Brian Crozier

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Brian Crozier is a historian, strategist, and journalist. He is the founder of the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), a London-based group that studied insurgencies and terrorism. The ISC was a right-wing propaganda group, reported to have been set up by the CIA and British intelligence in 1970. [1] Despite supposedly closing down in 1990, the ISC then functioned under the name of the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism (RISCT), headed by Paul Wilkinson, the formost British academic terrorlogist.

Crozier is a veteran of the cold war and has provided advice to the British Secret Intelligence Service, the Information Research Department (IRD) of the British Foreign Office, and the CIA. He wrote for Reuters, The Economist and was a commentator for the BBC. He wrote a column for National Review. Crozier was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow on War, Revolution, and Peace of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Brian Crozier was born in Australia, and grew up in England and France. He once believed in communism -as a reaction to the Great Depression and to Adolf Hitler- and is now dedicating his life to fighting it. His memoirs appeared in 1993 as Free Agent: The Unseen War 1941-1991.

Despite his age - he was born in 1918 - Crozier still participates in public debate. In 2000, then 81 years old, he joined the CNN.com chat room to discuss the elections in Russia and his latest book "The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire." This is how CNN introduced him:

"For many years, Crozier led a double life, on contract with the CIA, the British Secret Intelligence Service and the Information Research Department of Britain’s Foreign Office. In 1977 Crozier set up a "private sector" international action service. During most of this period, he was unofficially advising Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and on occasion President Reagan. He later told the story in detail in his autobiography Free Agent: The Unseen War 1941 – 1991." [2]

In 2003 he wrote a review of Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History for Human Events, calling it an 'Impressive' History of the Soviet Camp System. [3]

His last book to date, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (1999) is an 800 pages "massive account of the evils of communism, from its inception under Karl Marx and Valdimir Lenin to its eventual demise on Mikhail Gorbachev's watch," according to Insight on the News, a magazine that interviewed him for the occassion.

"Crozier began his career as a member of the notorious Left Book Club, organized by Communists and Marxists, and was deeply influenced by Arthur Koestler's book Spanish Testament, written during Koestler's time as a Communist. Later he learned from Koestler that the book virtually had been dictated by Willy Muenzerberg, the head of the Soviet NKVD (secret police) in Western Europe.
In the meantime, Crozier's views had been turned around by a book written in 1947 by Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko titled I Chose Freedom, an early account of Josef Stalin's atrocities in the Ukraine. The second book which he says "taught me to think about politics" was James Burnham's The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom. Many years later he was to become Burnham's successor at National Review, carrying on "The Protracted Conflict" column for 18 years."[4]

Brian Crozier is a self-acknowledged disciple of James Burnham, according to David Rees, seeking political and strategic truth through a search for the "real" as distinct from the "formal" meaning of political utterances. Crozier himself explained his debt most thoroughly in a 1976 article in the Lugano Review, later condensed and updated for NR (April 15, 1983).

David Rees devoted a long article in National Review in 1985 to Crozier's "immense contribution to modern strategic thought."

If Crozier's realism owes much to the Burnham influence, it owes much as well to his fifty years of working journalism, nearly forty of which he has spent as a foreign reporter. Born in Australia in 1918, Crozier was brought to France in 1923, at age five. He spent his early school years there, and was fully bilingual by the time he moved to England. In 1935, Crozier won a scholarship to study piano and composition at Trinity College of Music in London. Within a year he was drawn into journalism, writing not about terror and subversion but about music and art. He joined the London staff of Reuters in 1943, soon moved to the now defunct News Chronicle, and then, in 1951, returned to Australia and the Sydney Morning Herald. A year later he was in Southeast Asia as a foreign correspondent for Reuters.
He hasn't stopped traveling since. In 1953 he joined The Economist. For ten years he wrote that magazine's confidential bulletin "Foreign Report," during which time he traveled constantly not only for The Economist but for the English, French, and Spanish services of the BBC. He left The Economist in 1964. But leaving neither lightened his schedule nor reduced his output, as he continued to work under contract for print and electronic media organizations too numerous to list. Over the course of his career he has interviewed 56 heads of state or government, an achievement that has been accepted by Guinness as a record for a journalist.
In 1970 he founded the Institute for the Study of Conflict, the first private think-tank devoted to the study of terrorism and subversion. Under his direction (he left it in 1979) the institute specialized in the study of the "peace-time" strategy of the Soviet Union. Its analyses, including the Annual of Power and Conflict it published for ten years, have been used in war colleges throughout the West. Lately, Crozier has taken up writing realistic spy thrillers. The first, The Andropov Deception, will be available in the U.S. next spring.[5] (this was in 1985).

With the Institute for the Study of Conflict Crozier (co-)authored many books, reports and studies on the dangers of communism and of terrorism (or both).

A small selection:

  • The Rebels: A Study of Post-War Insurrections (1960)
  • Neo-colonialism (1964)
  • South-East Asia in turmoil (1965)
  • The struggle for the Third World : a background book (1966)
  • Since Stalin : an assessment of Communist power (1970)
  • The future of communist power (1970)
  • The Ulster debate - report (1972) with James Camlin Beckett and Robert Moss
  • Soviet pressures in the Caribbean : the satellisation of Cuba (1973)
  • The peacetime strategy of the Soviet Union - report (1973)
  • Soviet objectives in the Middle East - report (1974)
  • The conflict of information : "détente", freedom & constraint (1975) with Leonid Vladimirov et al.
  • The Soviet presence in Somalia (1975)
  • The surrogate forces of the Soviet Union (1978)


Crozier has also written three biographies:

  • Franco: A Biographical History (1967)
  • De Gaulle, 1. the Warrior, 2. the Statesman (1973, reprinted 1990)
  • The Man Who Lost China: The First Full Biography of Chiang Kai-shek (1976)


The most revealing book Crozier wrote about his intimate contacts with (heads of) intelligence and heads of state in the Western World is:

  • Free Agent, the Unseen War 1941-1991 (1993)

Subtitle of this book is the autobiography of an international activist; the red banner on the cover: "The book MI5 and MI6 tried to ban." In this book Crozier sheds some light on his involvement in international affairs, and his stories are often just a slightly different version of what has written about Crozier, his contacts, his views and his influence by others.


Resources

External Links

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