Greg Mortenson: Cups Half-Full

Missing Pages S01E08

Greg Mortenson: Cups Half Full

TV Clip - CNN:

Greg Mortenson: I went to K2 in ‘93, spent 78 days on the mountain.

Fareed Zakaria: And K2 is?

Greg Mortenson: It's the world's second highest mountain in Pakistan, on the Pakistani-Chinese border.

Bethanne Patrick: In 1993, Greg Mortenson, a trauma nurse from St. Cloud Minnesota, set out with a crew of five men to scale K2. Towering over most people at more than six feet tall, Greg was a healthy, physically fit 35-year-old at the time of the climb. 

TV Clip - CNN: Coming off the mountain, it was very difficult, dangerous… Several people died that year.

Bethanne Patrick: He had served in the U.S. military and gone onto play college football. If you close your eyes, he’s the image of the all-American, cornfed man from the heartland.

TV Clip - CNN: So, how does a teacher from Montana end up fighting the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan?

Bethanne Patrick: For Greg, our story’s hero, making it to the top of K2 wasn’t merely about pure athleticism. The climb meant more. He planned to honor his late sister’s memory by placing her necklace at the mountain’s highest peak. But Greg never made it to the top. A mission to rescue an injured climber derailed his team’s ascent. 

Greg got separated. Then, he got lost. With the wind and snow and sleet whipping at his back, our doomed climber took one wrong turn after the other. Eventually, he crossed an ancient, rickety bridge and stumbled into the isolated village of Korphe. There, the village elders took our imposing American in and saved his life. Moved by the people and their hospitality and warmth in this faraway Pakistani village, Greg vowed to return, and, as a “thank you,” build schools.

Video Clip - Central Asia Institute: We are Central Asia Institute. Education is our mission. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan, our local community partnerships support nearly 400 projects and programs in 189 schools with over 100,000 students.

Bethanne Patrick: He returned to the states and started raising money. One school turned into two, turned into three. But Greg quickly realized if he was going to build more schools, he would need a lot more funding. And a book seemed like the best way to get the word out about his humanitarian mission.

In 2006, more than a decade after his harrowing experience on K2, Greg and his co-author, David Oliver Relin, released his memoir Three Cups of Tea. The book was a runaway success. It had everything: a high stakes adventure, an unlikely hero, and a call-to-action that gave people hope, which was in short supply during those early days of the war on terror.

TV Clip - CVS: …Beyond president Bush's deadline for Saddam Husain to leave Iraq, that US warships and planes, there were F-117 stealth bombers involved, launched the opening salvo of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The attack came in waves: cruise missiles, followed by the F-117 stealth bombers with so-called --

Bethanne Patrick: The book rallied in favor of access to education and literacy as a way to promote peace, and man, was that a feel good read when the headlines were bleak. For more than four and a half years, the paperback sat atop The New York Times best-seller list. According to Vox, you’d need to sell at least 5,000 to 10,000 books a week to get on the bestseller list. To do this for four years is doing numbers.

Its success generated millions of dollars in donations toward building schools. Then, on April 11th, 2011, a 60 Minutes episode aired that called everything into question.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: The story you're about to see, which first aired in April, was the product of a seven-month investigation, and caused quite a stir because we raised serious questions about how millions of dollars have been spent, whether Mortenson has been personally benefiting, and whether some of the most dramatic and inspiring stories in his books are even true.

Bethanne Patrick: The legitimacy of Greg’s story and of the Central Asia Institute’s finances were being scrutinized. Like wildfire, the story took hold.

TV Clip - CBS: Five years ago, Greg Mortenson's gripping and inspirational memoir Three Cups of Tea shot up the bestseller list. His story inspired millions to donate to his charity.

But the ride hit an abrupt stop this weekend after a 60 minutes investigation exposed some troubling discrepancies. The author spoke out late yesterday, defending his memoir to Outside Magazine.

Bethanne Patrick: Did Greg Mortenson lie in his memoir? Did he ever cross that bridge into Korphe? More than a decade later, people are still wondering what really happened. In today’s episode of Missing Pages, we look at the controversy around one of the most popular books of the century. Is there more to the 60 Minutes story? And at the end of the day, if thousands of women and girls received a better life because of the schools Greg Mortenson worked to build, does it really matter if aspects of his memoir were untrue? There’s two sides to this rope bridge, and I’ve been on a rope bridge. It’s pretty scary. Let’s walk carefully between the reader and the reality. 

Welcome back to Missing Pages. I’m your host, long-time literary critic and publishing world insider, Bethanne Patrick. You can find me tweeting about books, my dog, and G&Ts on Twitter at The Book Maven. In Season One of Missing Pages, I’ll be your guide, as we look back at some of the most iconic, jaw-dropping, and just truly bizarre book scandals to shape the publishing world. In every episode we re-examine the headlines and go behind the scenes to give you the unabridged industry story we all missed the first time around. Because isn’t there always a page that gets cut from the final draft? On that note, let's find the missing pages together on today’s episode, Cups Half Full: Greg Mortenson’s False Steps.

