by Jon Krakauer
This summer I worked in Hushey, Khandey, Shigar and Baisha valleys, Krabathang etc…. The reason I am writing you is that the school you built in Hushey is empty and unused (beautiful by the way) and could not confirm that but people I ran into in Skardu and other villages told me that there are other schools you have built that apparently are not used. What was even more surprising was the fact that many people I talked to (about snow leopards) inevitably (because I live in Montana) asked me if I knew you and took that opportunity to share a series of negative feelings such as: “the book is full of lies”, “Dr.
Greg built the schools but did not provide funding for teachers, stationery etc.”, “he is banned from G-B”. Hearing this was sad and disappointing, at the same time I know that becom-ing successful attracts envy or that sometimes even when you are well-meaning things do not turn out the way you want them.
Rosen’s report that some CAI schools were empty—in-
cluding the Hushe school, which Mortenson has long trumpeted as one of his most satisfying accomplishments—was disturbing. When I asked Rosen to elaborate, she replied that the elders of Hushe village told her “the school was built by Mortenson and that’s where the support ended.” It was run thereafter by government teachers, and the “poor quality of education was one of the reasons that the community decided to set up its own private school in a more modest building nearby with a more varied curriculum which includes English.”
t h r e e c u p s o f d e c e i t 47
CAI has become proficient at erecting schools off the beaten path, and Mortenson deserves praise for that. But filling those schools with effective teachers and actually educating children turn out to be much more difficult than constructing schoolrooms. On this front, Mortenson has
delivered far less than he has professed.
On April 15, 2010, Mortenson was the featured speaker
at a conference presented on Edutopia, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, during which he
stated, “The most important thing in any school is obviously a teacher…. So we provide teacher training and support.”7
Students at CAI schools, he assured his audience, “learn to read and write, science, math, everything else. They also, by fifth grade, they learn five languages, including Arabic and English. One of the things we stress is not only that they learn how to read and write Arabic, but they learn how to understand Arabic…. We put a lot of emphasis now on teacher training…. It goes on for a month about twice a year.”
Mortenson has made similar assertions on countless
occasions, including a Charlie Rose interview broadcast on July 27, 2010. As recently as March 26 of this year, he told a reporter from the Spokane Spokesman-Review, “We supply the teacher training and support…we have a teacher-training program and we have emphasized that quite a bit.” In the case of the Hushe school, such claims are patently untrue, and they also turn out to be bogus for all but a handful of CAI projects. The statement about students learning five languages is absolutely false, says a CAI staffer, “not even true for a single school.” Most teachers, this staffer also reports, have never received any training from CAI.
Even more alarming is the fact that a significant num-
ber of CAI schools exist only on paper. The CAI website, for example, lists eight schools that have been completed in Afghanistan’s Konar Province; during his Charlie Rose
interview, Mortenson claimed he’d built eleven schools there.
At that time, he had built only three schools in Konar; in the months since, he has built a fourth.
Many CAI schools that actually did get built, moreover, j o n k r a k a u e r
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were later abandoned due to lack of CAI support. “Ghost schools,” they’re called by the disillusioned residents of Baltistan, where at least eighteen CAI buildings now stand empty.
No one, not even Mortenson, knows exactly how many CAI
projects exist as ghost schools, or simply never existed in the first place, because he has repeatedly subverted efforts by his Montana-based staff to track effectively how many schools have been built, how much each school actually costs, and how many schools are up and running. For the CAI staff to gather such crucial information, Mortenson would have to accurately account for how he spends CAI funds—something he has never been willing to do.
