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Whatever you do, don't piss off John Krakauer.

Greg Mortensen did, and Three Cups of Deceit is the result, an eighty page takedown where Krakauer puts him up against the ropes, pounds him merciliessly, then dances around his slumped and disgraced form.

Mortensen makes this pounding he receives so, so easy, and (if even half of what Krakauer talks about is true) so, so justified.

You may not have heard of Gretg Mortensen. I hadn’t. He is the founder of the charity CAI (the Central Asia Institute), a group whose goal is to build schools in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mortensen wrote a famous bestseller about how he came to found his charity � Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations ... One School at a Time.

In Three Cups he details how after a failed expedition up K2 he got lost and wandered into a remote village, then ended up promising to build them a school. Returning to the USA he started fundraising, got the school built, and then had a number of adventures, including being abducted by the Taliban for eight days.

You’ve no doubt seen this sort of thing before. A (usually) white person with a bit of a saviour complex, telling stories about their tough times in developing lands, helping
Not unusual, but not terrible either, providing that people actually get helped, and money is spent where it is needed.

Except� a large part of this story is apparently complete tosh. Mortensen lies about the village he visited, lies about where schools were build, and even defames Pakistanis who generously hosted him by claiming that they were Taliban operatives who held him captive. (They were not. They were kind and welcoming hosts who were super-pissed when they found out what he had written about them)

He appears to have fabricated this story for his own personal glory, and to both sell books and do well on the speaking circuit. On the face of it, he comes across as the James Frey of charitable giving.

This would be bad enough, but his charity’s finances are also very, very questionable, with numerous financial advisors and auditors quitting in disgust over Greg’s using the charity as his personal ATM, and refusing to document his expenses. He got CAI to pay for private jet flights to his book talks (where he was paid money he didn’t share with CAI) and used the charity to buys thousands and thousands of copies of his books � at full retail price so he would still receive a cut and the book would remain on the bestseller list.

Apparently he has had to pay a cool million back to the charity since all this came out, but from what Krakauer writes that would be a small fraction of the largesse he has treated himself to on charity dollars over the years.

The icing on the corrupt and dodgy cake comes in the revelation that many of the schools CAI has built are in locations that don’t suit the local population, or are so unsupported that they are pretty much empty, leading them to be labelled ‘Ghost Schools�.

Overall it’s a pretty sad picture, of someone who may have begun with the right intentions but who has become just another dirty cog in the dodgy international aid ‘industry�.

So what drew John Krakauer to take Mortensen down? Well, it seems Krakauer fell for his sales patter. Inspired by Mortensen's (fake) tales of Himalayan inspiration and his (often ineffective, poorly targeted and badly supported) building of schools in Pakistan Krakauer donated somewhere around 75,000 dollars to CAI.

When he began to hear about problems in CAI he investigated further, and on finding evidence of corruption he began this book, the publishing of which blew CAI’s dodginess wide open.

At a quick eighty or so pages it’s a quick read, and a fascinating insight into charitable corruption, and the ways unscrupulous people can doubly exploit those who are already globally exploited.

My only word of warning is that if John Krakauer ever gives you money to do something, make sure you damn well do it, or his next eighty-page sucker punch could be aimed at you.