Chapter 1: The Controversy

When I say Three Cups of Tea was a huge success, it’s not an exaggeration.

TV Clip - C-SPAN

Brian Lamb: Greg Mortenson, can you explain how your book Three Cups of Tea has been on the New York Times best seller list for paperbacks for eight 80 weeks? It's number one today.

Greg Mortenson: Well, that's a little baffling.

Bethanne Patrick: The paperback edition spent 252 weeks on the New York Times best seller list. That’s more than 4 years at the top. For reference, the average bestselling book stays on the list for about 3 to 5 weeks. It was translated into 47 languages and sold in 39 countries. As of 2016, more than four million copies were sold worldwide and the authors were even nominated for Nobel Peace Prizes. You can hear Greg in this C-SPAN Q&A with Brian Lamb from August 2008 talking about how the book really gained traction once it was printed as a paperback with a new tagline.

TV Clip - C-SPAN:

Brian Lamb: Well, I've got the hardback, but the hardback didn't sell much, did it?

Greg Mortenson: No it didn't, Brian. And the interesting point to that is the subtitle of the hardcover was "One man's mission to fight terrorism and build nations one school at a time."

Bethanne Patrick: Here’s Greg talking about his resistance to changing the book’s subtitle.

TV Clip - C-SPAN: Although I'm a veteran, I was very opposed to that because I said, "I've been doing this eight years before 9/11. And I grew up in Africa as parents of educators who set up schools in east Africa. And I wanted the subtitle to be "One man's mission to promote peace one school at a time." And they said, "You know, Greg, you have to understand that only 12% of nonfiction books make a profit. And two thirds of all bestsellers are pre-chosen by the publishers. So, we need you to be fighting terrorism so we can pitch the media so the book will do well." So finally, I conceded. 

Bethanne Patrick: With the book attracting all sorts of readers, here’s Greg again talking about its core audience.

TV Clip - C-SPAN: You say about a third of the people who buy the book are probably, say, Republicans. Another third are liberal or Democrats, and the other third are in the middle. And they all are touting the message about, really, the power of what education can do.

Bethanne Patrick: Just as the book reached across party lines and cultural divides, so too would the Controversy. 

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: But last fall, we began investigating complaints from former donors, board members, staffers, and charity watchdogs about Mortenson and the way he was running his nonprofit organization.

Bethanne Patrick: The CBS 60 Minutes episode, which accused Greg Mortenson of lying in his memoir and mismanaging school funds, was such a ratings hit that it aired multiple times during the spring of 2011. At this time, which, remember, was before streaming was even a thing, if you were to exclude sports, 60 Minutes was the most watched primetime show and reached more than 12 million viewers live.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: In 2004, the organization contacted me and said, "Hey, why'd you quit giving?" So I told them, I wrote a letter which Greg saw, I know he saw because I was told that he saw it.

Bethanne Patrick: In this clip, you hear the show's well-respected news correspondent, Steve Kroft, in conversation with another giant in investigative journalism, John Krakauer.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: I explained that, you know, "This isn't right. You need to clean up your act. You need to get a board of directors that will hold them accountable. Until then, I'm done."

Bethanne Patrick: Here, Jon recounts pleading with Greg to change the Central Asia Institute’s questionable operational standards. From the sound of his voice, you can tell how personally disappointed he was by the mismanagement.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: And I really, it hurt my, you know, I was really crushed. Like everyone else, I really believed in him. He offered some hope in this horrible war in Central Asia. And then in 2010, I finally got around to reading his book and, you know, the alarms went off.

Bethanne Patrick: And as soon as those alarm bells went off for Jon, he started doing what journalists do best. He began looking for answers.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: I found out that, you know, a whole bunch of board members, at least half a dozen, had quit because of Greg. I not only resented that I'd given him $75 grand and he had wasted a lot of it, but I felt even worse in that I had helped persuade thousands of well intentioned people to be fleeced by Greg Mortenson.

Bethanne Patrick: Now, the story of Greg Mortenson’s fall from grace in many ways can’t be divorced from Jon Krakauer’s success. The two mens’ lives are deeply intertwined. Once upon a time, Jon and Greg were actually friends. They were both larger than life mountaineers. And they were both writers.

Jon is best known for his climbing and adventure books like Into Thin Air and Into the Wild. Jon even fundraised for the Central Asia Institute and personally donated to the cause.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: I was one of his biggest supporters. He says that in Three Cups of Tea. You can read about it. And then in 2004, his board quit en masse, almost the entire board.

