Free Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way by Jon Krakauer

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 equipment 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 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 manuscript 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 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