Greg Mortenson: A reputation in transition

Tahira Yaqoob recalls an encounter with Greg Mortenson, the disgraced author of Three Cups of Tea, in Dubai.

Every one of the 500 seats in the auditorium was taken, yet still they kept flooding in. And when there was no more room inside, they filled the foyer too.

They were there, at last month's Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai, to hear Greg Mortenson recount his now familiar tales of heroism: how he nearly died trying to climb K2, then stumbled into the village of Korphe in Pakistan where he was nursed back to health and how he later promised to build a school for its poverty-stricken urchins.

"Anyone here read Three Cups of Tea?" asked the softly spoken, shabbily dressed man. It was a redundant question judging by the sea of hands waving back at him. But such an enthusiastic response should have come as no surprise to this seasoned veteran of the promotional circuit.

Three Cups of Tea has sold at least four million copies worldwide. It is the kind of runaway bestseller that most publishers dream about. Together with its sequel, Stones to Schools, it tells of how Mortenson went on to establish 178 schools under the noses of the Taliban in volatile rural areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan and of the Central Asia Institute (CAI), the charity he founded, to support this venture. There is, however, only one problem in this uplifting narrative - it isn't exactly true.

Jon Krakauer recently published a 75-page polemic called Three Cups of Deceit asking why, in 2009, only 41 per cent of funds received by the CAI actually found their way into schools, while Mortenson spent nearly $2 million (Dh7.3m) from its coffers jetting around the world to plug his books. It was also revealed that it was Mortenson's bank account (rather than the CAI's) which benefited from speaking engagement fees of up to $30,000 a time.

A CBS News 60 Minutes documentary questioned key facts in the story the author routinely rolls out for eager audiences around the world - 160 in the past year. It asked why successive accountants have quit the charity, complaining of Mortenson's opaque spending habits, forcing the author to admit that yes, he did concoct a "compressed version of events" and no, he did not split his royalty cheques with his charity.

CAI has been operating for 17 years and receives up to $20 million a year in donations, while appearing to give Mortenson the freedom to use its funds as he sees fit. Why then did no one wave a red flag earlier?

Mortenson cut an interesting figure when I met him during his recent visit to Dubai. A Nobel Peace Prize-nominated author, he presents himself as improbably self-effacing - yet the content of what he says is the exact opposite. Curiously, throughout our conversation, he never quite met my eye. He spoke in a stream of anecdotes that left little room for questions, painting a tableau of Dickensian poverty, of children tugging at his clothes "wearing burlap sackcloth and riddled with lice, dysentery and vitamin deficiencies".

There is no doubt, of course, that Mortenson has helped thousands of children by building schools in poor villages. To some of his most loyal supporters, his massaging of the facts matters little as long as those in need reap the benefits. But with every misappropriated donation, irreparable damage is done, both to the CAI and other organisations working in the same field.

In the days since the allegations first surfaced, Mortenson has cancelled at least one future speaking engagement and has been admitted to hospital with a heart condition. But if the future looks bleak for Mortenson, don't rule out this past master of reinvention just yet.

As he explained to me last month in his luxury suite at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, with its sweeping views across the Gulf: "The first chapter of Three Cups of Tea is called failure because in order to succeed, we all have to fail. In the Balti language, there is no word for fail. The closest word means reaching a fork in the path. It is merely a transition."