Bethanne Patrick: And it wasn’t that people at CAI were quitting without warning. According to Jon, they first tried reasoning with Greg to make changes.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: Greg wouldn't listen. He just, when we tried to tell him, suggest ways he should, you know, make this a reputable organization, he just stopped talking to us. So, the board had to quit. He wouldn't communicate. The treasurer of the organization told me Greg was using CAI as his personal ATM. So, I just quit giving. I felt betrayed and hurt.

Bethanne Patrick: Before he was Greg’s adversary, he was a fan. And for Jon, Greg’s deception was personal. The day after the 60 Minutes story aired, Jon Krakauer released an entire book called Three Cups of Deceit.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: 

Steve Kroft: Did he stumble into this village in a weakened state?

Jon Krakauer: Absolutely not.

Bethanne Patrick: Jon’s investigation even alleged that maybe the entire foundation of Greg’s memoir was untrue.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes:
Steve Kroft: So nobody, nobody helped him out and nursed him back to health?

Jon Krakauer: Absolutely not. I have spoken to one of his companions, a close friend, who hiked out from K2 with him. This companion said Greg ever heard of Korphe until a year later.

Bethanne Patrick: Then, the 60 Minutes episode goes on to show Steve visiting a few dozen of CAI’s 100-plus schools.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: The IRS tax return Central Asia Institute filed last year included a list of 141 schools that it claimed to have built or supported in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Over the past six months, we visited or looked into nearly 30 of them. 

Bethanne Patrick:  And while the 60 Minutes team did not visit every school, here’s what the footage from about thirty schools revealed: 

TV Clip - 60 Minutes:  Some were performing well, but roughly half were empty, built by somebody else, or not receiving support at all. Some were being used to store spinach or hay for livestock. Others had not received any money from Mortenson's charity in years.

Bethanne Patrick: The episode also shows Greg declining an interview with the 60-Minutes producers. And because no one from CAI or from the Greg camp participated in the bombshell story, even though 60 Minutes claims to have reached out for comment, Jon Krakauer, a journalist with a shiny reputation for truth-seeking and multiple best-sellers under his belt, appeared to have the final say and it was a closed case.

For the record: Our team did reach out to both Jon and Greg for interviews. A representative of Jon’s passed along the message that “He’s said all he has to say on the issue and his feelings haven’t changed.”

Greg Mortenson, who’s known to be very private these days, did not respond to our multiple emails and Twitter messages.

Jennifer Jordan: I can still, and in fact, I kind of get that PTSD stomach clench when I think of it.

Bethanne Patrick: That's award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, Jennifer Jordan. She joined us for an interview from her home in Utah this past spring.

Jennifer Jordan: Yes, I remember exactly, standing in my living room because I couldn't sit. I was so, I was so... Frenzy is the word that I'm struggling with. I just felt this incredible anxiety, and I couldn’t, I just paced back and forth in front of the set and I thought, "Holy hell." I said, "I don't know if it's true. I don't know if he'd lost his way. If he'd, you know, just become this greedy monster that was portrayed in this piece." I didn't know. But I did know that no matter what the truth was and no matter what Greg did with the rest of his life, this would be his epitaph. And it broke my heart.

Bethanne Patrick: In 2016, Jennifer and her husband, documentary filmmaker Jeff Rhoads, released a film that brought into question Jon Krakauer and the 60-Minutes report.

Jennifer Jordan: I thought, “Ooh, there's something really off about this.” You know, they say they've interviewed thirty people and yet they only showed critics. They didn't show, they couldn't find one defender or, you know, one supporter? You know, tens of millions of people have given money to this organization and they couldn't find one supporter? 

One of their interviews in particular was an old man sitting in the corner of a room, and Steve Kroft does the voiceover. And I thought, "Why aren't we hearing him? Like, why isn't there a translator in the room? Why are we hearing what Steve's telling us? Not what the man's telling us?" So, there were just little things in watching it that I thought, "Ooh, there just -- something is off." And also, as I said earlier, I mean, I knew Greg to be many things, but a liar and a fraud were not two of them. So it, none of it jived with me.

Bethanne Patrick: First, we could not verify Jennifer’s claim that  “tens of millions of people gave money,” but it’s certainly plausible. The overall thesis of her film, which was titled 3,000 Cups of Tea, was that maybe Greg Mortenson was guilty of mismanaging funds. 

Jennifer Jordan: I met him when our team in 2000 was trying to navigate the very turbulent waters of heading up through the Northwest territories of Pakistan. And he helped us with the logistics. And my first impressions were of this kind of big, burly, kind of socially awkward man who also had a quiet confidence about him that was striking. There was no bravado. There was no, you know, braggadocio. There was no, "I can get you this and I can call this person." There was none of that. It was all just, "Let me help."