Instead, for years the CAI books have been cooked to
order. In 2010, for example, when CAI’s financial records underwent a long-delayed audit by an independent accounting firm (as the law requires in most of the states where CAI conducts fundraising), the auditor requested documentation from 2009 that showed how much CAI spent on each of its overseas school projects. Such documentation didn’t exist, however, so CAI staffers fabricated it. Because they lacked invoices and receipts with which to determine the schools’
true costs, in many cases they simply guessed how many
students might plausibly be enrolled at each school (or con-jured a number out of thin air) and then applied an arbitrary formula based on school size to come up with a fictitious cost for each school. For example, if they imagined a school to have between 300 to 600 students, the school was said to cost $50,000 to build (according to this formula), and its annual operating expenses came to $7,500. Schools reported to have 601 to 1,000 students were said to cost $65,000 to build and $9,000 to operate. By this method, CAI staffers created a fraudulent document and gave it to the auditor. Astound-ingly, the auditor accepted the document as genuine, no red flags were raised, and CAI posted the ensuing “Independent Auditor’s Report” on its website in May 2010.
★ ★ ★
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during mortenson’s Edutopia webinar in April 2010, someone asked him if he still visits Korphe. “I go to Pakistan and Afghanistan three times a year, maybe three to four months a year,” Mortenson replied. “I try to go to every school every year.” But according to CAI staffers, Mortenson hasn’t been to Korphe—or anywhere else in Baltistan—since 2007, and he has never laid eyes on most of the CAI schools.
Indeed, many CAI schools have never received a visit from any CAI employee.
To a certain extent, this failure has resulted from insuf-ficient staffing. For the past three years, Mortenson has devoted the bulk of his time to getting Stones into Schools published, promoting his books, fulfilling remunerative speaking gigs, and fundraising. These days neither he nor any of his Montana-based employees goes to Central Asia to oversee programs firsthand, and his entire staff in Pakistan and Afghanistan consists of just eleven people responsible for more than a hundred projects, a large number of which require many days, or even weeks, of travel to visit.
The root of the problem, however, lies in Mortenson’s
dysfunctional management. Whenever CAI staff members
have attempted to closely monitor Central Asian programs, some of them report, he’s thwarted their efforts. In 2003 and 2004, a woman named Kate DeClerk came on board as CAI’s program director. She traveled to Pakistan to document the organization’s projects there, and discovered a number of ghost schools. When Mortenson continued to extol these
failed projects as proud CAI achievements, DeClerk quit.
After Mortenson refused to comply with CFO Debbie
Raynor’s repeated requests to provide documentation for overseas programs, Raynor contacted Ghulam Parvi (the
Pakistan program manager) directly, instructing him to provide her with documentation. For two or three months Parvi complied—until Mortenson found out what was going on and ordered Parvi to stop. Raynor resigned.
In 2007, Mortenson hired an accomplished consultant to
periodically fly to Central Asia to supervise projects. When he discovered irregularities and shared them with Mortenson, j o n k r a k a u e r
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Mortenson took no action to rectify the misconduct. In 2010, the consultant quit in frustration.
In September
2007, CAI hired a highly motivated,
uncommonly capable woman to manage its international
programs. Quickly, she demonstrated initiative and other leadership skills the Institute sorely needed. She had excep-tional rapport with Pakistani women and girls. In 2008, she unearthed serious issues in Baltistan that contradicted what Mortenson had been reporting. After she told Mortenson
about these problems, she assumed he would want her to
address them. Instead, as she prepared to return to Pakistan in 2009, Mortenson ordered her to stay away from Baltistan.
Disillusioned, she resigned in June 2010.
When asked about the high turnover of talented employ-
ees, a person who worked for CAI during this period replies,
“Greg is always fucking with people, intentionally undermin-ing them. That’s his management style. He does everything in his power to keep everyone off balance. He did not like people discovering things.”
