Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way Read Online Free PDF Page A

speaking, promoting, and fund-raising into which I have been thrust … have often made me feel like a man caught in the act of conducting an illicit affair with the dark side of his own personality. ”
    — Greg Mortenson, Stones into Schools

IN THE FALL 1993, when Mortenson arrived home from K2, he immediately started soliciting donations for his “ Khane school project. ” A year later, he had managed to raise just $723. “ If it hadn ’ t been for Jean, ” muses Jennifer Wilson, referring to Jean Hoerni, her late husband, “ Greg would still be a nurse. ” In September 1994, Hoerni gave Mortenson the $12,000 he needed to build his first school, thereby launching his career as a humanitarian. Hoerni was a brilliant theoretical physicist who in the late 1950s played a pivotal role in the invention of the planar transistor, a new type of semiconductor that enabled the mass production of silicon chips — thereby transforming not only the electronics industry but also life as we know it. According to Stanford University historian Michael Riordan, “ Hoerni ’ s elegant idea helped to establish Silicon Valley as the microelectronics epicenter of the world. ” It also made Hoerni a wealthy man.
    Hoerni had moved to California in 1952 at the age of twenty-eight, but he was born and raised in Switzerland, where he had developed a lifelong passion for mountains and mountaineering. Around 1990, Hoerni met Jennifer Wilson, their friendship gradually evolved into something more serious, and in the summer of 1993 he invited her on a twenty-eight-day, two-hundred-mile trek through the Himalaya, in the northern Indian regions   of Zanskar and Ladakh. “ I had never even been camping before, ” says Wilson, a businesswoman who grew up in Iowa. “ It was a completely new experience for me. It was amazing. ” Four months after returning from India, Wilson and Hoerni got married. He was sixty-nine; she was forty-five.
    In the fall of 1994, Hoerni happened to read Mortenson ’ s article in the American Himalayan Foundation newsletter about his quixotic scheme to build a school in Baltistan. Having trekked up the Baltoro Glacier to K2 on two occasions, Hoerni was familiar with the region, and the venture piqued his imagination. “ I was in the kitchen, ” Wilson remembers. “ Jean came in and said, ‘ Look at this article about this guy who is trying to build a school. Americans don ’ t care about Muslims; they only care about Buddhist Sherpas in Nepal. No one is going to contribute to this. I ’ m going to call this guy. ’” Hoerni, who was living in Seattle, had a brief phone conversation with Mortenson, and then wrote him a $12,000 check. After the call, Wilson recalls, “ Jean actually said, ‘ This guy may just take off with my money. But I ’ m going to take a chance on him. ’ It was really an act of faith. ” As soon as the check cleared the bank, Mortenson departed for Pakistan to build his first school.
    In December 1996, when Mortenson reported to Hoerni that the school was finally finished, Hoerni didn ’ t care that it had been built in Korphe instead of Khane; he was simply happy that it had been completed while he was still around to hear about it. Eighteen months earlier, he and Wilson had been hiking up a mountain in the Swiss Jura, Wilson says, “ and Jean couldn ’ t keep up with me. That was unprecedented. ” Although Hoerni was seventy at the time, up until that moment he had been as strong as a man many years his junior; the previous summer he had trekked over an 18,400-foot Tibetan pass at a blistering pace. Concerned about his persistent, uncharacteristic fatigue, Wilson persuaded Hoerni to make an appointment to see his brother, Marc, who was a doctor in Geneva. A blood test revealed that Jean had acute leukemia. He was expected to die within a few months.
    Nevertheless, for about a year after his diagnosis, Hoerni managed to remain active. “ We weren ’ t able to hike as