Bethanne Patrick: Jennifer’s comprehensive reporting suggests that Greg’s lack of compliance with nonprofit law and accounting basics, which Jon Krakauer, 60 Minutes, and ultimately, the Montana Attorney General’s office found plenty of evidence of, wasn’t purposeful, but rather a case of someone who was ill-prepared for the accounting needs of such a rapidly growing organization. And this makes sense. Before the climb, Greg was a nurse. He had little to no experience running a non-profit. It wasn’t a coincidence that his life’s work changed after the climb, it was the climb that changed his life.

Jennifer Jordan: You know, you look at the chain of mistakes that he made. One of them was, you know, as you said earlier, CAI became too big, too fast. I mean, almost overnight.

Bethanne Patrick: Jennifer’s reporting tried to take a more practical and empathetic approach. 

Jennifer Jordan: At least three of the schools that we went to, I was told by village elders and by other journalists who had been in right after the report, that the cameras had gone in when the schools were closed, either for holidays, later in the afternoon, or during the winter.

Bethanne Patrick: Jennifer does clarify that CBS wouldn’t tell her which schools they visited, but says that all the schools she went to were, in fact, functional. She also raises the point that 60 Minutes only visited thirty of the two hundred schools CAI opened. So to her point, it’s possible to conceive that if their team had visited a different handful of schools, the results might have been different. 

Then, there’s the case of lying in Greg’s memoir, which really is what we’re here to think about. Did Greg ever cross that bridge into Korphe? Now, upon fact checking this episode, our team received pushback on the bridge as a focal point of the story. Our fact checker wanted to know why we were so worried about the bridge, especially when there seemed to be evidence of so much other misconduct.

Well, dear listener, the bridge, which Jon Krakauer and 60 Minutes alleged may never have existed, it’s step one in building the Greg Mortenson archetype. It’s the book’s entire foundation. Without the bridge, there is no book. It transformed him from a lost climber to a superstar humanitarian hero. And if the route Greg claimed to take was non-existent, everything falls apart. Crossing the bridge into Korphe is Greg’s origin story. It’s the chicken or the egg question: did fame and fortune lead to his misconduct? Or was Greg lying about everything from the very beginning?

Here’s where Jennifer’s reporting opens up the possibility that there was a bridge.

Jennifer Jordan: So, I found an anthropologist who had been in the area in that same timeframe, the eighties and the nineties. He said, "Of course there was a bridge there. It's a part of the old silk route, silk trade route. And you can see, you can actually see in the satellite image where the trail comes from the north, and then there's nothing there over the river, and then where the trail continues on the other side. So, you can see that time, you know, worn trail. 

But the bridge indeed has been washed out. It washed out probably in the storms, they think in ‘99. This huge flood came through and washed out a lot of those twine – and they're literally twine and rope, not rope, twine bridges – I mean, they're, they're terrifying to walk over, because you're –

Bethanne Patrick (to Jennifer Jordan): I've been on a rope bridge, let me tell you. A rope bridge over rocks. And it is terrifying. Exactly.

Jennifer Jordan: And this isn't even a rope bridge. This is a twig bridge. Like woven twigs. So yeah. So, the bridge that Greg crossed washed out at some point in the late nineties, early two thousands, nobody quite knows when. But [if] you talk to anthropologists who were in the area before that, ‘93 and before, and they're like, "Yeah, absolutely. You can see that it's a trade route." And so when I mentioned that to Krakauer, again, talking about your agenda journalism, he refused to acknowledge it.

Bethanne Patrick: If this is all true, then why isn’t everyone talking about Jennifer Jordan’s documentary? According to Jennifer, she didn’t have the media muscle or influence of Jon Krakauer or 60 Minutes. This is how she characterized their response when she asked to interview the 60 Minutes host about his investigation into Greg Mortenson:

Jennifer Jordan: I got an email when I first reached out to 60 Minutes and said, you know, “I'm doing this research and would love to talk to your producers.” [I] got an immediate email back: "And who are you to ask for an interview with Steve Kroft? Like, who are you?" Like, you know, Salt lake city? You're, you know, you're calling from Salt Lake City and expect an interview with Steve Kroft?"

Bethanne Patrick: Jennifer Jordan versus Jon Krakauer: it’s a classic David and Goliath story. Is Jennifer’s evidence enough to fully dismiss Jon Krakauer’s and 60 Minutes’ reporting? Not quite. But does it deserve equal airtime? Yes.

There were other damaging things that called Greg’s credibility into question. Stones Into Schools, another book Greg co-authored, details how he was captured by the Taliban. Jon, with corroboration from 60 Minutes, accused Greg of making this story up.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: I went into the area to find a place to build a school. What happened is I got kidnapped by the Taliban for eight days.The kidnapping story was featured in Three Cups of Tea and referred to in his followup bestseller, Stones into Schools, with this 1996 photograph of his alleged captors. We managed to locate four men who were there when the photo was taken. Two of them actually appear in the picture. All of them insist they're not Taliban and that Greg Mortenson was not kidnapped. They also gave us another photo of the group with Mortenson holding the AK-47.

