Jay, Tobey, and Molly Mullen in Uganda.
During the 1970s, researcher Jay Mullen was a man with connections in Khartoum.
He had graduated from the University of Oregon’s College of Arts and Sciences in 1962, the early days of the swinging sixties, and in Sudan’s bustling capital city attended parties, rubbed shoulders with esteemed dignitaries behind embassy walls, and was a member of the finest clubs.
He was also living a lie.
His daughter, Molly Mullen, BA ’88, discovered the truth as a bored and restless fifth-grader, listlessly bouncing a tennis ball against a wall in her parents’ bedroom—the only room in the house with air conditioning—one particularly hot, muggy, Sudanese summer.
Bounce. Thud. Bounce. Thud. Bounce. Thud.
Until, that is, a wayward throw hit her father’s bookshelf instead of the wall, and the dull thud was replaced by the whir of a secret compartment springing open, revealing a stack of papers inside. Her father initially claimed the papers were inconsequential, but soon came clean to Molly and her brother, Tobey, and sister, Dinah.
Goodbye, boredom. Jay Mullen, researcher, was actually Jay Mullen, spy; specifically, a CIA agent keeping tabs on Communists in Africa during the Cold War.
“’Oh my God,’” Molly recalled thinking at the time. “It seemed so fantastical.”
Jay Mullen’s journey to becoming a real-life secret agent is hardly the stuff of Bond or Bourne films—though Molly admits the TV show The Americans does hit close to home. Jay met his future wife, Nancy Jo, MFA ’91, while the two were students at the UO, and after Jay received his bachelor’s degree in speech, they moved east to study at the University of Kentucky. There, Nancy Jo completed her bachelor’s degree while Jay earned a master’s and doctorate and got a job teaching at Midway University in rural Kentucky. The Mullens were at Midway long enough to have Molly and adopt Tobey, but Jay eventually lost his job due to his anti-war views and unruly facial hair.
Setting a trend that continued for the next decade, the Mullens then packed up and moved again, this time to Bloomington, Indiana, where Jay studied Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal, Mauritania, and the Gambia, at Indiana University. While in Indiana the couple had another daughter, Dinah, but when Jay's studies concluded, they were back where they started.
“From there,” said Molly, “he's an unemployed PhD that speaks Wolof with a wife and three little kids.”
Jay’s sudden unemployment came while the Cold War was raging, and the USA and USSR were both increasing their nuclear arsenals. The Cuban Missile Crisis had taken place just a few years earlier, the term “Mutually Assured Destruction” had entered the national lexicon, and the two countries were squaring off by supporting ideologically aligned governments and politicians around the world. The Soviets? They were in Cuba and Czechoslovakia. The USA was in the Dominican Republic. Both were in Vietnam.
In Africa, the CIA was keeping tabs on a number of Soviet and Chinese citizens. Unable to place spies in Moscow or Beijing, the CIA sent its agents around the world to make contact in other countries; needing a representative in Uganda, the agency turned to an out-of-work professor who was already familiar with Africa through his research and who had, out of desperation, submitted his résumé to them.
Jay spent the next year training in rudimentary CIA safehouses, where radios and televisions were constantly left on to interfere with eavesdroppers. Lampshades were still encased in cellophane and had the price tags on them; kitchens were stocked with little more than what was needed to make a cup of tea or coffee.
Following Jay’s training, the Mullens moved to Kampala, Uganda’s capital city. Only, the CIA initially did not give Jay a cover story; there was no plausible excuse why a 28-year-old American would pack up his wife and three children and move to East Africa. Jay got a job teaching history at Makerere University, which the CIA initially objected to, but he was able to convince them that teaching at least gave him a valid reason to be in the country.
Only, much of his “teaching” was informing the CIA about what the Soviets and Chinese were doing. A game of rugby with Soviet paratroopers was organized. Molly took violin lessons in the Korean Embassy, as Jay needed an excuse to get in the door to meet a contact. He became a member of the local German club, despite not being able to speak a word of German—“He bullshitted his way through that,” Molly laughed. He was instructed to bug the Chinese Embassy, though that mission was called off when President Richard Nixon decided to visit China. Local Ugandans were recruited to become assets, and they helped Jay turn Soviets into double agents.
One time, Jay had to copy top-secret documents and send the photos back to the CIA. “My hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t hold the camera; that’s what I reported back,” he once told Southern Oregon University’s student newspaper.
Several days after sending the CIA the blurry photos, a package arrived in the mail. The CIA had sent him a tripod.
But the year after the Mullens arrived in Uganda, everything changed. The Ugandan army, led by General Idi Amin, seized power while President Milton Obote was out of the country. Amin declared himself Uganda’s new president, and began purging Uganda of those he felt were not loyal to him. Some estimates claim that 300,000 were killed during the eight-year reign of “The Butcher of Uganda;” others put that figure closer to 500,000. Among those abducted and murdered were relatives of the Mullen’s friends.
Amin declared himself “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular,” and the King of Scotland. But to Jay Mullen, Amin was someone to keep tabs on the best way he knew how—by socializing with him.
