that the CIA "sought to destroy me," and then having gone round the houses he deduces that because Le Bailly's 'political boss' when he was Defense Secretary was Lord Carrington who had blocked funding for Crozier's 'Shield' organisation and its plans for a 'Counter-Subversion Executive'. A friend also informed him that the Foreign Office wanted him 'out of the way' and that the ISC was to become "an arm of the Foreign Office," adding:

There had been much low-key rejoicing over the callaghan government's decision to kill off the IRD. With me at its head, however, the ISC was seen as a potential thorn in the Foreign Office's side, ever ready to expose and criticise appeasing words or gestures. With me out of the way, the Institute for the Study of Conflict could be made into a pliable adjunct to HMG's policy: an unembarrassing junior partner to the Royal Institute of International Affairs."

Later in 1999 Crozier suggested in a letter to The Times, that his involvement in his "private sector operational intelligence agency" The 61 was the reason for his departure. He wrote that: 'Rumours of this enterprise reached Schapiro, who presented me with an ultimatum: stop running The 61 or resign as director of the ISC. I chose to step down.'

New faces

After Crozier's departure IST was taken over by its former administrative director Michael Goodwin. Goodwin's background was similar to Crozier's. He had worked for the BBC as well as in publishing, whilst operating covertly for the Information Research Department, as well as the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

In 1980 Michael Goodwin recruited a number of new figures to the Institute. On 27 October that year the terrorologist Paul Wilkinson joined the Council of Management, as did the British philosopher and author Maurice Cranston. Wilkinson was a member only until May 1981, but Cranston stayed. In 1980 Goodwin also recruited the former head of the Information Research Department Nigel Clive as an editorial consultant, hoping to change the Institute’s reputation as a centre for fanatical Cold War propagandists. However, Goodwin later rejected Clive’s advice leading to the latter's resignation. In 1982 Goodwin instead recruited William Gutteridge, an expert on Southern African militaries based at Aston University. Gutteridge remained an Editorial Consultant at ISC throughout the 1980s.

Another significant sigure who joined ISC during this period was Charles Elwell, who had retired from MI5’s F branch in 1979. Dubbed the Security Service's “Witchfinder-General” by the Observer, Elwell had spent much of his career smearing left of centre politicians, charity workers and trade unionists. At ISC he continued his 'counter-subversion' work, producing a regular bulletins called Background Briefing on Subversion.

In May 1983 Chairman Leonard Schapiro was replaced by the former diplomat and Middle Eastern expert Frank Brenchley. Schapiro remained a member of the Council, but died that November. Brenchley, who had started his career in intelligence, had been a Visiting Fellow at ISC 1974–75. Since then he worked at the Cabinet Office and the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce.

In 1985 The Council of Management comprised of Louis Le Bailly, Frank Brenchley, Max Beloff, Maurice Cranston, Samuel Finer, Christopher Foxley-Norris (vice-president of the Royal United Services Institute) Robert Thompson, Harry Tuzo (Chairman of the Royal United Services Institute), Laurence Martin and Edward Peck.

That year the London School of Economics professor Dominic Lieven also joined the Council, and on 27 November 1986 IST recruited Lord Denman, a former military man who was extremely well connected in the corporate and diplomatic world.

Activities and output

ISC continued to publish its regular journal Conflict Studies throughout the 1980s, and ISC successor's the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism later took over the journal. The Annual of Power and Conflict was discontinued in 1982, but from Autumn 1983 ISC published a new periodical called Conflict Bulletin which was also taken over by the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism and ran until 1996.

ISC has been reported to have produced a regular bulletins called Background Briefing on Subversion from 1979. However, the most detailed report suggests that this operation was conducted by Brian Crozier who had by now left ISC. The Background Briefing on Subversion was written by Charles Elwell, formerly of MI5’s F branch which targeted ‘subversives’. From 1988 Elwell’s Background Briefing on Subversion was taken over (in terms of sponsorship rather than authorship) by the anti-union activist David Hart and became British Briefing. The Background Briefing on Subversion and British Briefing were based on paranoid and sometimes bizarre exposés. One issue of British Briefing published in 1989 condemned the housing charity Shelter for 'Communist affiliations' and the World Council of Churches, for its support for the Institute of Race Relations.

