WASHINGTON: President Obama was so impressed with the book that he donated $140,000 of his Nobel Peace Prize money to education ventures it spawned. The US military made it compulsory reading for personnel deployed in the Af-Pak theatre . American kids emptied their piggy banks to give to schools the author claimed to be building in Pakistan.Now it turns out that the acclaimed book by American mountaineer Greg Mortensen, “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time,’’ may have been a tall tale.In a scathing expose broadcast on Sunday, CBS’ 60 Minutes say Mortensen did not stumble into Korphe village in Pakistan’s mountain region, scene-setter for the book, when he says he did; he was not taken hostage by the Taliban like he says he was; and he has not built as many schools as he claims to have from the millions of dollars he collected after his book became a must-read for policy makers for its espousal of humanitarian efforts rather than military solutions in the troubled region.Instead, the 60 Minutes investigations suggest Mortensen spent millions of donated dollars on self-promotion and travel, and he used the Central Asia Institute, a charity he established on the basis of his Pakistan narrative, as a ‘’personal ATM machine.’’The controversy has once again raised questions in the publishing industry about the veracity of non-fiction accounts in addition to issues of plagiarism it is facing. “Three Cups of Tea” had climbed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list following glowing reviews and acclamation for the author.The book’s title comes from a proverb in Pakistan’s remote Baltistan region: “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honoured guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family...” In the book, Mortensen described how he stumbled into a Balti village called Korphe in 1993 after failing to climb K-2, the world’s second tallest mountain, and how, in return for their hospitality and nursing him back to health, he promised to build a school.He describes struggling to raise capital to build the first school, but after a Silicon Valley pioneer commits money, he founds the Central Asian Institute, returns frequently to the region, and builds dozens of school in the face of Taliban threats. The 60 Minutes investigation shows that the so-called Taliban who he claims kidnapped him were actually his hosts who treated him well. In one photo the program unearthed, Mortensen is shown holding an AK-47 with his ‘kidnappers’ arrayed around him.Mortensen declined to be interviewed by CBS’, but he subsequently issued a statement saying the book’s timeline (which 60 Minutes questioned) “was done was to simplify the sequence of events for the purposes of telling what was, at times, a complicated story.” He also insisted he had been kidnapped, while explaining that ‘’some people are Taliban, some are not, and affiliations change overnight often on a whim.’’