Scaife Says Goodbye To An Old Friend

And in doing so leads us to some, shall we say, interesting connections.

From saturday's op-ed page:

Many of you likely have never heard of Brian Crozier. More’s the pity. For Mr. Crozier, who died Aug. 4 on his 94th birthday, was one of this nation’s most important educators.

No, Crozier wasn’t a teacher, per se. But he was a teacher nonetheless. In fact, he was a teacher extraordinaire.

The native Australian began his career as a music and art critic. Then he began a long and storied tenure as an international correspondent, first with Reuters in the Far East. He later would write for The Economist and National Review, among many others.

Oh, but he did so much more than that.  More on Crozier's bona fides:

Crozier’s insightful reporting was years ahead of the pack. He exposed the horrors of Lenin and Stalin and detailed how misguided were the efforts to live with Communism. Detente, he showed, only emboldened the spread of Communism, undermining leaders and nations all too willing to go along to get along.

So deep were Crozier’s sources and so accurate was his information that he became a de facto intelligence agency for British and U.S. leaders during the Cold War. As another legendary journalist, John O’Sullivan, put it, he did “more than most to bring about the collapse of Communism, and when it happened, it confirmed the truth of his brave and often unpopular criticisms.”

Note the part about how "he became a de facto intelligence agency for British and U.S. leaders" a few decades ago.

But the whole thing felt out of place.  Why this obituary now?  On the surface, it's obvious that it's an old man (Scaife) paying tribute to an old friend (Crozier) who's passed away.  And who can argue with that?

On the other hand, I was still curious about who this Brian Crozier was.  So I looked up Mr Crozier and found this obit at The Guardian.  This further piqued my interest:

In the 1960s, at MI6's suggestion, Crozier was approached by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded agency that financed publications around the world, including Encounter magazine in Britain. In 1966, with the help of CIA funds, he set up a British-based agency, Forum World Features, and later founded the Institute for the Study of Conflict.

Guess who has a connection to both the Forum World Features.

From the Washington Post in 1999:

Scaife undertook one unusual media enterprise in his own name. In 1968, he agreed to replace John Hay Whitney, last owner of the New York Herald Tribune, as the head of the parent firm of Forum World Features, a London-based news agency that received subsidies and guidance from the CIA. The proprietor of Forum, Brian Crozier, has said he was introduced to Scaife by the CIA. Scaife has never spoken about this.

Who knew that Richard Mellon Scaife once fronted a CIA Propaganda firm?

But this is nothing new, my friends, the Washington Post had the story in 1975.