George Crile III, 61; Veteran Producer for ’60 Minutes’ Who Helped Craft a Controversial Show on Vietnam War
George Crile III, a longtime producer for CBS’ “60 Minutes” and “60 Minutes II” and the author of a bestselling book about a CIA operation in Afghanistan during the Reagan administration, died Tuesday of pancreatic cancer at his home in New York City. He was 61.
Crile was perhaps best known as the producer, with Mike Wallace, of “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,” a controversial 1982 documentary that accused Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the U.S. commander of forces in South Vietnam, of being involved in “a conspiracy at the highest levels of American intelligence” to distort and minimize enemy troop strength.
The motive, Crile’s documentary claimed, was to mislead Congress and the White House into believing that the United States was actually winning the war.
Westmoreland sued CBS Inc. for libel and sought $120 million in damages. He withdrew the lawsuit before the case went to the jury, settling for a joint statement with the network that included an acknowledgment that he had not been “unpatriotic or disloyal in performing his duties as he saw them.”
While covering Afghan rebels in their war with the Soviets in the 1980s, Crile came to know a flamboyant, scandal-prone Texas congressman named Charlie Wilson, who was working with the CIA to secretly funnel billions of dollars to the Afghan fighters.
He spent years investigating Wilson’s incredible tale, which culminated in his bestselling book “Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History” (2003). Tom Hanks bought the film rights to the book, and a movie version featuring Hanks as Wilson is in preproduction for Universal Studios, according to a statement from CBS News.
George Washington Crile III was born in Cleveland. He graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., in 1968 and also studied at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey.
Crile started his journalism career at the Gary Post-Tribune in Indiana and was promoted to the newspaper’s Pentagon beat in the early 1970s.
He later worked as a reporter for Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. He also was Washington editor for Harper’s Magazine and had articles published in Washington Monthly, New Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
He joined CBS News in 1976, where his documentaries included “The CIA’s Secret Army,” which chronicled the story of the CIA’s clandestine campaigns against Fidel Castro after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
He also produced “The Battle for South Africa” (1978), which won a George Foster Peabody Award.
In 1985, he joined “60 Minutes.”
Survivors include his wife of 22 years, Susan Lyne of New York City, a former president of ABC Entertainment and now president and chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia; two daughters from his first marriage; two daughters from his second marriage; and two sisters.