by Jon Krakauer
need for it was greatest…. “This is no time to sit around watching an old man die,” [Abdul Rashid] railed at his well-wishers…. “It is worthless for you to be here when you could be helping to build our future!. . This school is our priority….
Inshallah, we are going to finish what we have started.”
In Mortenson’s rendering of Abdul Rashid’s last days,
nothing mattered to him more than the Bozai school. “Abdul Rashid Khan would have been amused to learn that his dying wish was to see this school completed,” notes Callahan, who knew the man well. “He had a wry sense of humor.”
Nevertheless, according to Mortenson, when Abdul
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Rashid implored his people to get the job done before he expired, his exhortations incited them to charge out and win one for the Gipper. More than sixty men, Mortenson wrote, rushed to Bozai Gumbaz and flung themselves into the task of assisting the eight [CAI] masons from [Pakistan] who were directing operations. They worked fourteen hours a day hauling water, mixing cement, and roughing out the roof frame.
A week later, the phone rang in Mortenson’s Bozeman
home. It was Sarfraz calling from Bozai on his satellite phone:
“No problem sir—the school is finished.”… It was Monday, September 28. Nearly a decade after the original promise had been made to Abdul Rashid Khan’s horsemen, the covenant had finally been fulfilled.
★ ★ ★
a tidy little schoolhouse now stands in Bozai Gumbaz,
and construction was more or less complete by the time
Abdul Rashid succumbed to his infirmities in December
2009. But the way things have played out in the real world isn’t quite as uplifting as the denouement Mortenson wrote for the book. Bozai, to put it bluntly, is already a ghost school. Although Mortenson’s staff reported on CAI’s 2009
tax return (dated May 17, 2010) that sixty-six students were enrolled there, the building remains empty. When New York Times reporter Edward Wong visited Bozai in the autumn of 2010, he observed,
the school is still trying to fill its classrooms. Kyrgyz parents prefer that their children herd livestock, said Sarfraz Khan,
[CAI’s] regional manager. “We need to convince the people to send their children to school,” he said.
No classes have been held in Bozai. Furthermore, if the school was built to fulfill some sort of covenant between t h r e e c u p s o f d e c e i t 65
Mortenson and the Kyrgyz, the Kyrgyz aren’t aware of it.
Before readers get carried away by the rousing conclusion of Stones into Schools, Callahan warns, they should bear in mind that “Greg met Abdul Rashid Khan once, several years earlier in Baharak. He never spoke to him again. He’s never been to Bozai or anywhere else in the Pamir. He has no firsthand knowledge of any of the things he wrote about.”
Callahan spent the better part of a year living in the
Pamir with Abdul Rashid Khan and his son, Roshan Khan,
the horseman with whom Mortenson purports to have made
his sacred pledge. “Roshan was one of my best friends up there,” says Callahan, “and he never, ever mentioned Greg or the school during the months we spent together, never mentioned a sacred promise. The school was just an afterthought to the Kyrgyz.”
Callahan doesn’t doubt that at some point Mortenson
met Roshan Khan in Zuudkhan, just over the mountains
from Bozai on the Pakistan side of the border. “But the way Greg tells it,” Callahan says, “Abdul Rashid Khan heard that Greg was in Zuudkhan, so he dispatched his son Roshan to plead for a school. That’s utter bullshit.”
Every September, Callahan explains, the Kyrgyz routine-
ly ride over the mountains to trade at a shrine near Zuudkhan called Baba Gundi Ziarat. During one of these annual trips—
most likely in 2000 or 2001—they apparently learned that a wealthy American was in the vicinity, and simply rode over to see what sort of largess they might pry out of him.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of the Bozai saga is that the school Mortenson worked so hard and spent so much to build is never likely to educate a meaningful number of Kyrgyz youth, if any. In his ignorance of the Kyrgyz, Mortenson believed their children would attend the Bozai school in winter, as he indicated in the epilogue to Stones into Schools:
[D]uring the six months when the grasslands lie buried be-neath the snow and all connection between the Kirghiz and the outside world has been severed—I am told that there will be roughly 200 children who will study at the school….
