Hippie, Hooper, Swimmer, Spy: The Basketball Coach Who Secretly Worked for the CIA

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

His comment to me was, well, I think I'd rather make history than teach it.

Right after this ad.

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Ooh, yep, there it is.

You're trying to talk with the bottom of your diaphragm now?

I'm trying to talk from my stomach.

You told me just to channel it and talk like if I.

Like Boog.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why you sound like Boog just now?

Yeah.

What's you, you

figured it out.

Hey.

Teach me.

You got it from the bottom from inside, from deep inside.

It's good to see you, Pablo.

You sound like you're straining.

What are you doing?

I'm trying to start the episode.

Okay, great.

Very good.

We have a voicemail.

Great.

Hey, Pablo.

This is May from the deserts of Arizona.

A question for you.

Out of all sports personnel and hosts, how many of them do you think are insider agents for the CIA or FBI?

With sports being such a big media giant in modern day,

could they be in collaboration with intelligence agencies?

all All right love the show dude peace out he might want to invest in like maybe verizon instead of whatever he has but we love the callers and we thank you for calling five one three eight five pablo we appreciate the call but also what man like he's actually in like the sonaran desert yeah it sounded like it was an episode of breaking bad yes yeah i feel like marlin's man is the cia agent that comes to mind immediately the thing about marlin's man is he's a dork and i don't know what the point is like i think if you're looking for someone that is a cia agent in i want to do a marlin's man episode you're saying we shouldn't do that There's nothing to answer.

He's just a dork.

He's

paying a bunch of money on

a dork.

Who cares?

What I'm looking for is somebody that like, there's a purpose, right?

Like, so to me, the person that could be in hiding is Lou Holtz because Lou Holtz is sending out all these ridiculous tweets and so forth.

Maybe the purpose is somebody is, he's in hiding doing that.

The CIA.

What do you mean, Tyler?

I wouldn't say he's hiding or subtle,

but you're saying Lou Holtz, former Notre Dame football coach, turned culture warrior.

You heard what Harrison Butker had to say.

You think it's courageous.

Tell us why.

Oh, absolutely.

Could be a TIA.

Jesus Christ, that's a terrible Lou Holtz.

I would make the differ.

I think it does the job.

So the reason we are trying to do this job here today, the reason why we get voicemails like this now from people who are making us talk about

Lou Holtz.

Lou Holtz?

Why does it sound like you have a a lollipop in your mouth?

Oh, man.

It's because, obviously, of this.

Well, pop star Taylor Swift's high-profile relationship with the football star Travis Kelsey is sparking right-wing conspiracy theories ahead of the Super Bowl.

Some commentators are convinced the relationship is all part of an elaborate plan to help Joe Biden get re-elected in November.

Around four years ago, the Pentagon Psychological Operations Unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting.

What kind of asset?

A PSYOP for combating online misinformation.

She posted the link to the vote.org.

It's like hundreds of thousands of young Taylor Swift fans all of a sudden registered to vote.

I wonder who got to her from the White House or from wherever.

So everybody accused Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift, you may recall, of being a CIA psyop.

But this is stupid, right?

Like the whole point of this is that people are claiming this on major cable television networks talking about the election being swung this was a thing it was a real thing that made me feel like everybody was turning into like a lou holtz character it looks like a parody of of a news show yes we're gonna talk about a psyop with taylor swift and travis kelsey is actually an agent of the government we do is this jason whitlock like what do we mean exactly right except

that i've been uh

looking into

some historical research.

You've been investigating i've been investigating this instead of like showing up up at game shows.

I'm not, I'm just trying.

Look, wow, I can do both.

I'm not trying to be a contrarian.

I'm trying to just make sure that the other side of this issue

can debunk it as comprehensively as I can.

And all of this brought me to a game show from

decades ago called To Tell the Truth.

Are you familiar at all with this game show?

Was it on Bravo?

It was not.

I probably don't know.

Okay.

So

this is

a game show in which a sports figure was a contestant.

Pat Riley?

No.

Okay.

Someone even more internationally significant.

Number one, what is your name, please?

My name is Jay Mullen.

Number two, my name is Jay Mullen.

And number three, my name is Jay Mullen.

Only one of these people is the real Jay Mullen and has sworn to tell the truth.