Bethanne Patrick: For the record, during a Today Show interview in 2011, Greg Mortenson opened up about his alleged capture. To date, Greg stands by the claim that he was detained by a group he assumed to be the Taliban but apologizes for retelling the story in a misleading or heightened way. Regardless of the power dynamics at play, we think there’s enough of a gray area here to keep the conversation going. 

CAI? It’s still up and running. But donations never recovered. Mortenson’s career was forever tarnished. As for the book’s co-author, David Oliver Relin, his death by suicide meant many questions would remain unanswered. And if there is another side of the story, why isn’t Greg trying harder to speak up? Jennifer has her own theory:

Jennifer Jordan: First and foremost, he wanted to protect himself and his family from any more of the damage. And you and I, I mean, I am certainly much more of a fighter. I am a fighter, so much, I don't need to couch it by saying much more. I am a fighter. I have a warrior gene. Greg does not.

Bethanne Patrick: Does an experienced climber like Greg really have no fight left? Despite all this drama, we did mention this book became a phenomenon, and boy did it. But being a bestseller means your book may end up in surprising hands. And its messages? They can take on a life of their own. 

Chapter 2: Oh, The Places You’ll Go

Where were we? Let’s review the tape. Three Cups of Tea was flying off shelves in the late aughties. Greg Mortenson’s memoir about losing his way on K2, being saved by the kindness of strangers in a remote Pakistani village, and then pledging his life to building schools in this faraway region as a “thank you,” well, it resonated with everybody. He was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Then, big deal journalist Jon Krakauer questioned the veracity of Greg’s memoir. Did he ever lose his way? Was Greg’s story full of baloney? Jon accused Greg of mismanaging funds. He said that CAI’s former treasurer accused Greg of using the school’s charitable donations as “his personal ATM.” This was all alleged in a bombshell 60 Minutes story seen by millions, irreparably tarnishing Greg Mortenson’s once sparkling reputation. 

Ultimately, an investigation proved that Greg’s foundation of schools, the Central Asia Institute, did fail to keep records of its expenses and to address accounting deficiencies. But the claim that Greg lied and fabricated his memoir’s foundational story, the story about stumbling into a village of hospitable strangers who saved his life, well, alternative reporting by journalist Jennifer Jordan shows this accusation may have been a bridge too far… get it?

Jennifer Jordan: And so, I found an anthropologist who had been in the area in that same timeframe, the eighties and the nineties. He said, of course there was a bridge there, it's a part of the old silk route, silk trade route.

Bethanne Patrick: And when you strip away the book’s controversy, it’s understandable why Three Cups of Tea was such a cultural phenomenon. We’re talking about America in the late 2000s, during the peak days of the War on Terror.

Video Clip - George W. Bush: States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the world.

Bethanne Patrick: In 2006, most cultural commentary about the Middle East was laced with fear.

Video Clip - Al Jazeera English: I'm here to protest the building of this disgraceful mosque, which to me is nothing but a touchdown victory dance for the whole Islamic jihadist culture.

TV Clip - CNN: We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there's no question about what they want: to get rid of Saddam Hussein. And they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.

Bethanne Patrick: Regardless of your feelings about the war, everyone could get behind this book. When Three Cups of Tea came on the scene, it made people, regardless of politics, all feel like they could finally do something. 

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: Greg Mortenson is a former mountain climber, bestselling author, humanitarian and philanthropist. His nonprofit organization, the Central Asia Institute, is dedicated to promoting education, especially for girls, in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

Bethanne Patrick: Here’s Steve Kroft talking about how Greg’s message resonated with so many people. Even world leaders.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: President Obama donated $100,000 to the group from the proceeds of his Nobel Prize.

Bethanne Patrick: Donating to CAI was one way to fight the Taliban, and it felt real. Or at least more effective than wearing an American flag pin on your lapel.

There were no limits to where Three Cups of Tea could go. One friend of the show, who grew up in a church-going family who loved the book, aptly described it as the Chicken Soup For The Soul or the Eat. Pray. Love. of 2006 through 2011.

But the book wasn’t just resonating with American citizens, it was catching on within the United States Military.

TV Clip - 60 Minutes: Mortenson’s book, Three Cups of Tea, has sold more than 4 million copies, and is required reading for US servicemen bound for Afghanistan.

Bethanne Patrick: According to a Washington Post article in 2011, the book’s story offered hope that there could be a peaceful and successful end to the wars in the middle east. Folks unfamiliar with how military cadets are trained may not realize the importance learning about great literature plays in their education. 

