From the stands, Jay Mullen didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like that the Soviet basketball team was humiliating its overmatched Ugandan opponents. He didn’t like that the visitors were bigger, stronger, faster, and more skilled than the amateurish Ugandan army and prison guard teams. He didn’t like that the Soviets were outscoring, out-rebounding, and out-everythinging the home team, and didn’t like that they were throwing the ball off the backboard and dunking it. They were putting on a Harlem Globetrotters–type show and the Ugandans were the Generals.
The Soviets had arrived in Kampala a few days earlier, and now they were showing why they had come: to dominate. Winning these two initial games by more than 60 points apiece, they displayed the skills that made them the best team in the Soviet Union and in Europe. They were also showing, Mullen thought, a complete lack of respect and humility. Next, they would be playing Mullen’s team, the best Uganda had to offer. As he watched the Soviets pummel the locals, it made Mullen want to retaliate, to wound the visiting team’s estimable pride, and to regain it for the Ugandans. And if he could serve his own country at the same time, then so be it. That idea, he liked.
In 1972, in the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet military sent a team of all-stars to Kampala to compete in three goodwill basketball games against Uganda’s top players. The Soviets, who were hoping to curry favor with the leader of the new regime, Idi Amin, didn’t know that the best of the three squads, the Ugandan national team, was at that time being coached by an American named Jay Mullen. And they definitely didn’t know that Mullen was an undercover CIA operative, sent to Uganda earlier that year to spy on the Soviets.
The space race was winding down, but the nuclear arms race was accelerating at a perilous rate despite talks of limitations. U.S.-backed coups were happening all over the world. Courting and deposing regional leaders was a global game being played by dangerous men. At a moment when any shift in the balance of power could lead to Cold War escalation between the USSR and U.S., the team from the USSR had been invited by the Ugandan Ministry of Defence as a way to show solidarity between the militaries of this East African country and the Eastern Bloc.
A coup supported by the CIA was partially responsible for the series of events that led to this athletic standoff — an uncelebrated moment in the annals of Cold War sports that includes the Miracle on Ice and boycotts at the 1980 and 1984 Olympics. For decades, the Cold War was played on the field, the pitch, and the basketball court. Victories for individual athletes were seen as triumphs for superpowers, for capitalist or communist ways of life.
Mullen was the coach of the Ugandan national basketball team for six months under the reign of Idi Amin. During that short time, he would turn a team of amateurs — the first generation of Ugandan basketball players — into a proxy army against the USSR’s propaganda tour. “I’m a competitive guy and, number one, I wanted to win,” he told me. “Number two, I’m competing for the hearts and minds of the world, and if I could in some microscopic way derail this thing of theirs, I would’ve enjoyed that, and I almost felt an obligation to try.” If the Soviets were trying to impress Ugandan leaders by winning a basketball game, he would do everything in his power to make them lose.
In March, I visited Mullen in southern Oregon, where he has been living for almost 40 years. Ever since our first conversation in 2013, the tall, white-haired history professor had not stopped asking me, “Did you follow that?” — checking in as he breathlessly shared stories from his travels and how they intertwined with historical events.
At home with Mullen, I could see how he would be the right person for the CIA job. His 46-year-old son, Tobey, told me that Mullen often speaks without words, pointing at things he wants. I witnessed as much, but I also saw him initiate conversations with strangers like it was nothing, breaking the ice with at least three different people by asking if they had Nordic ancestry. At dinner one night, without warning, he broke into the New Zealand national anthem, not the last anthem he would sing during my visit. The guy can listen, schmooze, or entertain as needed.
Before I arrived, he suggested that we talk while driving to and from the coast, where we’d be dropping off his teenage granddaughter at surf camp. Mullen spent nearly the entire three-hour trip to Gold Beach explaining the genesis of World War II to his granddaughter while she sat half-listening in the backseat of my rental car. “Did you follow that?” he asked her, often, while listing the many types of people the Nazis hated.
As the two of us drove back alone, Mullen began to tell me how the hell an academic originally from southeastern Missour-uh ended up taking his young family to Uganda only months after one of modern history’s most notorious dictators took power.
In 1970, Mullen and his wife, Nancy Jo, were living in Kentucky, where he was teaching history courses at Midway College. This was during the Vietnam War, which Mullen staunchly opposed and protested against. The administration at his school told him he had to shave his beard, considered a symbol of “treason” at the time, according to Mullen. “I told them to go fuck themselves,” he said. “And so I had to find a new job.”
