Read Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way for Free Online Page A

stressful for the entire board. Nonetheless, Jennifer Wilson insists, “ No matter how many problems I had working with Greg, I never, ever thought of him as evil. And believe me, I ’ ve had opportunities where I could have felt that way. ” It ’ s hard for her to be angry with Mortenson, she says, because “ he isn ’ t a normal person. It ’ s almost like he ’ s from another planet … . For years, he struggled to find a place in our Western culture. Then, thanks to Jean ’ s money, Greg figured out how to be extraordinarily successful working in a very different culture. ” She believes it would be an exercise in futility to expect Mortenson ever to conform to Western norms of doing business — or anything else.
     
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    MORTENSON ’ S BULLISH PRONOUNCEMENT to the CAI board notwithstanding, at the end of 2002 “ the organization ’ s finances were as shaky as ever, ” Three Cups of Tea reports on page 295. “ So Mortenson decided to defer the raise the board had approved for him, from twenty-eight thousand dollars to thirty-five thousand dollars a year. ”
    Although the first statement (about CAI ’ s shaky finances) is true, the latter statement is not. According to CAI financial records, Mortenson ’ s CAI salary for 2002 was $41,200, plus $12,087 in employee benefits and deferred compensation; in 2003 his salary increased to $47,197, plus $6,547 in benefits. Furthermore, since 1995, he had been quietly drawing a stipend amounting to $21,792 per year from the AHF Hoerni/Pakistan Fund in addition to his CAI salary package. 5 All told, at the time Mortenson claimed he was being paid $28,000, his annual compensation actually exceeded $75,000. One could make a strong case that Mortenson deserved every penny of it, given how hard he worked and what a crucial role he played in all aspects of CAI ’ s operation. What ’ s disturbing is not the amount Mortenson was paid, but that he lied about it — and that dozens of such falsehoods are strewn throughout the book.
    In any case, by the fall of 2003, CAI ’ s financial difficulties had ended. On April 6 of that year, Mortenson appeared on the cover of Parade magazine. Inside, an article titled “ He Fights Terror With Books ” described how Greg found himself in Korphe after retreating from K2 in 1993. After the Korphe villagers nursed him back to health, Mortenson repaid their kindness by building them a school, and in the years that followed he constructed dozens of other schools in northern Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan. These schools, the article explained, helped to counter the influence of fundamentalist madrassas :
 
“ In the past 10 years, ” says Mortenson, “ more than 80,000 Pakistani and Afghani boys who received hard-line religious instruction in these madrasas were fed directly into the ranks of the Taliban. Islamic extremists know they can use these religious schools as an effective vehicle for recruiting terrorists. The West has so far failed to recognize that offering an alternative by building secular schools is the cheapest and most effective way of combating terrorism. ”
     
    Thirty-four million copies of the magazine were distributed across the country. The article included a mailing address, an email address, and a toll-free number for Central Asia Institute. Before publication, Mortenson had hired extra staff and set up a phone bank to answer calls to handle the anticipated response. Within a few days, says one of those new employees, “ We needed a wheelbarrow for all the mailbags stuffed with checks arriving at the office. ” By the end of 2003, the organization had received more than a million dollars in donations. The CAI board of directors (which by then consisted of Mortenson and three loyal admirers) raised Mortenson ’ s annual salary to $112,000, and Mortenson announced an ambitious plan to use the Parade donations to expand CAI ’ s programs in Afghanistan.
    In the autumn of 2003, Mortenson flew