Elizabeth Samet: I teach English at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and I've done so for several decades now. I started teaching there when we were at peace and have taught there ever since. And as my students reminded me the other day, my first year students whom we call plebes, they reminded me that they have never known a country that was not at war.

Bethanne Patrick: So we talked to Elizabeth Samet, an English Composition and Poetry professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Here we are talking about why military cadets are assigned reading.

Elizabeth Samet: I love to teach the plebes. I love to direct the first year literature course, which I'm directing again this year. In that course, and in the electives that I teach, everything from film to poetry to various seminars, I think there's always a balance. I think that when we first went to war, there was a sense of urgency on the part of some faculty to teach something relevant. But of course, as you well know, what's relevant today is obsolete tomorrow. And so, that always struck me as a shortsighted philosophy. I know that my students are getting the most current military training they can get, but I saw my job as something different, as something maybe best described as not simply preparing them to go to war, but preparing them to come home.

Bethanne Patrick: Now, you all know I’m a literary critic, but I’m also a military spouse. Throughout the years, I’ve traveled from military base to military base with my husband, our daughters, dogs, and a lot of books. And I’ve thought a lot about how art and literature shapes military strategy. And Elizabeth, who last year released Looking For The Good War: American Amnesia and The Violent Pursuit of Happiness, gave me some clarity here. 

Elizabeth Samet: And of course, war is in many ways a very different enterprise than it was, let's say, in the 19th century, when West Point cadets were being trained for very few jobs. Look, my father was a member of this generation. My father fought in World War II. I would love to think of his generation as the greatest generation, but I don't really know what that means. I don't know how you measure that. And is there a way to accord respect and to honor those who served without suggesting that there is some elusive greatness that we need to recapture. And I think that backward glance to which this idea condemns us has led us to keep looking for a kind of salvation, to keep looking for a kind of greatness and goodness in ensuing wars, the wars that have followed World War II. 

And that's why I think this is a dangerous way to view the war and why the rhetoric of World War II has survived. The Axis Powers become the Axis of Evil, Saddam Hussein compared to Hitler. There are all sorts of ways in which the architects of recent wars have used World War II as a touchstone. And I don't say they do it all cynically. Some do it cynically, some do it because of a real belief.

Bethanne Patrick: Unfortunately, soldiers shipped off to combat zones, of which Elizabeth has taught many over the years, a lot of times have to confront romantic perceptions of war on the battlefield.

Elizabeth Samet: War, perhaps to a larger extent than other human endeavors, is saturated with myth and with idealism. And I think part of that is an inevitable component to motivating those who wish to serve. It is just saturated with ideals, and those are wonderful ideals, but there is a moment, and that moment, and I've seen it happen to my colleagues and students, where those myths and those ideals come into contact with the brutal reality of warfare. And if they're not prepared for that, it's a catastrophe and it shakes them. It shakes them to such an extent that some don't fully recover from it.

Bethanne Patrick: Here’s where books like Three Cups of Tea come into play. While Elizabeth never assigned Three Cups to her West Point students, in 2008 and 2009, it was on a required reading list for the Marine Corps and she did recall one of her students loving the book.

Elizabeth Samet: I remember, in fact, one in particular student with whom I worked a great deal, and she had a dog-eared copy of it that she was very interested in at the time.

Bethanne Patrick: While the media was busy perpetuating a version of Muslims as violent, radical, misogynistists, on a Jihad against our western way of life, Greg Mortenson’s depiction of the gentle hospitality of the Pakistani villagers in Korphe ran counter to how Muslim people were being portrayed almost everywhere else.

TV Clip - Fox News: Why are people coming to this country in the name of Islam killing Americans? And don't you think you should pause for a minute and reflect on what's gone wrong within your community?

Bethanne Patrick: Three Cups was about empathizing rather than villainizing. Which, as Elizabeth shared with us, is at the heart of why soldiers are taught great literature at the military academy.

Elizabeth Samet: The great power of literature is not, I think, that we find people who look and talk and act exactly the way we do. And so this question, and I hear this word all the time now of “can I relate to it” or “relatability,” that irks me because I always feel that if you're only looking for people who act, talk, and think the way you do, then you can save time and not read at all. And so, the real power of reading is to find people in wildly different situations that you can't necessarily access immediately, but you know they're human beings just like you are. And so, you know that they have certain responses. But how do they differ? How are they similar? How do they navigate strange worlds? And so, literature's a strange world and my students, maybe to a degree greater than others, are going to find themselves in strange worlds.

Bethanne Patrick: Did the widely read Three Cups of Tea do good? Did the book accurately describe the Pakistani people? And that bridge Greg crossed – real or added to his memoir for dramatic effect – did it lead us across another important cognitive bridge? When we come back, we’ll make sense of it all.

