Three cups of deceit

Anyone who has read Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer's account of the 1996 Everest disaster, will know that it is one of the most brutally honest, self-critical memoirs ever published. In collating information for the book Krakauer had every opportunity to modify the narrative, to deflect responsibility for his actions on 10 May 1996. That he chose not to is remarkable for, by his own admission, Krakauer was at least partly responsible for the death of Andy Harris, a guide on Rob Hall's Adventure Consultants team:

This possibility—which now seems so self-evident—didn't occur to either Mike or me at the time, however. In hindsight, Andy [Harris] was acting irrationally and had plainly slipped well beyond routine hypoxia, but I was so mentally impeded myself that it simply didn't register.

Into Thin Air is packed with similar admissions. Krakauer makes no attempt to hide behind the veil of oxygen deprivation, nor does he couch the disaster in abstract terms. That people suffered and died, he points out, was the direct result of human action. Many of Krakauer's companions offered similar admissions, perhaps the most heart-wrenching of which came from Neal Beidleman, a guide on Scott Fischer's Mountain Madness climbing team. That Beidleman knew any other course might well result in his own death does not diminish the pathos of his statement:

"But I can't help thinking about Yasuko [Namba]," he said when he resumed, his voice hushed. "She was so little. I can still feel her fingers sliding across my biceps, and then letting go. I never even turned to look back."

Ultimately, Into Thin Air highlights the natural veracity of its author. Krakauer had everything to hide and chose to conceal nothing, a fact critical to the success of his newest venture.

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Greg Mortenson's book Three Cups of Tea spent more than four years on the New York Times' bestseller list. It has inspired a generation to donate their savings to Mortenson's charity, the Central Asia Institute (CAI). President Obama, after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour for which Mortenson has been nominated three times, donated $100,000 to the CAI. It is a fantastically profitable organization. And according to Jon Krakauer, it is founded on fraud and deals in deceit. Krakauer's investigation, now in print under the title Three Cups of Deceit (Byliner, 2011), is summarized in this online brief. In it, Krakauer wrote:

On April 17, the CBS News program “60 Minutes” broadcast an exposé of Greg Mortenson, alleging that crucial parts of his bestselling book, Three Cups of Tea, were fabricated and that the charity he founded—the Central Asia Institute (CAI), which received $23 million in donations in 2010—has spent more money promoting Mortenson and his books than actually building and supporting schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Because I had once been one of Mortenson’s most enthusiastic supporters, and had given him more than $75,000 in the charity’s early years when it was teetering on the brink of insolvency, I was interviewed by correspondent Steve Kroft for the show. My comments—based on a comprehensive investigation of Mortenson I’d undertaken over the previous eleven months—supported the charges made by “60 Minutes.” I explained to Kroft that a former treasurer of the CAI board of directors had warned me, “Greg uses Central Asia Institute as his private ATM machine.”

Although these allegations have not yet been proven demonstrably true, Krakauer's reputation for honesty makes it unlikely that he would lend his name to a shabby smear campaign based on unsubstantiated charges. That Krakauer felt comfortable publishing a book on the subject – and facing the possibility of a lengthy and expensive libel suit – further buttresses the accuracy of his claims. At the very least, Krakauer's exposé should give everyone who read (and believed) Mortenson's book good reason to conduct their own investigations.