Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way (12 page)

 
Even more alarming is the fact that a significant number 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, 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 conjured 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. Astoundingly, 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.

*
*
*

To a certain extent, this failure has resulted from insufficient 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, 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 exceptional 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 employees, a person who worked for CAI during this period replies,
“
Greg is always fucking with people, intentionally undermining 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 Hajj, he has to openly admit all his SINS before the Allah Almighty and seek forgiveness
…
. 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 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 misappropriated 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 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.

*
*
*

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.
”