He and Nancy Jo had also just adopted a Native American son, and then had another child who was born with severe and expensive health problems. Mullen sent form letters to all sorts of places looking for work. “I believe I have credentials that would be of interest to you,” he wrote to Xerox. “I believe I have credentials that would be of interest to you,” he wrote to the Tennessee Valley Authority. “I believe I have credentials that would be of interest to you,” he wrote to the CIA.
One night Mullen got a call from a guy who said he was with “the agency.” Mullen didn’t know if he meant the home loan agency or any of the other entities that he’d sent letters to in search of employment. As it turned out, the CIA was interested in his credentials. Then in his early thirties, Mullen was finishing up his dissertation on the influence of Indians on British colonial policy in East Africa, and he had earned a fellowship to study Wolof, a West African language, at the University of Indiana.
Jay Mullen and his kids Tobey and Molly in Uganda
Courtesy of Umeeda Switlo
After doing a background check, the CIA asked him to come to Washington, D.C., despite his antigovernment past. “They didn’t care,” he told me. “As long as I could be inserted there and provide information, they didn’t give a goddamn if I worked for Che Guevara.” It was difficult to plausibly place operatives in African nations outside of embassy jobs, but with his academic bona fides, Mullen was fit to work under non-official cover, as a NOC.
With the approval of Nancy Jo, herself excited to try something new, Mullen joined the CIA, and, in September 1971, after an accelerated eight-week training, he and his family left for Uganda’s capital, Kampala. He would be posing as a researcher on African history; there were plenty of other Americans and Brits at Makerere University among whom Mullen could blend in. But his real job would be to get to know the Kampala-based Soviets.
At first, Mullen told me he was in Kampala as “just another set of eyes and ears” for the CIA, but he quickly corrected himself. “That’s probably a little too cute,” he admitted. “I was actually managing a ring of assets, as we called them. Some people call them a spy ring.” His assets were mostly Ugandans recruited to help gather information on the Russians living in Kampala in order to turn them into double agents. Not all of them understood what they were doing or whom they were doing it for. In the agency, Mullen said, “you recruit all kinds of people who don’t even know they’re recruited or why.”
Getting to know Russians, who were themselves trying to find Americans to spy for their side, meant going to social events once or twice a week, and drinking a whole lot. He’d meet Soviets at parties and write reports describing every detail of their mostly mundane conversations. Sometimes Nancy Jo would come along, to dance with (and gather information on) the single Russian men. The reports, along with the contents of tapped phone calls and other gathered intelligence, would be used by experts in D.C. to determine which Soviets might be willing to turn and work for the Americans. “Every one of them was a candidate,” Mullen said.
The Cold War was in full effect when Mullen arrived in Kampala. In this post-African-independence period, both the Americans and the Soviets were trying to spread their ideals to Africa, occasionally by hook and more often by crook. African leaders who showed signs, or were thought to show signs, of moving to the left — i.e., toward communism and away from capitalism — were strongly “encouraged” by American agencies to step down.
Milton Obote, the president of Uganda starting in 1966, was one such leader who made Americans wary. The CIA did not directly support the January 1971 military coup that took Obote out of power, but declassified British government documents have shown that the Israelis, and to a lesser extent the British, did, while the Americans cheered and eventually provided weapons to the new man in charge — the civilized world’s hope for Uganda, the man destined to foster under his leadership a new era of capitalist Western-style democracy, the despot known as Big Daddy: Idi Amin.
Amin’s coup happened only months before Mullen arrived in the country, and so it was under his regime that Mullen spied on the Russians. Amin had joined the King’s African Rifles, a British colonial unit, in 1946, and had trained in the U.K. and Israel. He was a big, charismatic man, a heavyweight boxing champion, and he became a Western symbol of African leadership for a short while. “Amin burst into the presidency, like Obote before him, through the barrel of a gun,” wrote historian Phares Mutibwa, “stumbling on to the pages of history.”
Amin’s reign has become famous for its brutality, but at the time of the coup it was greeted by many Ugandans with great cheer. Obote had begun physically eliminating or detaining his enemies. He’d expelled Kenyan industrial workers and used the military and police to maintain shaky yet violent control of the country. Change was welcome when Amin came to power and immediately released 55 political detainees. He spoke of halting widespread corruption, lowering taxes, holding organized elections, and stemming bloodshed. The coup was supposed to mark a new beginning for Uganda.