I, Jay Mullen, spent six years as an agent for the CIA.

For two of those years, I lived in Uganda during the regime of the notorious Edi Amin.

Strangely enough, I even became friendly with some Russian agents in the country.

Officially, during my tour of duty, I was a lecturer at the university and coach of the national basketball team.

Signed, Jay Mullen.

Fascinating story.

So the way that game show works, and this music is awesome,

the way it works is three contestants all claim to be one person of some import, and a panel of judges has to guess who it is.

And so the real Jay Mullen in this case, if you heard the last part that

was claimed there.

That was locked in, of course.

Was the head coach of the Ugandan national basketball team while also working, allegedly, for the Central Intelligence Agency.

That's right.

You want me to give you my guess on who I think it is?

I guess we should.

I'm curious.

So they're labeled in the video as one, two, and three.

Two is the only black guy.

Yep.

Okay.

When they go to three,

three's a doofus.

It can't be Jay Mullen.

I know that for sure in my heart.

I just see him, doofus, punchable face.

It's not Jay Mullen.

Jesus.

He's a fraud.

Number two, it could have been Jay Mullen.

When they pan to him, though, his eyes immediately darted because he's hiding something.

He knows he's not Jay Mullen.

You're doing CIA psychoanalysis.

I know what I'm doing.

It's number one.

That's Jay Mullen.

In order to figure out who is the real Jay Mullen, whether his story is actually rooted in historical fact, how it is that a CIA secret double agent was also coaching a national basketball team, I had to bring on an actual journalist.

I'm right here.

A real reporter named Sean Raviv, who got to know Jay Mullen in real life, who investigated his story, reported it out for us, and it involves the Cold War.

one of the most brutal dictators in world history.

And something that I think you should personally appreciate, which is

ridiculously hard fouls.

Hmm.

Like Udonis Haslam style, Tyler Hansborough to the face.

Even more profoundly

impactful.

All right, now you got me.

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Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

Remy Martin Cognac, Feene Champion, Force and Alcoholic Volume 40 by Remy Control, USA Incorporated in Europe, New York, 1738, Centaur Design.

Please print responsibly.

You happen to be a person who has spent years getting to know and reporting about a real-life secret agent.

So, Sean Revive, thank you for being here.

I appreciate you coming into the studio for this.

Thanks for having me.

When did you first get to know Jay Mullen?

It was 2013.

I was living in Ghana, and I just randomly went to a library and picked up a book off the shelf.

And it was a book about the history of the CIA's work in Africa in the 60s and 70s.

And there was a very, very brief mention of a guy named Jay Mullen who'd been undercover in the 70s and done some pretty amazing stuff.

And I'd never heard of him.

It sounded like too...

too crazy to be true.

Okay, so when something sounds too crazy to be true, especially in the realm of government psyops and actual spies, it usually is.

But Sean Raviv, who is a veteran journalist and correspondent for Sports Explains the World, did not simply investigate the story of Jay Mullen, who was the CIA agent from that game show that we showed you before, the guy who claimed he coached the Ugandan national basketball team.

Because over several years, Sean got to know the real Jay Mullen personally, first over the phone and then in person at Jay's home in Oregon.

And Sean made time for check-ins with both Jay and his wife, Nancy Joe Mullen, who's his college sweetheart and the mother of his three kids.

All of which is how a Cold War-era spy began to trace on the record the private trajectory of his life.

I was born in southeast Missouri, a little town called Cape Gerard on the Mississippi, there.

Just about where Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri come together.

But the first thing I wanted to find out about Jay's story was something different.

I just wanted to know what kind of person would want to join the CIA in the first place.

He was very much into sports for sure.

He ran, ran track, played some basketball in high school.

He was a pretty good athlete, but not a great one.

Whenever I spoke with him, he would always downplay his athletic ability.

He was not spectacular.

He had been a Vietnam War protester, an academic, really.

a little bit hippie-ish, and he had long hair and a long beard.

He wasn't, I don't think he was a pacifist, but I just think he thought that the war was wrong-headed.

You know, it was just like a bad war.

He was a super curious guy.

He loved history, loved reading books, read a lot about Africa when he was young.

He loved singing, loved dancing.

I've seen him do both.

Wait, what kind of a singer and a dancer was Jay?