Chapter 3: The Final Cup of Tea

Seema Khan: I really enjoyed the book. I absolutely loved the book. I remember around that time, I gave away quite a few copies of the book as gifts. You know, it was birthday presents, Christmas gifts, whatever. I think I must have given away six or seven copies of the book.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s Seema. She’s from Pakistan but lives in Virginia now, where she raised a family.

Seema Khan: We got a lot of phone calls from our friends who lived in other parts of the country after 9/11, asking us, "Are you okay? Is everything alright? How are you doing? We just want you to know that you can, you know, call us if you need any help."

Bethanne Patrick: It’s her perception that among a sea of negative portrayals of her culture, this book finally stood out as an accurate representation of the Muslim people.

Seema Khan: As a country, I think that's what everybody notices about Pakistanis, is that we are very hospitable. You cannot come to a house and not be invited in for a cup of tea, and with the tea, you know, they will have to give you something to eat. So, what was most striking to me about Greg's book was this. This is how he really became friends with the people, it was the hospitality there. He was a complete stranger to them. And if I remember correctly, he had fallen sick and the villagers took him in and nursed him back to health, and shared whatever limited resources they had with him. And they helped him recover. And that, for me, was a completely understandable phenomenon, because I can imagine those people doing that. They really are very simple, very hospitable, and I don't know if we should say it comes from our culture or from our religion. You know, in Islam, we are supposed to look after anybody and everybody. It's a very community-based religion.

Bethanne Patrick: Along with Seema, we talked to several other readers off-mic who shared similar feelings about the book. And while we won’t assume that there is a monolithic feeling among people of Pakistani descent on the subject, it’s safe to say that Three Cups still resonated with many people, even despite the allegations around the story and its protagonist. 

In talking to Seema and Elizabeth, I got to thinking more about literature and its profound ability to build empathy. Looking back, perhaps no group was shown less empathy than Muslim folks living in the United States following 9/11 and at the height of the War on Terror. 

TV Clip - ABC: So, I don't remember a world before 9/11, but I do know as a kid, you don't know what racism is, but you feel it. You feel the way that the white dance moms at the dance studio stopped talking to my mom the day after 9/11 because she was an Arab.

Bethanne Patrick: And with Muslims in America feeling Islamophobia more acutely in their everyday lives.

TV Clip - ABC: People associate people who look like us with an event that we didn't create, we had nothing to do with, and we, quite frankly, shouldn't be made to feel like we're apologizing for.

Bethanne Patrick: Three Cups of Tea was the closest a white writer came to relating to predominantly Muslim countries during the late aughties. But there were other kinds of art available working to disrupt Muslim stereotypes.

Video Clip - The Muslims Are Coming: Al Quaeda claims responsibility for things they could have never done. “Do you know the eclipse? We did it for Allah.”

Bethanne Patrick: That’s the trailer for The Muslims Are Coming! As you can hear, this film offered a satirical and subversive perspective on the Muslim American experience. A documentary about a group of predominantly muslim comedians touring through the south a few years after 9/11. 

Negin Farsad: My name is Negin Farsad. I'm a comedian. I'm also host of the podcast, Fake the Nation, and I have been called, by myself and by others, a social justice comedian.

Bethanne Patrick: That's our guest, Negin Farsad. She's an American comedian of Iranian descent who co-created the documentary, which came out back in 2012.

Negin Farsad: I mean, you know, look, the term social justice comedy is just like, some like, silly thing that I started saying because people would call me a political comic. And I was like, "Well, that makes me sound very partisan." And like, don't get me wrong, I'm very liberal and you could probably tell, but I never felt like I was doing, you know, like I wasn't like doing jokes about, like, Mitch McConnell. You know what I mean? I wasn't doing jokes about Paul Ryan. So, I didn't feel like I was a, you know, some sort of, like, partisan political comic. I felt like I was just trying to point out wrong and right, right? Justice or no justice. And that felt like, to me, more like I was a social justice comedian.

Bethanne Patrick: Her work is both hilarious…

Negin Farsad: You look great, but you know, Zoom makes everybody kinda look great.

Bethanne Patrick: …but also hopes to break down barriers between white and Muslim Americans through exposure, something Negin thinks of as key.

Negin Farsad: Exposure is just such an obvious way to get over any kind of dumb bigotry you have. And everyone has dumb bigotries. Like I said, I was a person that had just super unnecessary and bad and sad and terrible bigotry because I grew up with it. We all grew up in this same system. So, we're likely to have some of these beliefs, no matter if we're a person of color or what, you know? And so, I think exposing people to Muslims was like, is one of the best ways to get, you know, people to understand that they're not a big deal.

Bethanne Patrick: For Negin, who also created the TEDTalk “A Highly Scientific Taxonomy of Haters,” which has over a million hits on YouTube and counting…

Video Clip - TED: Now, why comedy? Because on a scale of comedy to brochure, the average American prefers comedy, as you can see from this graph. Comedy is very popular. And by the way, this is a mathematically accurate graph generated from fake numbers.