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In winter, temperatures in Bozai routinely plunge to forty degrees below zero, and the nearest Kyrgyz camp is three miles away. It would take at least an hour to reach the school on horseback through knee-deep snowdrifts. “No one is going to attend that school in the winter,” Callahan insists.
“Absolutely not.” The only time any Kyrgyz actually pitch their yurts in Bozai is from mid-October to mid-December.
But the teachers brought to the Pamir by the Afghan Ministry of Education each year arrive in June or July and depart by the end of September. “Education grinds to a halt throughout the Wakhan district in winter,” says Callahan. “Even the government-run schools are shut. Everyone is hunkered down. So building a school to provide education in the winter is a bad idea. It’s just not going to happen. I’m convinced that the Bozai school was built primarily for the sake of Greg’s book, to anchor the narrative.”
From June through September, when a teacher could
conceivably be hired to teach in Bozai, the summer camp inhabited by Abdul Rashid Khan’s clan, Karajelga, is situated nineteen miles away—much too far for any children to attend. Haji Osman’s summer camp at Kaschsh Gaz is closer to the school—four and a half miles up the hill, a ninety-minute trudge at an energetic clip—but when Callahan visited Osman in September 2010, Osman told him, “We’re never going to use it because it’s built down there.” The Afghan government provides a teacher who holds classes inside a yurt right in his camp, he pointed out, “so why would our children want to walk all the way down there to go to school, and then have to walk back up at the end of the day? The school is pointless.
It’s empty. The border police seem to use it sometimes.”
★ ★ ★
in all fairness, Greg Mortenson has done much that is
admirable since he began working in Baltistan sixteen and a half years ago. He’s been a tireless advocate for girls’ education. He’s established dozens of schools in Afghanistan and t h r e e c u p s o f d e c e i t 67
Pakistan that have benefited tens of thousands children, a significant percentage of them girls. A huge number of people regard him as a hero, and he inspires tremendous trust. It is now evident, however, that Mortenson recklessly betrayed this trust, damaging his credibility beyond repair.
It might not be too late, though, to salvage the wreck-
age of Central Asia Institute, which has talented staff and valuable material assets that could further benefit people in the region. But if CAI is to be pulled back from the brink and rehabilitated, the organization must sever its ties with Mortenson. It needs to overhaul its board of directors, and find a principled executive director to replace him.
During the past several months, as I came to grasp the
magnitude of Mortenson’s deceit, I felt ashamed at being so easily conned. How could those of us who enabled his fraud—and we are legion—have been so gullible? Ted Callahan attributes the uncritical acceptance of Mortenson and his shtick to the seemingly endless war raging in Central Asia.
“The way I’ve always understood Greg,” Callahan reflects, “is that he’s a symptom of Afghanistan. Things are so bad that everybody’s desperate for even one good-news story. And Greg is it. Everything else might be completely fucked up over there, but here’s a guy who’s persuaded the world that he’s maki
ng a difference and doing things right.” Mortenson’s tale “functioned as a palliative,” Callahan suggests. It soothed the national conscience. Greg may have used smoke and mir-rors to generate the hope he offered, but the illusion made people feel good about themselves, so nobody was in a hurry to look behind the curtain. Although it doesn’t excuse his dishonesty, Mortenson was merely selling what the public was eager to buy.
On April 13, I sent an email to Mortenson. “Please call me at your earliest convenience,” I wrote.
As I believe you have known for quite a while now, I am writing an article that shines a bright light on you and your management of CAI…. If you'd like to respond to the material in my article before publication, time is growing very short….
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My only conditions for such a conversation are that everything be on the record and that the conversation be digitally recorded to ensure the accuracy of what is said. I know you are busy, but the allegations I make in my article are quite serious.
If you wish to tell me your side of the story before my article is typeset and closes for publication, you need to contact me without delay.