Jay’s club memberships were a way for him to meet people, learn sensitive information, and turn foes into CIA assets. For the Mullen children, years away from learning their father’s secret, they were simply where the swimming pools were. Amin was not an expert swimmer by any means, but he enjoyed escaping the Ugandan heat and the Mullen family occasionally saw him and his bodyguards at the International Hotel. A brutal dictator to all who opposed him, Amin was anything but in the hotel’s pool, and enjoyed playing with the Mullen children. He once competed against Jay in a swimming race—similar to the one shown in the 2006 film The Last King of Scotland—and lost after one of Jay’s flailing arms smacked him in the face; the brute who had his opponents fed to crocodiles in Lake Victoria and the Nile just laughed the collision off.
“If he disliked you, your ass could be grass, but if he didn’t dislike you, he was capable of being a really nice guy,” Jay once told Buzzfeed when recounting his time in Uganda. “Can you believe that?”
That certainly may have been hard to believe for the owner of Tobey’s preschool, a woman from India. Amin ordered all Asians to leave Uganda, calling them “bloodsuckers” who were bleeding the country dry. The school's owner was given mere weeks to leave the country with her family, and they had to leave most of their possessions and money behind.
Jay was able to help the family escape to Canada, and the two families are close to this day. They were even able to establish themselves in British Columbia thanks to a little money laundering on Jay’s part—they gave their money to him, he deposited it in his own account, and then transferred it to them after they’d left Uganda.
“It sounds silly to say that was typical, it's not typical, but that's a pretty good example of the sort of generosity of my father,” said Molly. “He was just that kind of a person.”
When he wasn’t busy spying for the CIA or inadvertently assaulting Idi Amin in swimming pools, Jay Mullen managed to end up with an entirely different job in Uganda in 1972—that of Ugandan national team basketball coach. A former UO track athlete, Jay kept fit by playing rec league basketball games in Uganda, and often squared off against the head of the country’s basketball council. When the star-studded CSKA Moscow team added a Ugandan stop on its world tour, the council asked Jay to coach the national team.
The Soviets were hoping to promote Communism by proving their superiority at every turn on the tour. Sensing an opportunity to strike back, Jay drilled his team in the intricacies of the game. The upstart hosts led at the end of the first quarter, but the Soviets soon pulled away in a game marred by violent clashes between players, and coaches yelling at each other in languages their opposites couldn’t understand. CSKA Moscow ended up winning, but was made to sweat and bleed for every point in a game they had expected to be a cakewalk.
Eventually though, life in Uganda became unsafe even for an independently wealthy researcher who coached basketball on the side. The USA closed its embassy and evacuated its employees, but as a spy “in the cold”—out on assignment, and not officially affiliated with the government—Jay and his family did not have diplomatic passports and were left behind. Nancy Jo was eventually able to leave with the children, but it was some time later before Jay joined them—he eventually left Uganda mere weeks before the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian hijacked an Air France plane and redirected it to Entebbe International Airport, 30 miles south of Kampala.
From there, the family moved back and forth between Medford, Oregon, and various countries in Africa. Uganda was followed by Sudan—where Molly discovered the bookshelf’s secret compartment—which in turn was followed by Chad. Jay soon grew tired of spying and became disillusioned with what he was being asked to do though, and in 1979 left the CIA and returned to Oregon for good.
In 1980, he ran for office, which was when the family secret became public knowledge. Jay submitted his tax returns, which were combed through by a reporter; the reporter noticed a number of payments coming from a company that didn’t exist, and began asking questions. Jay got the green light from the federal government to answer the reporter’s questions, and came clean about his past as a CIA spy in Africa. The payments in question were the ones the government was sending him through a shell company.
Life after spying was quiet. After years spent getting close to Idi Amin and recruiting Soviets to be double agents for the CIA, Jay Mullen opened a farm outside Medford, and when he wasn’t tending to his orchard, taught history at Southern Oregon University. A lifelong Duck fan, he was a regular at Autzen Stadium, never more so than when Molly was studying history at the UO and he would travel to Eugene to attend games with her.
“He would just drive up Saturday morning, and we’d walk over to Autzen Stadium and walk in and sit wherever we wanted to,” Molly said. “Usually we would sit in the end zone where kids would be running and throwing the football back and forth because nobody was sitting there. I mean, we—my husband and I—were at Oregon in the days of the Oregon-Oregon State zero-zero tie.”
Jay Mullen died suddenly of a heart attack in 2016. After his passing, people gathered to share stories about his life, swapping stories about how they met Jay and how he impacted them throughout their own lives.
“That was the kind of effect he had had on people,” said Molly. “It might have been somebody from his fraternity saying, ‘I was at Oregon and I joined this fraternity, and I was awkward and didn't really know anybody, and he reached out to me.’ He was a very, very inclusive person.”
That said, the best stories may be locked away in boxes at the CIA’s headquarters, never to be known.
“I can’t tell you [if I was successful recruiting a Soviet double agent] because I just can’t," Jay told Buzzfeed less than a year before his death. "If I did, I would say no, and if I didn’t, I would say no, so either way the answer’s gonna be no, even if it’s yes. And that’s just the way the game is played.”
- Damian Foley, University Communications
Photos courtesy Molly Mullen