Last June, when Parvi announced his resignation and
accused Mortenson of writing “false and baseless stories in the book which is against Islam, Baltistan and Pakistan,”
Mortenson attempted to discredit Parvi by revealing that in November 2007, Parvi had confessed to embezzling approximately $50,000 from CAI. Mortenson and the CAI board received the confession via email shortly before Parvi embarked on a sacred pilgrimage to Mecca:
I am planning to leave Skardu for Saudi Arabia to perform HAJJ…. A Muslim believes that during Haj , he has to openly admit all his SINS before the Allah Almighty and seek for-giveness…. Since I have to admit all my bad things, which I had performed without any witness and record, yet I believe Allah Almighty knows. Since there is no excuse, I also want to submit the same situation before you and the CAI Board Members. I admit that willingly or unwillingly I have spent the wealth of CAI at my own. Please Sir, do not hesitate to tell me every thing. I am mentally prepared to make good all t h r e e c u p s o f d e c e i t 51
losses which I had to CAI…. So Sir, if I am dead and could not come back home, Insha Allah you will not face any problem in getting the available assets of CAI. I have proper record of all the income and expenses of CAI which can be presented before any time.
Upon receiving this email, Mortenson neither fired Parvi nor probed further into his misconduct; according to staffers, doing so would have exposed the existence of ghost schools and other secrets that Mortenson didn’t want to come to light.Parvi is not the only CAI employee to have misap-propriated funds, and to no small degree Mortenson shares responsibility for the wrongdoing. Over the past sixteen years, he has disbursed millions of dollars in cash to CAI workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and has supervised these employees erratically at best. Brief flurries of intense micromanagement have preceded lengthy periods with no
guidance whatsoever. The program director in Kabul went a year without hearing from Mortenson. During one extended silence, Mortenson failed to contact Parvi for an even longer interval. Staff in the Montana office would take calls from Parvi pleading for instructions, begging for Greg to phone him.Although Mortenson urged his foreign employees to use CAI funds frugally and not waste a single rupee, his deeds contradicted his words. When Mortenson traveled through Pakistan and Afghanistan, he often brought a Pelican equip-ment case holding bricks of hundred-dollar bills, and he spent huge sums capriciously, frequently on things that seemed to have little or nothing to do with schools. Chartered helicopters flew journalists and VIPs from one end of Pakistan to the other. Favors were asked of powerful individuals, who were rewarded lavishly for their help. When the American office staff implored Mortenson to document his expenses, Mortenson routinely ignored them. Adept at reading their mercurial boss, the overseas staff concluded that cash was abundant and bookkeeping was merely a contrivance done for j o n k r a k a u e r
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appearance’ sake. As long as Greg went home with inspiring tales to keep the donations flowing, they took for granted that no one would miss a few thousand dollars here and there.
★ ★ ★
in 2008, Mortenson hired the veteran sportswriter Mike
Bryan to write a sequel to Three Cups of Tea, which was still perched atop the major bestseller lists. By the end of that year Mortenson signed an agreement with Viking Penguin to
publish the new book, which didn’t yet have a title. The deal included a $700,000 advance to be paid to MC Consulting, Inc., a company Mortenson created in 1998 to shelter his personal wealth.
When Mortenson read a partial draft of Bryan’s manu-
script in the spring of 2009, he thought it lacked sizzle. So he hired Kevin Fedarko—the journalist who’d authored the Parade article that catapulted Mortenson out of obscurity—
to rework Bryan’s draft and ghostwrite the remainder of the book on an extremely tight schedule. Writing sixteen hours a day for more than a hundred consecutive days, Fedarko completed the job in time for Stones into Schools to appear in bookstores twenty-five days before Christmas 2009.8
“Picking up where Three Cups of Tea left off in 2003,” the book’s dust jacket announced, “Stones into Schools traces the CAI’s efforts to work…in the secluded northeast corner of Afghanistan.” The story hinges on the challenges Mortenson and his staff must overcome to construct a school in the most remote part of the Wakhan Corridor, a roadless region
“where the frigid waters of a shallow, glassy blue lake lap at the edges of a grass-covered field known as Bozai Gumbaz.”
Here, 13,000 feet above sea level in the Pamir mountains, Kyrgyz herders “struggle to uphold an ancestral lifestyle that represents one of the last great nomadic horse cultures on earth.”