Eighteen minutes after I clicked the “send” button,
Mortenson replied,
I greatly appreciate that you reached out to me now so we can meet ASAP to answer any questions you have. I’ll look at my schedule today to see when we can make a meeting happen.
Immediately thereafter, Mortenson’s personal assistant, Jeff McMillan, invited me to fly to Bozeman to interview Greg on Saturday, April 16. “Thanks, Jon,” McMillan said,
“for the opportunity to let Greg talk openly and completely before going to press.” In subsequent emails, I confirmed that I had booked my flight and looked forward to interviewing Greg three days hence.
I heard nothing further from either Mortenson or
McMillan until the afternoon of April 15, when Mortenson informed me, “If we do an interview, I would like that there is no digital recording. I’m on my way to my doctor as my oxygen saturation is very low.”
I replied,
If we do the interview, it has to be recorded. This point is non-negotiable. I will, however, promise that
I will not share the audio with anyone else, I will not post the audio on the Web, and I will not give the audio to
60 Minutes 10 or any other news organization…. I would think you would want me to record the interview, to ensure the accuracy of what I write. I will provide a copy of the digital recording to you.
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“We are currently at cardiologist in Bozeman,” Mortenson’s assistant answered. “Greg is having a heart procedure done Monday morning [April 18] and will not be available for any type of interview.” I immediately phoned McMillan to express my concern for Mortenson’s health, and to suggest that we conduct the interview by phone instead of in person, at a time convenient for Greg. McMillan said that would not be possible. This was the last communication I received from either McMillan or Mortenson.
★ ★ ★
in march, when I attended Mortenson’s lecture in Cheyenne, the experience unsettled me. After taking my seat, while waiting for the program to begin, I read the six-page bro-chure that had been handed out to everyone in the audience, and I noticed it included the usual lies: the Korphe myth, Mortenson’s “eight-day armed kidnapping by the Taliban,”
the claim that for sixteen years he has built schools in “places often considered the front lines of the ‘War on Terror.’” The next morning, I called Tom Hornbein to talk about the
feelings that seeing Greg in person for the first time in years had stirred. It was Hornbein who initially introduced me to Greg, fourteen years ago, and my description of the Cheyenne event roiled Tom’s emotions as well. Reflecting on his own bewildering relationship with Mortenson, he jotted
down his thoughts and sent them to me a few hours after our conversation.
“My transcendent emotional feeling is grief for the loss of what might have been,” Hornbein wrote. “Like you, I feel as if I was stupidly conned, wanting to believe in the cause and its value and Greg’s motivations. Part of me still wants to believe that there was/is something sincere in what he was setting about to do to change the world a bit for the better.
Another part of me is just downright angry at his irresponsibility to the cause with which he was entrusted, the lives of so many whom he sucked in and, in effect, spit out, and not least Tara and their kids and other loving bystanders to the j o n k r a k a u e r
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play…. I wish I understood the pathology that has compelled the unending need to embellish the truth so flagrantly. With one hand Greg has created something potentially beautiful and caring (regardless of his motives). With the other he has murdered his creation by his duplicity.”
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EndnotEs
1 According to Three Cups of Tea (pages 10 and 44), Mortenson was an accomplished mountaineer who, before attempting
K2, had made “half a dozen successful Himalayan ascents,”
including climbs of 24,688-foot Annapurna IV and 23,389-foot Baruntse, both of which are in Nepal. But there is no record in the American Alpine Journal (which meticulously documents all ascents of Annapurna IV, Baruntse, and other major Himalayan peaks) of Mortenson reaching the summit of, or even attempting, any Himalayan mountain prior to 1993. Scott Darsney, Greg’s climbing partner on K2, confirms that Mortenson had never been to the Himalaya or Karakoram before going to K2.
2 In addition to the article by Mortenson in the American Himalayan Foundation newsletter, irrefutable evidence that he originally intended the school to be built in Khane exists in the form of a memo he submitted to Jean Hoerni and the AHF board of directors on March 19, 1995. Entitled “RELOCATION OF PROJECT SITE,” the memo explained that
Mortenson no longer thought Khane was the right place for the school. “THE PROBLEM WAS OBTAINING A LAND
TITLE CERTIFICATE FOR THE SCHOOL IN KHANE….
