George Crile's war: a man who pulled no punches

Numbers can lie, especially in a time of war. The late CBS News producer George Crile understood the hard truth that policymakers can't rely on statistics to decide the course of armed conflicts. His life story serves as an exclamation point for journalists who are not afraid to battle entrenched institutions — the CIA, the U.S. Army, or the media powers themselves.

Although he won Peabody and Emmy awards for his 1978 documentary, "The Battle for South Africa," Crile emerged on the national scene when CBS broadcast "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception" in 1981. The documentary claimed that Gen. William Westmoreland's Military Assistance Command in Vietnam deliberately undercounted North Vietnamese troop and guerrilla forces in order to show progress in Vietnam and further sell the war to the Pentagon and American public.

As the researcher for that documentary, I knew that thousands of documents and interviews supported our thesis. Crile had befriended Sam Adams, a retired CIA analyst, who had the courage to seek a court-martial of Westmoreland for the crime of "cooking the books" on the enemy order of battle.

As a young journalist, I was captivated by the way Crile and Adams fought to get the 90-minute program broadcast without pulling any punches. The image of Crile charging through the hallways of CBS, shaking his leonine mane, trailed by the lanky Adams clutching reams of research notes, remains with me to this day. These two men, along with correspondent Mike Wallace, knew that their account of intelligence distortion would be controversial.

The personal accounts of intelligence officers that we captured on film confirmed that military analysts in Vietnam were pressured to "lie a little" in order to maintain an image of progress on the battlefield, even when they had hard evidence that the North Vietnamese were massing their forces for the Tet Offensive of 1968. As a result of this deception, even though we had ample warnings of the timing of Tet, American and South Vietnamese forces were caught unprepared for the scale of the enemy effort and, in fact, the North Vietnamese captured Hue and other key cities before the tide of battle turned.

The $100-million libel lawsuit brought by Westmoreland, and funded by a conservative think tank with an anti-media agenda, ended when the general settled for a statement from CBS that he had done his duty "as he saw fit." CBS didn't pay Westmoreland a dime, yet the reputation of the network was damaged by the suit and CBS subsequently shied away from hard-hitting, controversial documentaries, choosing to invest its budget in soft-news programs and celebrity profiles.

In the current American war, where there are no defined battle lines, one can only wonder what pressure Army and CIA analysts are under to prove that we are "winning," when in fact there are very few clear measures of progress. As in Vietnam, the Pentagon has created numerous indexes of progress, charting bombing incidents and casualties. What we can't chart is the enemy's willingness to fight, its ultimate resources, or the spirit of the Iraqi people.

Crile would have understood this. In the wake of "The Uncounted Enemy," he had already turned his gaze to the next global hot spot — Afghanistan.

In 2003, Crile wrote "Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History," detailing how a flamboyant Texas congressman arm-twisted the House Appropriations Committee and the CIA to supply Afghan rebels with advanced missiles and other weaponry to defeat the Soviet army. Once again, Crile was in his element, giving his audience a glimpse behind the scenes of how policy is occasionally shaped by larger-than-life figures who passionately pursue objectives and don't take no for an answer.

The fact that "Charlie Wilson's War" in book and movie form has resonated with the American public vindicates Crile's audacity. He was not well-liked at CBS, especially by those who thought he was too impatient and impertinent when pursuing a story. It's true that he pushed hard to get to the truth. But, isn't that the very definition of a journalist?

Crile died on May 15, 2006, from pancreatic cancer. He was 61. George didn't live to see "Charlie Wilson's War" on film, but he would have liked the fact that the movie doesn't pull any punches.