Also, again, not pro-level.

He was just someone who liked, he liked people.

He liked learning about people, and he liked just busting into song out loud.

I heard him sing several national anthems just on a short reporting trip with him.

Wait, so you're describing this guy who grew up in Oregon, had a beard, protested Vietnam, sang and danced.

This feels like

a guy who the CIA would not want, actually.

Definitely.

But apparently they wanted people who didn't appear to be CIA agents to be CIA agents.

That's actually, that's good strategy by the CIA.

I think so too.

But his interest in Africa,

how deep was that?

Get like a master's degree and then I think a PhD as well.

He studied the West African language of Wolof.

He was really interested in Africa, but he'd never been there.

So when Jay is figuring out what to do professionally, what's his approach?

Well, it was kind of a panicked approach.

He had a job.

He was teaching at a university, but they asked him to shave his beard because it was the Vietnam War era and and people were saying that beards were sort of like a sign of protest itself, a sign of treason.

You know, they, in effect, said, you're going to have to shave your beard.

At least when I told them to go fuck themselves, it's not a diplomatic thing to do.

So I had to find a new job.

But he had three kids, including one who was sick

and like really sick, had to go to the hospital a lot.

And he needed a job.

So he started sending out letters to a bunch of companies, which is what you did back then.

I would sit down and write letters to various entities.

Dear Commodity Credit Corporation,

I believe I have credentials that would be of interest to you.

And then I'd sit down and write, dear Tennessee Valley Authority, I believe I possessed

something like 300 letters saying, you know, I want to work for you.

I want to work for you.

So I'm imagining Jay Mullen.

He's in the library.

He's applying to

all of these corporations, spamming them.

Who Who does he get a call back from?

Someone calling from what he calls the agency.

He said, We're interested in interviewing you.

Can we meet?

His wife, Nancy Joe, sort of recounts what happens.

He had completely forgot the man was coming.

As soon as we drove up to the house, this poor man was sitting in his car, and it was probably 87 degrees and 90%

humidity.

He looked absolutely miserable and Jay was very chagrined, but that's the way it was.

So that was his first interview.

So Jay has to go through

a series of tests, essentially.

Then he has to pass those tests in order to become an agent.

And those tests include a lie detector test.

They ask him like all sorts of questions about his life.

They want to know really strange things like whether he prefers like piano or sports.

They ask him point blank if if he's a homosexual.

They want to know his interests, his background, his friends.

I think they're just trying to figure out if he's if he's blackmailable, if he's trustworthy, if he can be the kind of person who's on their side.

And how did Jay respond to the revelation that the CIA is interested in him?

I think he was pretty surprised because he, like everyone else, you know, kind of thought of the CIA as a bunch of like, you know, uptight people.

Yeah, potentially the people he was protesting against.

Yeah, exactly.

Uptight men in suits.

And Nancy Jo, his wife, is thinking what about Jay's interest in this job.

Well, I think she could probably see the sparkle in his eye pretty immediately.

I thought it was very Jay.

His comment to me was, well, I think I'd rather make history than teach it.

But I also understand Jay to be like a guy who loves to sing and dance.

And I don't know if that immediately transfers to the CIA secret agent skill set.

So what does he need to know how to do?

How does he learn how to do it?

Yeah, so the CIA trains him over eight weeks sort of crash course and espionage, how to use cameras, which he always talked about being really crappy at.

He learned to shoot, learned to shoot automatic weapons just in case.

He learned about dead drops, which is like a way of passing information between sources without being seen.

Learned about gathering assets, you know, people to work for you.

and help spy for you.

Right.

Assets being human beings.

He learned a lot of stuff that he'd never learned before.

He learned to sort of take an elevator, not to the floor you wanted to end up on, but one or two floors above or below.

I get that this is the 70s, Sean.

I get that.

This is, you know, it was a less sophisticated time, but this is really how you become a CIA agent.

You get eight weeks and you're like, you pop out the other end with like a little certificate of some sort.

Like that's all it took to become a CIA agent?

Apparently, at the time, yeah.

Why were they rushing him?

What was he supposed to do on the other side of this of this crash course?

Well, Well, the CIA says, you know, we want to send you to Kampala, to Uganda, and your whole family is going to go with you.

