A 60 Minutes report that aired last night alleges that author and philanthropist Greg Mortenson falsified details in his bestselling 2006 book “Three Cups of Tea.”
Mortenson claimed to have gotten lost while mountain climbing in 1993, and that he stumbled onto the rural mountain village of Korphe “where the kindness of local residents inspired him to build a school.” Mortenson has since established the “Central Asia Institute” (CAI), which says it has established nearly 200 schools and helped to educate 68,000 children, with a special emphasis on girls.
“Into the Wild” author John Krakauer has been publicly skeptical of Mortenson’s claims, and was interviewed for the 60 Minutes Special. Mortenson’s porter companions on his mountain trip to Pakistan even dispute that Mortenson was ever lost, and add that he didn’t visit the small village until well after the trip.
President Obama gave $100,000 of his Nobel Prize proceeds to Mortenson’s education charity, which has itself already amassed $60 million in donations. “Three Cups”, which has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide, is “required reading” for US troops deploying to Afghanistan. Today, Mortenson monetizes on the lecture circuit, fetching about $30,000 for each event.
Krakauer, who himself donated $75,000 to Mortenson’s charity, has become an important figure in dispelling what are allegedly self-aggrandizing Mortenson myths. After casting aspersions on the notion that Mortenson was ever lost, let alone that he “stumbled into [the] village in a weakened state” where he was “nursed…back to health,” Krakauer and 60 Minutes enumerate scores of other examples of possible creative liberties.
To one of the book’s claims; that Mortenson was kidnapped by the Taliban and held hostage in July of 1996, 60 Minutes says,
One of the men, Mansur Khan Mahsud, is the research director of a respected think tank in Islamabad and has produced scholarly articles published in the U.S.
Until recently, he had no idea that he had been shown as a kidnapper in a best-selling book.
We spoke with Mahsud via Skype. He told us he and the other people in the photograph were Mortenson’s protectors in Waziristan – not his abductors.
Kroft: The story, as Mr. Mortenson tells it, is that he was held for eight days, and won you over by asking for a Koran and promising to build schools in the area. Is that true?
Mahsud: This is totally false, and he is lying. He was not kidnapped.
Kroft: Who are these people that are also in the picture?
Mahsud: Some are my cousin. Some are our friends from our village.
Kroft: Well, why do you think Mr. Mortenson would write this?
Mahsud: To sell his book.
The story goes on to make further allegations about the charity’s financial mismanagement, about exaggerations on the number and influence of schools built, and more.
Mortenson, who has summarily been the recipient of prestigious awards like the Star of Pakistan (rarely awarded to non-Pakistanis), denies any wrongdoing and defends the narrative delineated in his book:
However, Mortenson declined to participate in any 60 Minutes interviews multiple times, and when 60 Minutes sought him out at a book signing, he again declined, saying they were “disrupting” the event. When the 60 Minutes staff offered to wait for a 5-minute post-event interview, Mortenson called security and had them escorted from the premises.
The story calls back to the James Frey-Oprah row, in which the author of an addiction recovery memoir James Frey falsified significant details in his book “A Million Little Pieces”, which went on to sell millions of copies when Oprah began promoting it in 2005.
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