But Amin’s honeymoon period would not last long. As many as half a million Ugandans were killed under his regime, including hundreds, if not thousands, of prominent civil servants, academics, senior military officers, cabinet ministers, diplomats, educators, church leaders, and doctors. Anyone who posed a threat to the control of the country was eliminated. In a 1972 memo, one British ambassador described the situation in Uganda as “absolute hell.”
As the risks of being stationed in Uganda became more and more apparent, foreign governments began pulling out their personnel. The exodus from Uganda, said Mullen, was “like rats leaving a sinking ship.” One of the people who fled Kampala after the coup was the Ugandan national basketball team’s coach, a Yugoslav. With the trials for the Pan African Games — a continental version of the Olympics — coming up and a group of Soviet ballers on their way, the Ugandan team needed a new coach. Amin’s coup and the ensuing violence in Uganda had cleared the way for Mullen to step in.
When he wasn’t spying on the Soviets, Mullen spent time with his wife and kids, taught classes at Makerere University, and played outdoor basketball at the YMCA. Basketball had come to Uganda only a few years earlier, in the 1960s, through Peace Corps volunteers and missionaries. Those playing in the early 1970s were true pioneers of the sport in Uganda. Cyrus Muwanga was one of them.
“I started playing basketball probably when the first Ugandans played the game,” Muwanga, now a 66-year-old retired hand surgeon in County Durham, England, told me. As a young boy, he learned the sport from Americans who taught at his school. He and his friends would play on a grassy field or packed dirt lot.
Jay Mullen refereeing a YMCA basketball game in Uganda.
Courtesy of Jay Mullen
“It was so rough, at first we thought that we’re not supposed to bounce the ball,” Muwanga said. “We’d just run.” But learning to dribble on a rough surface, which they did for two or three years before moving to a proper court, proved to be an advantage: “When you actually move to a smooth court, it’s quite easy.”
Muwanga and his schoolmates also became good shooters because they were initially playing on backboard-less netball hoops. Accuracy is key when only a swish gets you a bucket.
When Muwanga finished high school, he had to choose which college to attend for his A-levels. His father wanted him to go to the school that was the best academically. “I chose the school with a good basketball court,” Muwanga told me, following with the long, deep laugh that he attached to every basketball-related memory.
Hilary Onek (left) at the opening of the St. Mary's College Kisubi basketball court.
Via visitugandaschools.blogspot.com
The Aga Khan School, where Muwanga took his pre-university courses, would compete against a Catholic school 15 miles down the road called St. Mary’s College Kisubi, which had three proper basketball courts. One of the St. Mary’s players was a cocky, tall drink of water named Hilary Onek.
As a younger kid, Onek had never even heard of basketball. “I didn’t know anything about it,” he told me from his office in Uganda, where he is a member of parliament. But at Kisubi, he found out about this American game where you shoot a ball through a metal hoop. His teachers singled him out for instruction because of his height. Soon, he was dominating. “I could outjump all of them,” Onek said. “I was probably the strongest player on the team.” Onek also had an older classmate named James Okwera, a great athlete and basketball star despite the fact that he didn’t start playing until he was 16. With Cyrus Muwanga holding court at Aga Khan, competitions between the schools were fierce. “When Aga Khan played Kisubi, it was a war,” Muwanga said.
The St. Mary’s College Kisubi basketball team.
Irene Tyaba
“Aga Khan came second to us a lot of the time,” Okwera told me. “But they had some really good players, and my friend Cyrus was one of them, so whenever we were playing them, it was always a very tense rivalry.” In his last year at the school — during a somewhat more relaxed, if still politically unstable, pre-coup period in Uganda — the two teams played for the national school championship, with Kisubi coming away with a one-point victory. The players from both schools pushed each other to improve, and by the time they were moving on to university studies, Onek, Muwanga, Okwera, and their friends were taking the game seriously.
Muwanga and his Aga Khan schoolmate Ivan Kyeyune were Muganda; Hilary Onek and James Okwera were Acholi. At various times under Obote and Amin, members of each of their tribes were being murdered and coming into and out of power. But they say politics didn’t matter when they were on the court, and especially when they all ended up on the national team. “I don’t think that ever came across anybody’s mind,” Okwera told me. “We all trained as one, and played as one.”
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