Brian Crozier

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See here for the guitarist.

Brian Rossiter Crozier (born 4 August 1918, Far North Queensland) is a historian, strategist, and journalist. He is the founder of the Institute for the Study of Conflict, a London-based group that studies insurgencies and terrorism. Crozier has provided advice to the British Secret Intelligence Service, the Information Research Department (IRD) of the British Foreign Office, and the CIA. His memoirs appeared in 1993 as Free Agent: The Unseen War 1941-1991. He wrote for Reuters, The Economist and was a commentator for the BBC.

Crozier is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow on War, Revolution, and Peace of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

He has written three biographies:

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

as well as the history:

The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (1999) ISBN 0-7615-2057-0

Crozier was born in Australia, although he was raised in France, where he learnt French. Thereafter his family moved to England where he would receive a scholarship to study piano and musical composition at the Trinity College of Music in London. He eventually became interested in journalism, and pursued a career that would lead him to become a foreign correspondent for Reuters, columnist for The Economist, reporter for the BBC, and - during a brief return to Australia - a writer for The Sydney Morning Herald.

In 1970 he founded The Institute For The Study Of Conflict, which he would preside over for the better part of a decade. According to a profile written by David Rees in National Review in 1985, it:

...was 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.

Crozier once believed in communism --as a reaction to the Great Depression and to Adolf Hitler-- but changed his mind and later worked to combat it.

Joseph D'Agostino of Human Events states: "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."