You're going to be a history professor while you're there, which you actually are.

But in the meantime, your real job is going to be to spy on the Soviets.

One of the fundamental operational objectives of the intelligence service was to find Russians who would be willing to come across and work for the government of the United States and help the people of the United States by penetrating their governments.

All right, so you may now be wondering why Professor Jay Mullen would have to go to Uganda, which is decidedly not Russia, in order to spy on the Soviets.

And the short answer in 1971 was the Cold War, which was, if you fell asleep during history class, a vast and paranoid global conflict between not just the United States and the Soviet Union, but their two respective ideologies, capitalism versus communism, as this old propaganda film from the U.S.

Armed Forces suggests.

If a person supports organizations which reflect communist teachings, or organizations labeled communist by the Department of Justice,

she may be a communist.

If a person defends the activities of communist nations while consistently attacking the domestic and foreign policy of the United States, she may be a communist.

If a person does all these things over a a period of time, he must be a communist.

The American government, in other words, was dead set on stopping the spread of communism head to head wherever it could, including, especially, actually,

in the developing world.

The Cold War was less about large-scale fighting and more about these proxy wars.

It was more about overthrowing governments and yes, even teaching a stubbornly bearded professor, apparently, how to spy on his Soviet counterparts in like eight weeks.

But by the time Jay Mullen arrived in Uganda in 1971, things were even more chaotic.

A recent military coup would change the East African country forever, and the general who seized power would become known as one of the most notorious dictators in history.

Edi Amin,

one of the most colorful and outrageous rulers in the world today.

With a brilliant understanding of power,

he rules Uganda by a simple yet effective method.

He has wiped out all opposition.

And up to 80,000 have been murdered.

That everybody loves me

and therefore I am one of their hero, the hero in the country, and therefore everybody is responsible for my security.

All of which is to say that Jay Mullen was not sent to Uganda to directly cross paths with a newly ascendant Idi Amin.

That was not his mission.

But as fate would have it, that is what Jay Mullen quite literally did.

He meets him a few times at a swim club.

Idiomin likes swimming.

He's apparently really terrible at it, but he runs into him there.

They even have a swim race together.

For the head of a military government who overthrew the previous regime, he takes security extremely lightly.

He drove himself down to Kampala's main hotel and plunged into the pool with scarcely a bodyguard in sight.

Idiomin is such a bad swimmer that he leaves his lane and Jay accidentally hits him in the face during the race.

But apparently he was good natured enough about that and didn't get angry.

Yeah, I don't think that was in one of the training seminars he took.

What happens when you accidentally backstroke a murderous autocrat in the face?

Yeah, I don't think that there's a whole chapter about that now.

He was really big.

I mean, that's my memory of him.

He was really big.

Jay's daughter, Molly Jo, she was about five at the time, but she remembers meeting Idiamin at the pool.

And he had like a real barrel chest, like a big barrel chest.

He had a very like kind of deep booming voice.

I mean, mostly I remember him like laughing and smiling.

He was a very playful guy.

And I think she even did,

you know, one of those pool fights where you go on someone's shoulders.

She went on Idyamine's shoulders.

She was chicken fighting on the shoulders of Idy Amin.

Yes.

And so when Jay Mullen meets him and he's swimming with him and getting to know him a bit, he is supposed to be doing what with regards to this guy.

At first, Idiomin is not really part of his thing.

He's there to spy on Soviets.

So he's teaching at the local university, teaching African history, getting to know people there.

And he's also, in the meantime, he's got some assets, some local people who work in the Russian, in the Soviet embassy, and he's getting them to give him documents.

Seems like when he describes it, it seems like the majority of his spying happened at parties.

It's not easy to meet Russians in Copenhagen or Monte Carlo.

Africa is a neutral area and Russians were going there because they were working for the hearts and minds of the third world.

And Americans were going there because we were working for the hearts and minds of the third world.

You spot, assess, develop, and recruit Russians.

They get drunk together, they party together.

He tries to talk to them and learn as much as he can about them.

In the meantime, they're doing the same with him.

But he finds out as much as he can about them, whether they're cheating on their wives, what they like to drink, what their favorite foods are, where they're from.

And then he sends all that information to the bosses back in D.C.

Yeah, and the bosses back in D.C.

then do what with that information?

