George Crile was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He received a bachelor’s degree from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and then attended the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve as a lance corporal from 1968 to 1974. After the war, he worked as a reporter in Washington, and as the Pentagon correspondent for Ridder Newspapers. He became the Washington editor of Harper’s magazine. His articles also appeared in Washington Monthly, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
In 1976 he joined CBS News to produce The CIA's Secret Army, a documentary about the CIA’s secret war against Castro after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, based on his own reporting. He also produced The Battle for South Africa, which won a Peabody Award; the controversial Gay Power, Gay Politics (1980), which focused on San Francisco politics following the assassination of Harvery Milk; and The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception (1982), which resulted in a libel suit against CBS from General William Westmoreland.
In 1985, he joined 60 Minutes, where he specialized in international affairs. He covered the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and his report was influential …
