Brian Crozier


Brian Rossiter Crozier was a historian, strategist and journalist.

Early life

Crozier was born in a small village in Australia, where his father worked as mining engineer. In 1923 his family moved to France. In 1930, it moved to England, where he received a scholarship to study piano and composition at the Trinity College of Music in London. Early in life he believed in communism, as a reaction to the Great Depression and to Adolf Hitler, but he later changed his philosophy and worked to combat communism.

Career

Crozier eventually became interested in journalism and pursued a career that led him to become a foreign correspondent for Reuters, a columnist for The Economist, a reporter for the BBC and, during a brief return to Australia, a writer for The Sydney Morning Herald.
Crozier worked as the director of Forum World Features, set up in 1966 by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had ties to the American Central Intelligence Agency. While editing the Economist's "insider" news sheet Foreign Report, Crozier, as he later recorded in his memoirs, kept some of the best stories that reached him for the CIA. He stated in 1975 that Forum World Features had broken all ties to the CIA when he became its director in the 1960s.
In 1970, Crozier founded the Institute for the Study of Conflict, based in London, to study insurgencies and terrorism. He presided over it for most of the 1970s. According to a profile written by David Rees in 1985 for the American fortnightly National Review "the Institute... was the first private think-tank devoted to the study of terrorism and subversion". Under his direction the institute specialised in the study of the "peacetime" strategy of the Soviet Union. Its analyses, including the Annual of Power and Conflict, which it published for ten years, have been used in war colleges throughout the West.
For many years, Crozier wrote a regular column, "The Protracted Conflict", in the National Review. Joseph D'Agostino of Human Events stated, "Crozier has another distinction: in 1988 he appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records for having interviewed the most heads of state or government, 58 in all".
Crozier provided advice to the British Secret Intelligence Service, to the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office, and to the CIA. Lecturing to Britain's staff college for army officers during the early 1970s, when the Labour Party was in power under Harold Wilson, Crozier stated if the government went "too far", it was the armed forces' duty to intervene. In 1982, it was revealed from the papers of a former Bavarian state security chief, Hans Langemann, that Crozier was an attendant of Le Cercle and headed a secret international group that tried to influence the West German federal election of 1980 by using secret-service connections and cover-up financial transactions to make Franz Josef Strauß Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Crozier was a co-founder of the group The 61, an organisation that wanted to counter Soviet communist propaganda.
HarperCollins published Crozier's autobiography, Free Agent: The Unseen War 1941–1991, in 1993, which was revised and corrected in paperback edition in 1994.
Crozier was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow on War, Revolution, and Peace of the Hoover Institution. He was also a member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. In 1985, he signed a petition in support for the far-right paramilitary Contras.

Personal life

Crozier was married twice. He had three daughters and a son.

Death

Crozier died on 4 August 2012 after a long illness at 94.

Selected works

Books
Book contributions
Articles
Book reviews