They try to determine if these people are turnable, if they can become assets for them.

If they can become double agents on behalf of the United States government.

Exactly.

Yeah, I want to point out that we've talked about swimming so far.

Zero basketball.

And so this is a story about the guy who becomes the double agent CIA secret coach of the Ugandan national basketball team.

How does that end up actually coming to pass?

Well, you know, Jay has a lot of time to fill while he's there.

And so he finds that there's a local basketball court at a YMCA and there's pickup games there.

So he plays there with the students and professors and he ends up refereeing games in various leagues.

And he just gets to know all the people playing basketball around in Kampala.

Yeah, and basketball in Uganda in the early 70s is what kind of a scene?

How popular is it?

How broadly played is it?

There had been no basketball in the country until the 60s.

Some Peace Corps volunteers, some missionaries sort of came and taught at some schools and they taught some of the students.

So the few people who play learned from almost directly from the first sort of pioneers of basketball in the country who were just like, you know, people who were there for a couple of years.

Yeah.

And so Jay Mullen fits into this tradition of like outsider coming in, teaching people how to play basketball.

Sounds like he's refereeing some games.

And how does the Idiomine administration spotlight him as as like,

this needs to be our new head coach?

Well, so Idiamine's really into sports.

He was a champion boxer.

He played rugby.

I used to run 9.8 seconds, 100 yards.

This is with my speed, with my weight of

getting the ball.

And when you tackle me, you can harm yourself.

I think you should know this.

He liked swimming, even though he was really bad at it.

He's just like a big sports guy.

And then he ends up talking to Jay at the pool one day, and he says, I really want to improve the sports in our country.

And eventually, you know, through Jay's basketball refereeing, people know that he knows a little bit about basketball.

He knows how to run plays and stuff.

He knew the basics, at least.

He could dribble.

He would say, like, if he could dribble, therefore he was one of the best basketball players in the country.

Great.

You know, because of all these basketball.

things that he's doing and because a lot of people are leaving the country because of idiomines sort of like takeover a lot of expats are leaving including the ugandan national

national basketball team coach.

He leaves the country because there's just a lot of violence happening in the country at this point.

And so the sports council, Idiamin Sports Council, asks if Jay will coach the Ugandan national basketball team because they have some games coming up.

Right.

And so I have two concerns here on behalf of Jay Mullen.

One is that he hasn't coached basketball before,

which is one immediate concern.

And number two, he's a fking CIA agent.

Yes.

But coach Jay Mullen, his goal, Sean, is what?

Well, his goal as a basketball coach sort of overlaps with his goal as a CIA agent.

It's to defeat the Soviets.

So just to recap here, the autocrat Idy Amin, who is in charge of Uganda, has inadvertently picked a a CIA agent to be the head coach of his national basketball team, a sport that really doesn't exist in a sophisticated way in Uganda at this point.

And so this guy, Jay Mullen, who's the coach and the CIA agent, has refereed games.

He's played at the Why.

What are these players like?

Well, the players come from all different backgrounds.

There's...

Some of them from the university, some of them from the police, some of them from the prison.

There's even like a high school student on the team.

There's only a few people who really know how to play basketball.

And those are the ones who learned from the Peace Corps volunteers during high school.

So one of the best players from one of those schools was Cyrus Mwanga.

He was one of the first basketball players in Uganda, one of the best players.

One day, one of the teachers decided to try this game called basketball.

We didn't have a basketball court at all.

So what they did was to put two posts in the grass in the field just near the assembly hall.

They would play barefoot because it was easier playing on the grass that way and they just didn't have really good sneakers either.

We had to dribble very very quickly because you had to control the ball and be able to move forwards on an even surface.

So we became pretty good at dribbling the ball and jumping as well.

And they would also learn using netball hoops instead of a basketball hoop so there's no backboard.

So their accuracy was really, really good because they had to shoot a switch essentially to make a shot.

I think there were only two basketball courts in the country at the time and put two rings on and started playing basketball.

But in terms of the state of the country, situate us in what Idiome's regime is doing beyond appointing Jay as the head basketball coach.

It's a really tumultuous time for the country.

He's sort of aligning himself with more Eastern countries like the Soviet Union, Libya, Gaddafi.

He's also persecuting rival tribes and sort of keeping power

with mercenaries, essentially.

