She became a political activist in response to France's war in Algeria and U.S. involvement in Vietnam. George said that the Vietnam War "was this sort of gateway to understanding what America could be, which is to say something quite negative, which I had not understood at all when I lived there. I had accepted the usual propaganda." In 1967 she joined the Paris-American Committee to Stop War (P.A.C.S.), and became assistant to the director of an NGO, the American Centre for Students and Artists, in 1969. This sparked the interest of the CIA who had already been looking into P.A.C.S. In 1971 she began working with the Front Solidarite Indochine, a group that organized antiwar lectures and protests in France. Shortly after, P.A.C.S. was dismantled by the French government. She then collaborated with the directors of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., to form a new NGO devoted to social justice, which, in 1973, became the Transnational Institute .