AFTER MANY WEEKS, I AM HIGHLY RECOMMENDING
MOVING THE PROJECT SITE TO KORPHE VILLAGE (SEE
MAP).” Reasons Mortenson gave for relocating the project included, “KORPHE HAS HAD A FULL TIME VOLUNTEER
TEACHER FOR FIVE YEARS, MARRIED AND WITH
FAMILY ALL FROM KORPHE…. KORPHE IS HIGHLY
VISIBLE. EVERY TREK, EXPEDITION, AND ARMY
CARAVAN TO ENTER THE BALTORO/BIAFO WILL PASS
BY OUR SCHOOL.” Near the end of the memo, he added,
“TO BUILD A SCHOOL IN KORPHE, WE WILL NEED TO
BUILD A STEEL CABLE SUSPENSION BRIDGE ACROSS
THE BRALDU TO KORPHE…. THE COST OF THE BRIDGE
WILL BE ABOUT $10,000. WHICH I WILL RAISE ON MY
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OWN. I HOPE TO BEGIN BUILDING BY MAY 1995.”
3 Mortenson’s lies deeply offended Naimat Gul Mahsud. By falsely claiming to have been kidnapped by his hosts and threatened with death—an egregious contravention of
Pashtunwali—Mortenson defamed the Mahsud clan. But aspects of Naimat Gul’s own story turn out to be as fishy as Mortenson’s. What Naimat Gul failed to disclose to Mortenson (and what Mortenson would likely never have known had it not been disclosed here) is that Naimat Gul was a profes-sional con artist. Although his late father, Nadir Khan, had been a famous war hero and the revered leader of one of the four Mahsud clans, Naimat Gul Mahsud “is just a criminal,”
says Hussein Mohammed (a pseudonym employed for the
safety of the source), who has known Naimat Gul since he was a boy. “Cheating here, cheating there. Live this place, then move to some other place to cheat some other people.”
According to Mohammed, Naimat Gul has a long history of thievery, extortion, and counterfeiting. He was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping a girl, but escaped from jail a year or two before meeting Mortenson
, and has been on the lam ever since.
Naimat Gul committed most of his crimes in sprawl-
ing cites such as Karachi, Dera Ismail Khan, and Peshawar.
While he escorted Mortenson around the tribal areas, however, Naimat Gul used Mortenson as an unwitting shill to pass counterfeit Pakistani rupees in the bazaars of North and South Waziristan. “Local people trusted Greg,” says Mohammed, because “he is a foreigner and he would not cheat them.”
When this swindle proved successful, Naimat Gul attempted to profit in a grander fashion from Mortenson’s visit by hatching an ill-advised blackmail scam: Naimat Gul falsely claimed that he had kidnapped Mortenson, then demanded a large ransom from wealthy members of the Mahsud clan—
banking on the fact that if he’d actually kidnapped Mortenson, the authorities would hold Naimat Gul’s entire family responsible.
When Naimat Gul tried to extort money from his rela-
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tives by purporting to have abducted Mortenson, his family was irate. If it were true, it would have brought disgrace to the entire clan. But instead of ceding to Naimat Gul’s demands for hush money, his relatives called his bluff. According to Hussein Mohammed, “Naimat Gul Mahsud’s family
told him, ‘If you kidnap this man, and something happens to us or our businesses, if our jobs get in trouble due to you, then we will hold you responsible.’” After reflecting on the extremely harsh payback his enraged relatives were apt to deliver, Naimat Gul backed down and abandoned his scam.
When Mortenson flew home to Montana in the summer
of 1996, he had no idea Naimat Gul Mahsud claimed to have kidnapped him. Ironically, Naimat Gul had no idea Mortenson would soon make the same spurious claim of abduction—
a charge that millions of Americans now accept as fact.
4 According to Three Cups of Tea, during a layover at Calcutta International Airport while flying home from Asia in