And there's like, you know, soldiers everywhere.

There's lots of people being kidnapped and disappeared, many of whom have never been found.

Lots of people dying, being tortured.

It even happens like outside the Mullen home.

They can actually hear people being tortured, I think, down the street.

It's a very, very, very scary time.

And Idi Amin, at some point, very, very close to the time that Jay becomes a coach, decides that he wants to kick all people of South Asian descent out of the country.

And he announces this publicly, internationally.

I want to see that the whole Kampala street is not full of Indians.

It must be proper black and administration in those shops is run by the Ugandans.

Would you like to get all Asians out, really, sir?

Yes, they must go to their country.

Even nationals of Uganda.

If they want to go,

they are welcome to go.

What will happen to these people if they don't go by the time limit?

I think they will be sitting like they are sitting on the fire.

I will tell you this.

You just wait after three months.

What will you do to them?

Okay, you will see.

A lot of people from South Asian descent are very prominent in the economy, and he just wants to sort of take their businesses from them and have black Ugandans control those businesses instead, or the government control it.

And so, what is Jay Mullen thinking as he's watching all of this unfold?

He told me that he sort of saw parallels between that and what had happened in Germany, you know, before World War II.

Once he came to power, if he perceived somebody as a threat to himself, he moved against them.

He had his own enemies list and his enemies got killed.

His son goes to a daycare run by an Indian Ugandan woman named Lella Umedli, and he's really worried that her two teenage daughters could get in trouble with this expulsion of Indians from the country.

I spoke with one of those daughters who was only 17 at the time, Munira Spence.

I remember he went on the phone and he called this college in West Virginia, little college.

I didn't know how little.

He called the president and he said, she has to come.

She has to leave now.

And so they accepted me, like on the phone call based on Jay's information.

And literally three days later, I was on the plane leaving the country.

So, Munira,

she ended up finishing school in West Virginia.

She got a master's from Yale.

And then the rest of her family ended up in Canada.

Yeah, I mean, look, the sense I get at this point in the story is that Jay Mullen,

almost shockingly to me, is getting stuff done.

He really, really helped his family.

He really,

they sort of described him as their hero, as someone who likes, you know, saved their lives.

Yeah.

And so to bring it back to the basketball part, in the context of Jay's mission here,

he's supposed to beat the Soviet Union.

And for those who are unfamiliar with the Soviet Union in the midst of the Cold War and where they were as a basketball power relative to Uganda.

Yeah, so the Soviet Union is...

probably the second best basketball country in the world at this point after the U.S.

Right.

And, you know, they're always competing for medals every four years.

And they're sending their sort of their best squad to Uganda, Sesca Moscow, which is still one of the best basketball teams in the world outside of the U.S.

Right.

And Sesca, I mean, this is a militaristic operation, almost.

Not almost, exactly.

It's directly affiliated with the Army at that point.

And the Soviet Union's goal here, again, is to

win hearts and minds by blowing teams out on the basketball court.

Yeah, I guess showing strength.

So they do two sort of early games against the prison guards and the police, and they just whoop their asses.

They're like doing Harlem Globetrider type stuff.

They're throwing Ali Ubes off the backboards and they beat him by, I think, like 60 points each.

And Jay goes to these games to scout for the sort of national team game, and he just hates what he sees.

They're making fools out of the Ugandans.

You know, they throw the ball off the backboard real hard, so they catch it at mid-court,

stuff like that.

Yeah, again, to remind everybody, I suppose, Uganda didn't have backboards for a while, and now they're watching the Soviets throw basketballs off of the backboards and dunking them.

And I thought for a diplomatic endeavor, they just made fools out of Ugandans in front of their countrymen.

I resented that.

I thought that their goodwill tour of Africa was a blatantly political thing, and if I could do anything to subvert it, then I would actually be in a sort of an operationally successful way.

Not just any Soviets.

These are some of the best players in the entire world.

A lot of them have won

Soviet championships.

A lot of them have been on the Olympic team.

Some of the people on this same team aren't there because they're training to play in the Olympics just a few weeks later.

Now the clock shows three seconds.

There is time for the Russians to go to their big man, Alexander Belov.

They're going to try.

Alexander Belov

between two American defenders.

