Brian Crozier

Brian Rossiter Crozier (4 August 1918, Shire of Cloncurry, Queensland – 4 August 2012) was a historian, strategist and journalist.

Born in Australia, Crozier grew up in France, learning French. His family then 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 later he changed his philosophy and worked to combat it.

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 (CIA). 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 (he left in 1979) the institute specialised in the study of the "peace-time" 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.

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