Bethanne Patrick: comedy was the delivery system through which she was both educating and building empathy with people from all walks of life.

Negin Farsad: We definitely have a "taking things too seriously issue" in the United States, exacerbated by platforms like Twitter and just the internet in general, where people have become somehow humorless and rageful. And so, I feel like my role is to break through that a little bit by using comedy, you know? And it's been, they've done studies on shows like the Daily Show and whether or not, you know, they've done studies on how much people retain if they get this, the piece of news from something like the Daily Show versus something like cable news. And it turns out their actual literal retention of information is higher when you get it from a comedy source. The way that something is packaged actually gets into your brain stronger if it's comedic.

Bethanne Patrick: And while Negin wasn’t a Three Cups of Tea reader, like Seema, for her the book was about being seen, understood, and humanized. 

It can be hard to reconcile Greg’s personal actions with the messages presented in his book. But voices like Seema’s and Negin’s are a reminder that authentic perspectives are out there if you only take a moment to find them.

We may never get definitive answers out of the he-said/she-said arguments surrounding Greg’s journey. But building a path forward in these regions of the world that’s based on empathy and education still seems like a noble cause.

TV Clip - KBZK Bozeman MT News: Of course, with the new Taliban-controlled government, the future of education for girls in particular is quite precarious. The Taliban haven't really spoken with one voice on this, but they did announce that high school girls were not allowed to go back to school, which was very concerning.

Bethanne Patrick: CAI, which is still educating women and children in Afghanstan, has been strategizing around how to keep schools open in the Taliban-controlled country.

TV Clip - KBZK Bozeman MT News: We're working to already get some community-based classes going for younger children. And as the policies are announced by the Taliban, we will design those programs and move forward.

Bethanne Patrick: For what it’s worth, the organization is still out there trying their best to do good in the world. Mortenson was probably not the guy we needed building these bridges. But there’s no denying that the story he told knew no bounds, moving books across countries and continents.

His goal was never to dictate how another part of the world should educate their children, just to carry the message that everyone should have access to an education – that literacy was the bridge to peace.

Even if Mortenson’s intentions were in the right place, his actions ultimately did great disservice to the organization’s efforts, ruining its reputation and repelling the large donors required to sustainably aid these communities. And while his book is undoubtedly a huge success, the controversy only served to undermine his credibility. In many ways, he was a good man, but I think we can all agree he wasn’t the hero we wanted him to be. 

Maybe the message is: it’s time to start trusting and listening to others, even if, and especially if they’re different from us. So, maybe the next time you consider reading a book about this region, consider the author’s vantage point. The real lay of the land. The real climb up the mountain.

Well folks, this is the final episode of season one of Missing Pages. We hope you follow us on social media and sign up for the newsletter at Podglomerate.com for updates on future seasons. And we look forward to being back in your feed soon. 

Want to explore other perilous, inspiring, adventure books in the vein of Three Cups of Tea? Maybe stories by less controversial authors? Here are a few titles I’d recommend:

Looking for a masterpiece? Try The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. It may be another “white guy climbs mountain in Nepal” book, but damn it always hits the spot. Perhaps we’ll return to Matthiessen next season. There are so few writers with CIA side hustles.

Looking for more outdoor adventures? Try The River by Peter Heller. This one will keep you glued to your seat and somehow sweating too. Our executive producer Jeff preorders all of Heller’s books, and it’s never taken him longer than a day or two to read one. 

And if you’re looking for a book with insight on issues in the regions discussed in this episode, look no further than Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. It’s a magical realist reflection on colonialism and culture from the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. 

Missing Pages is a Podglomerate Original, and is written and produced by a small army. 

Showrunner: Caila Litman 

Producer, Researcher, and Writer Jordan Aaron: 

Producer: Matt Keeley 

Production, Mixing and Mastering by Chris Boniello

Fact Checking by Kathleen Hennrikus

Legal Review by Alexia Bedat and Louise Carron at Klaris Law

Marketing by Joni Deutsch, Morgan Swift, and Madison Richards 

Social Media by Sylvia Bueltel 

Art by Tom Grillo 

Production and Hosting by me, Bethanne Patrick

Executive Produced by Jeff Umbro and the Podglomerate 

Special thanks to Dan Christo, Elizabeth Samet, Negin Farsad,Salma Hasan Ali, Seema Khan, Jennifer Jordan, James Meader, Angelina Venezia, Jon Krakaeuer, and Andrew Steven.

You can learn more about Missing Pages at thepodglomerate dot com, on twitter @misspagespod and on Instagram @missingpagespod, or you can email us at missing pages at the podglomerate dot com. If you liked what you heard today, please let your friends and family know and suggest an episode for them to listen to.