All of a sudden, the basketball game is the CIA versus the Soviets.

And, you know, this is not his job.

His bosses didn't tell him to coach the team.

But he does see an opportunity to subvert the Soviets now that he's coaching against them.

And so, the crash course that Jay now wants to give to his players,

what's their training like?

What's the training that he gives them now as the coach?

Well, he sort of like brings his cia training as limited as was you know to the to the practices to the trainings they have uh two or three practices a day for about 10 days training for this game against the soviets against sesca um and he uh he teaches them a lot of things but one of the things he really teaches them is how to foul really hard cyrus one of the players told me all about that we needed to do some special training So we did quite a few sessions where you learned how to cripple your opponent without the referencing what you do, which was was different from our usual training, which was just to get on and have a bit of fun.

And also knew how to outjump people that are taller than you so that at least you can give them a good game.

And so the big game.

The big game arrives and the pomp and circumstance, the ceremony around this.

What was that like?

Paint that picture for us.

It's kind of a crazy thing.

There's only like one, really one basketball stadium in the whole country.

And it's big.

It's thousands of people being there.

And

Jay knew that all the Soviets in the country would be there to watch their local team.

So he wanted to make sure that the Ugandans had a big support system, too.

So he hired a guy with a flatbed truck to bring in students from the university to make sure there was a big crowd.

And they, of course, brought drums.

They were banging drums throughout.

And they're echoing throughout this stadium, which is kind of like an airplane hangar.

Nancy Jo, Jay's wife, she was there for the game, and she said it was just an unbelievable atmosphere, super, super loud.

You just felt it all the way through the walls walls and everything.

It was physically amazing how it went through you.

When those drums started, you heard them and you felt them in your entire body.

It honestly sounds like an amazing atmosphere for a basketball game.

But it was supposed to be an exhibition, as another movie about the Cold War once said.

Yeah, so it is an exhibition, but it's a very big deal.

Like a lot of the leadership of the Uganda is there.

All the Soviets in the country are there.

It's very formal.

There's an opening ceremony where they play the national anthem of the two teams, including the Soviet national anthem.

And there's even like a part where they like give the coaches a hammer and sickle badge.

So Jay, this undercover CIA agent, has a hammer and sickle pinned on him during the Cold War as he's spying on the Soviets.

It's kind of an amazing,

amazing scene.

And when Jay Mullen zooms in and sees the players that he's going to have to defeat, that his squad is going to have to beat here,

who does he see?

What does he see?

Well, he sees some of the greatest players in the history of Russia.

Like, you know,

European champions, Russian champions, Soviet champions.

And then he sees this one guy who just like towers above them all, who towers above everybody in the stadium.

And his name was Viktor Petrokov, and he was just enormous.

He was known as an enforcer, not like the most skilled guy, but one of those guys who just bully other players and that you always want on your side.

Kind of looked like an incredible Hulk at 7'5 or something like that.

That's about how big he was.

I can remember the first time Cyrus saw him on the look on his face when he turned around and looked at the rest of us.

He thought, God, we got to try to guard that guy.

In other words, yeah, good luck, Cyrus.

Good luck handling the Hulk.

They just immediately looked at them and just like, we can't compete with that.

There's no way they look organized.

We're not organized.

You know, it was just, it just seemed like an impossible task, even to play them, much less beat them.

Yeah, it looked like a study in what happens when there is central planning a government program to create a sports team that is designed to be exported around to destroy other countries.

And when this game begins, when the ball is tipped,

what does the blowout look like?

I mean, it's unexpected.

It starts off differently.

Jay's training actually works at first.

In the first 10-15 minutes, we were just playing amazing basketball.

And these Russians didn't have a clue what had happened because they thought it was just going to be a walkover.

And everybody shouted and, you know, screamed and screamed.

The players are shooting well.

They're really frustrating the Russians with their style of play, with their defense, which Jay helped organize.

And there's sort of like the game plan is working at first, shockingly.

We got ahead of them.

I think it was 15 to 11.

And I thought, God damn, we might win this thing.

But in the second quarter, sort of the overwhelming skill and size of Sesca takes over of the Soviets, and the Russians are winning by 12 at halftime.

And so halftime,

what do you do?

What's the pep talk here?