Anti-peace propaganda

In 1987 The Guardian published an article exposing a ISC operation designed to smear Dutch groups opposed to the deployment of NATO cruise missiles in Holland:

The Dutch operation was launched in 1983, according to our source, when Holland was the only Nato government in Europe holding out against the deployment of cruise, much to the displeasure of the Reagan administration. A number of groups sprang up in support of cruise deployment and criticised parts of the church-led peace movement as Soviet inspired. The Dutch government reluctantly approved in principle the sitting of cruise in 1985 - but delayed deployment until the end of 1988. Another senior member of the institute and one of its powerful allies in Whitehall has confirmed its keen interest in the Dutch peace movement which spearheaded the campaign against cruise...Sir Clive Rose, a former deputy secretary in the Cabinet Office between 1976 and 1979, says he used institute research on Holland for his book, Campaign Against Western Defence. The research was carried out, he said, by a member of the institute's council, the late Professor Leonard Shapiro, and Mr Nigel Clive, a former MI6 officer and head of the Foreign Office's secret Information Research Department (IRD) from 1966 to 1969.

An interesting aspect of this operation is ISC's proximity to the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies - geographically as well as ideologically. At this time Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies. Founded in 1979, the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies for a time shared its office with ISC, and later moved to its own premises two doors away. The think-tank attacked the presence of the churches in the peace movement and the teaching of peace studies in British universities.

Relaunch as Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism

In late 1989 the ISC merged with Paul Wilkinson’s Research Foundation for the Study of Terrorism to form the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism (RISCT). Legally speaking RISCT was the same entity as the Institute for the Study of Conflict . The limited company of that name became the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism on 12 December 1989, and on the same day the charity of the same name amended its articles of association.

The origins of the merger are not entirely clear, although Paul Wilkinson’s association with ISC went back over a decade. In 1976 he authored an issue of Conflict Studies called Terrorism versus Liberal Democracy, he was listed as a 'Senior Research Fellow' at the institute in 1979 and, as noted above, he served as a member of ISC's Council of Management from 27 October 1980 to 26 May 1981. Wilkinson also wrote the keynote opening chapter in the 1986 book The New Terrorism which was edited by William Gutteridge for ISC.

A Times article published in 9 May 1989 (pre-dating ISC's relaunch), suggests that Wilkinson already had an office at ISC's HQ. It is perhaps also worth noting that Laurence Martin, who was involved in ISC from the mid-1970s, was professor of politics at the University of Wales during the same period that Wilkinson was assistant lecturer in Politics.

Locations

Golden Square in Soho, London - a 'nest of spies' in the 1980s and home to ISC

ISC was initially based at 199 Piccadilly in London’s West End. In 1971 it moved to the offices of the Royal United Services Institute on Whitehall. The Times reported that ISC would pay a grant to RUSI to help it meet its renewal of its 80 year lease which was close to expiring.

ISC registered a further office move in January 1973 (the notice was most likely filed months after the actual move) to nearby offices on 17 Northumberland Avenue, which was ISC's home for another four years.

In 1977 ISC registered its final office move to 12/12A Golden Square, near London's Regent's Street. For a time ISC shared its office with the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, which was founded in 1979, and which later moved to its own premises two doors away. Other neighbours at ISC's new location were the British arms company Astra Holdings, who had smuggled arms to Iraq and Iran during the 1980s. In 1995 Astra chairman Gerald James recalled the company's move to Golden Square:

We were not happy about our offices and helped by Roger Harding, a British defence adviser, we moved to a building in Regent Street, next to the offices of an organisation called the Institute For Study Of Conflict. Its boss, Brian Crozier, had been a key element in the CIA/MI5 campaign against left-wing/communist elements in Britain in the Seventies. Robert Moss, who worked with Crozier, was one of Margaret Thatcher's speech writers and in the office next to mine was a man called Charles Elwell, a former MI5 section head. Roger Harding had put us in a nest of spooks. But it seemed to do the trick.