Mortenson, who has deft storytelling instincts, had
foreshadowed the narrative arc of Stones into Schools on pages 250–252 of Three Cups. This passage recounts how, in the t h r e e c u p s o f d e c e i t 53
fall of 2000, Mortenson happened to be visiting a village in northeastern Pakistan called Zuudkhan, just below a 16,300-foot pass that marked the border with Afghanistan, when a band of Kyrgyz horsemen galloped down from the heights.
They
rode straight for him like a pack of rampaging bandits. There were a dozen of them coming fast, with bandoliers bulging across their chests, matted beards, and homemade riding boots that rose above their knees. “They jumped off their horses and came right at me,” Mortenson says. “They were the wildest-looking men I’d ever seen. My detention in Waziristan flashed in my mind and I thought, ‘Uh-oh! Here we go again.’”
The leader of the posse, named Roshan Khan, stood
nose to nose with Mortenson and demanded, “We know
about Dr. Greg build school in Pakistan so you can come build for us?” Khan invited Mortenson to ride back over the pass with him and remain in the Wakhan for the winter as his guest, “so we can have good discuss and make school.”
Mortenson explained to Khan that his wife expected
him back in Montana in a few days, so he couldn’t hie off to the Pamir for the winter. But he silently “swore to himself he’d find some way” to help Khan and his fellow Kyrgyz, and then promised he’d come visit Khan as soon as possible to talk about the school. Satisfied, Roshan Khan jumped on his horse and rode back over the mountains to the Wakhan, where he related the pledge he’d extracted from Mortenson to his father—a venerated figure named Abdul Rashid Khan, supreme leader of the Afghan Kyrgyz, who plays a starring role in the finale of Stones into Schools.
In Stones (pages 29–30), Mortenson says his encounter with Roshan Khan occurred in 1999, rather than 2000, and includes a number of details that are at odds with the account in Three Cups. But no matter: According to Mortenson, he had sworn a solemn oath. “Just as Three Cups of Tea began with a promise—to build a school in Korphe, Pakistan—so too does Mortenson’s new book,” proclaims the dust jacket for Stones: j o n k r a k a u e r
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“to construct a school in an isolated
pocket of the Pamir Mountains known as Bozai Gumbaz.”
Sixty-four pages into the book, Mortenson expounds
further on his promise to the Kyrgyz:
Roshan Khan and I enacted a ritual that I recognized from six years earlier, when Haji Ali had stood in the barley fields of Korphe and asked me to provide an assurance that I was coming back to him. The leader of the Kirghiz horsemen placed his hand on my left shoulder, and I did the same with him.
“So, you will promise to come to Wakhan to build a school for our children?” he asked, looking me in the eye.
In a place like Zuudkhan, an affirmative response to a question like that can confer an obligation that is akin to a blood oath—and for someone like me, this can be a real problem….
Over the years I have missed so many plane flights, failed to appear at so many appointments, and broken so many obliga-tions that I long ago stopped keeping track. But education is a sacred thing, and the pledge to build a school is a commitment that cannot be surrendered or broken, regardless of how long it may take, how many obstacles must be surmounted, or how much money it will cost. It is by such promises that the balance sheet of one’s life is measured.
By such promises, indeed. Mortenson’s sacred pledge to
Haji Ali to build a school in Korphe—to repay the villagers for their charity, and to honor his beloved sister—turned out to be a whopper, calculated to sell books and jack up donations. So too did Mortenson’s promise to construct a school in Bozai.
★ ★ ★
for the first phase of the Bozai Gumbaz project, Mortenson asked an anthropologist named Ted Callahan to help
him. An expert mountaineer and climbing guide, Callahan had recently begun research for a doctoral thesis about the Afghan Kyrgyz, and Mortenson wondered if Callahan would t h r e e c u p s o f d e c e i t 55
be willing to travel to the Kyrgyz homeland—at the eastern-most end of the Wakhan Corridor, part of the so-called