Brian Crozier

Brian Crozier, aged 21, in August 1939

Brian Rossiter Crozier (born 4 August 1918) is an historian, strategist, and journalist. He founded the Institute for the Study of Conflict, a right-wing propaganda group, reported to have been set up by the CIA and British intelligence in 1970. He is a veteran of the cold war and has provided advice to the British Secret Intelligence Service, the Information Research Department, and the CIA. He wrote for Reuters and The Economist, was an editor for The Sunday Times and 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.

Background

Crozier once believed in communism - as a reaction to the Great Depression and to Adolf Hitler - but later dedicated his life to fighting it. Despite his age he 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.

Crozier was born in Australia, and grew up in England and France. He went to school in Montpellier and after his family moved to England attended Peterborough College in Harrow before joining the Trinity College of Music in London. Whilst still at Trinity College Crozier became associated with a new arts focused weekly magazine called COMMENT. He wrote articles on art and music for the magazine, which he says launched his journalistic career. During this time Crozier says he had communist sympathies. He recalls in one of his autobiographies that two of his friends at Trinity College 'were both members of Britain’s Communist Party. Although I never joined the party, my sympasthies were on their side at that time, and these two friends impressed me by their outspokenness, their devotion to their principles...'

In the summer of 1936, Crozier lost his scholarship at Trinity College but was urged to pursue a career in journalism. This he did, and he subsequently held various journalistic and editorial positions during the 1940s including periods at Reuters, the News Chronicle and the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1954 was appointed a leader writer, correspondent and foreign reports editor at The Economist. Crozier worked at the The Ecnomist until 1964, whilst also working as a commentator for the BBC overseas services. During this time he made his first intelligence contacts and used them for scoops. When John Hay "Jock" Whitney was ambassador to Great Britain from 1957 to 1961, Crozier was invited to his inner circle, stating:

... in the late 1950s during my Economist years, ... I had been among the priviliged few journalists invited to his [Jock Whitney's] small lunches at the Connaught Hotel, and the more formal receptions at his residence in Regent's Park."

Whitney was a Rockefeller associate, a friend of the British royal family, a CIA associate, and a Pilgrims Society vice president. A few years later, Crozier went to work for the Information Research Department, doing studies on KGB subversion. He also started to work with the CIA, MI6, and the intelligence agencies of France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Morocco, Iran, Argentina, Chile, and Taiwan. The CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) also approached him to reconstruct and commercialize their organization. Crozier, however, turned down this offer but later did a study for CCF, investigating its South American network. Some time after that study, in 1965-1966, he reconstructed the CCFs Forum Service, turning it into Forum World Features (FWF). John Hay Whitney was the one who took over the financial burden of FWF from the CIA when it was commercialized. Another billionaire CIA associate, Richard Mellon Scaife, later took over funding of FWF from Whitney. Scaife also funded Crozier's Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), which he founded in 1970, and showed up at gatherings of the Foreign Affairs Research Institute, an anti-communist and anti-terrorist propaganda group headed by several British Cercle members, including Crozier (41). In his book 'Free Agent' Crozier summarized the purpose of his ISC:

"Throughout my period as Director, the Institute for the Study of Conflict was involved in exposing the fallacies of 'détente' and warning the West of the dangers inherent a policy of illusion."

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.

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."

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.(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).

Free Agent?

Crozier’s autobiography confirmed that, Time Out and other mid-1970s research published in the Leveller and State Research and more recently Lobster was accurate: Crozier was working for the British and American intelligence services, but he still paradoxically maintains that he worked “with” and not “for” the CIA, MI6 and IRD The briefings he received from an MI6 officer secured the job as editor of the Economist's Foreign Report, he had a 'part-time consultancy for IRD'; and they 'put an office at [his] disposal.' As Robin Ramsay put it:

”As early as p. 20 it is hard to avoid concluding that Crozier is describing how he was recruited by MI6; and his 'independence' is finally revealed as simply a cover story on p. 92 when he writes of contacting his main 'case officer' in the CIA. Independents or genuine free-lance journalists don't have case officers.”

Ramsay’s review notes several key passages in the book (and its omissions) including the observation that when Labour won the election in 1974, IRD dropped its briefings on subversion in Britain. This may explain why Colin Wallace was in such demand post February 1974. With the IRD briefings stopped, Wallace's Information Policy unit in Northern Ireland was the last official U.K. source of unattributable briefings on the British left. One can also assert that this was part of ISC’s mandate

The 1970s and 80s were the years when Crozier was engaged full-time in pyschological operations, running a large network in the UK. Forum World Features in which, 'with the full agreement of SIS [he] would deal directly with CIA personnel' was succeeded by the ISC.

”After Sir Dennis Greenhill, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, vetoed British state money for ISC and the CIA felt obliged to follow suit, 'the Agency came up with' Richard Mellon Scaife, who provided $100,000 a year (p. 90). After the formation of ISC came the so-called Sixth International (6I) (sic), most of whose activities remain undisclosed; his domestic counter-subversion agency The Shield; and, of course, the Freedom Association.”

Ramsay observes that in the 1970s and 80s Crozier claims to have run: Peter Shipley (last seen at Conservative Party Central Office); Douglas Eden of the Social Democratic Alliance; Dr Julian Lewis (last seen at Conservative Party Central Office); Tony Kerpel and Edward Leigh (now an MP).

Crozier also claims to have created the psy-ops outfits of the Coalition for Peace through Security (anti CND), the Campaign Against Council Corruption (anti Labour-controlled local authorities) and the Media Monitoring Unit (anti BBC).

So who were the communist threat? Crozier tells us that MPs Stan Newens, Jo Richardson, Joan Lestor, Frank Allaun and Joan Maynard were identifed by a 'senior KGB defector in London' as 'confidential contacts' of the Soviet embassy. As examples of 'extreme' left-wing (everyone from the CPGB to the WRP, are lumped together) Labour MPs he cites Sidney Bidwell, Ron Thomas and Eddie Loyden, Eric Heffer, Arthur Latham, James Lamond and Tony Benn. The other reds-under-the-bed organisations were the World Peace Council, and WPC's British off-shoot the British Peace Assembly.

Ramsay also notes:

”1979/80 was a some kind of watershed. Mrs T. got elected and Private Eye reported — accurately, it turns out (who leaked this?) — that Shield members Crozier and ex MI6 officer Nicholas Elliot had triumphantly gone to see her at Chequers. What the Eye didn't say was that, on Crozier's report, Mrs T. said 'thanks but no thanks'. She didn't need Crozier now she had the British secret state to brief her. He and Moss resigned from the Freedom Association — job done. Now even the ISC council began to flex its hitherto dormant muscles and forced his resignation.”

Publications

• 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 : "detente", 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.

Affiliations

• Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

Resources

• Institute for the Study of Conflict, extract from The "Terrorism" Industry
• Hoover Institution Archives, Register of the Brian Crozier Papers, 1936-1993

External Links

• David Rees Student of subversion - Brian Crozier, National Review, 31 Dec 1985.
• James P. Lucier Cold warrior Crozier Details Soviet Terror', Insight on the News, 20 Dec 1999.
• Joël van der Reijden (2006) Le Cercle and the struggle for the European continent,