Funding and finances

In December 1970, The Times reported that ISC had "raised about £20,000 to finance its work, chiefly through Sir Robert Thompson, former British representative in Saigon, and Major-General F.A.H. Ling...The chief benefactors have been Shell and BP, some merchant banks and the American National Strategy Information Center which has the backing of the Mellon family."

One member of the Mellon family Richard Mellon Scaife, also provided substantial funding. According to Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan ISC recieved more than $1.1 million from Richard Mellon Scaife between 1973 and 1979. ISC records in its first accounts that it was donated a library by the millionaire businessman John Hay Whitney. Whitney was the official owner of Kern House Enterprises (the CIA front group from which ISC sprang), so the 'donation' of the library no doubt reflected the fact that as Steve Weissman has stated, ISC "had grown directly out of the small library and research staff that the CIA's Kern House Enterprises had financed within Forum World Features".

ISC's fund raising efforts were given a boost in 1972 from John Whitehorn, the Deputy Director of the Confederation of British Industry. Among the documents leaked from ISC in 1975 was a memo from Whitehorn urging member companies of the CBI to increase their funding to five organisations working against "subversion" in British industry. ISC was one of the five organisations. Others included were the Economic League, Common Cause, Aims of Industry and Industrial Research and Information Services.

Reporting on the exposé of ISC and Forum World Features in 1976, The Guardian stated that:

The bulk of ISC's £30,000-plus annual budget comes from around 2,000 subscriptions to a series of reports - called Conflict Studies - whcih the Institute publishes. Subscribers to these include businessmen, Government offices, police and army training schools, and journalists in a number of countries. By far the largest subscriber is a Mr Quentin B. Saltzman of the Political Affairs Research Group in Washington. All efforts to speak to Mr Saltzman and his research group have so far failed. The address given on the ISC subscription list turned out to be an answering service.

In 1987 The Guardian reported that: "some of the institute's funds have been identified. They include contributions from the governments of South Africa, South Korea and Oman."

According to The Times, Michael Goodwin, who took over as Director from Brian Crozier in 1979, “rightly perceived that sound financing was important, and travelled extensively in Britain and the United States, on fundraising tours.”

In addition to its ISC income from corporations and foundations, ISC also recieved income from subscriptions to its various publications. This income is only reported in ISC's later accounts in the 1980s, but stays roughly stable around £30,000, with other income fluctuating substantially. The record of ISC's income from Companies House records seem to give an incomplete picture. Below is an account of ISC's income and expenditure from ISC's company filing. They show ISC reaching its financial peak in the early 1980s, and its income falling off towards the middle of that decade.

1970 / 1971

• Income from Donations and rent from library maintenance: £10,959
• Income from conference at Cambridge: £211
• Library donated by John Hay Whitney
• Cost of publishing Conflict Studies: £3,795

1973 / 1974

• Grants and Donations £6,244

1974 / 1975

• Grants and Donations: £66,548

1975/ 1976

• Grants and Donations: £787
• Expenditure: £8,176

1978 / 1979

• Grants and investment income: £135,679
• Operating costs: £150,841

1979 / 1980

• Grants and investment income: £138,378
• Operating costs: £165,551

1981 / 1982

• Operating Costs: £141,279
• Grants and Investments: £131,164

1982 / 1983

• Operating Costs: £135,826
• Grants and Investments: £105,254

1984 / 1985

• Donations: nil
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1985 / 1986

• Donations: £8,000
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1986 / 1987

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1987 / 1988

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1988 / 1989

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Resources, Notes

Resources

• Institute for the Study of Conflict, extract from The "Terrorism" Industry
• Terrorexpertise:Institute for the Study of Conflict - page on ISC's terrorism related activities

Literature

• Crozier, B. (1993). Free Agent: the unseen war 1941-1991. HarperCollins Publishers.
• Michaels, J. H. (2014). The Heyday of Britain’s Cold War Think Tank: Brian Crozier and the Institute for the Study of Conflict, 1970–79. In Transnational Anti-Communism and the Cold War (pp. 146-160). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
• Sim, R. (1978). Research note: Institute for the Study of Conflict. Terrorism Volume 1, 1978 - Issue 2