Well, I think at that point, Jay realizes that there's just no way they can win skill-wise or athletic-wise.

They're just so outmanned by the Sesca team.

And so that's when he starts using the subterfuge tactics.

He tells the players, start fouling and foul rough.

Get them pissed off.

And he thinks maybe that can help.

Yeah.

Subterfuge is a funny euphemism for just a bunch of flagrant fouls.

Essentially.

Yeah.

So they start trying to piss off the Russian players, pushing them over, knocking them over, being super, super aggressive.

And the Russians who kind of think it's just an exhibition, they're just here to mess around and show off.

They realize that they don't want to be pushed around either.

So they start pushing back.

And there's technical fouls called.

Two of the Russians are kicked out of the game.

An exhibition game, of all things.

It becomes really, really rough.

Jay and the opposing Soviet coach start yelling at each other, even though they can't speak each other's languages.

And he said, this is not basketball.

And

by this time, I was a little miffed at them, the way they were nogging around.

I said, you're telling me that after what you're doing to us?

There's a translator in between, but they're just sort of screaming, this isn't basketball.

This isn't basketball.

Them yelling, this is not basketball at each other in different languages, feels like an appropriate, almost on-the-nose metaphor for the way, in fact, this is not basketball.

It's geopolitics.

The entire thing has been theater.

But in this case, the basketball is quite real to them to the point where the Soviet Union's response now strategically is to do what?

They're like, let's not mess around anymore.

And so they put in the incredible Hulk.

They put in the Russian Hulk, Viktor Petrokov, who is just like so much.

bigger than any other player.

He's in for a few plays and then all of a sudden he gets a breakaway and he's ahead of everybody.

There's no Uganda players with him, and someone throws him an oop.

He catches the ball above the rim, and he slams it so hard that the rim breaks, and the whole stadium goes quiet.

But what they realize pretty quickly is that there's no other rims.

They have no replacement rim.

In the country.

In the country.

There's no other rim.

And so the game ends prematurely before the end of the game.

That's the conclusion of Jay Mullen's big coaching adventure.

And this feels like what to him at this point.

Well, it feels, I think, like an unbridled victory.

I think he feels like he won.

The final score is a little bit unclear, and his team was definitely down.

But he feels like he won.

He turned this Goodwill Russian game,

trying to win the hearts and minds of Ugandans into a brawl.

And a brawl that didn't even finish.

Right.

A brawl that he didn't technically lose.

And so the aftermath of this game, the aftermath of Jay Mullen's time in Uganda.

How long is he there for after that non-loss that he won?

He's only there until 1973, just about another year.

The Idiomian regime becomes more and more repressive.

So even a lot of the players leave.

Most of the players leave the country.

Anyone who can does.

Cyrus goes to the UK.

One of his friends goes to the UK as well.

Another one goes to the Soviet Union.

And Jay sees his name in the newspaper one day in 1973.

And it's sort of implying that he might actually be like conspiring against the government.

He's not really sure how this has happened because his cover has never been blown.

But it scares him enough that he's like, I got to get out of here.

So him and his family have, they all leave.

And so when Jay Mullen finally gets back to the United States, States, back home, to the country where he was a hippie protester before he became all of the, all the stuff we've been describing,

what does the CIA want from him at this point?

They don't want much.

They just want him to keep his mouth shut about what he's been doing in Uganda because it was a secret.

It was undercover.

And does Jay Mullen comply?

He does not.

He runs for a state senate position.

And during the primary, his opponent somehow finds out that he'd been working for the CIA.

And Jay sort of wants to get ahead of the story.

And he writes this long 20,000-word tell-all about his time in Uganda.

Right, because Democratic candidate for state senate, Jay Mullen being secret double agent.

Not the greatest

political turn of events.

It's not.

And he lost.

He lost in the primary.

And so now we're finally back around to how we started this show with the game show, with the contest where Jay Mullen actually did win something.

How did Jay wind up on to tell the truth, this televised game show?

Well, when Jay wrote this tell-all that he published in Oregon magazine, the CIA did not like it.

They didn't want him telling about his time as a spy in Uganda.

And so they tried to cancel to censor the story completely.

But Jay and his editor fought back and they ended up just censoring 28 words.

But all of this got a lot of press.

The New York Times covered it.

The Washington Post covered it.

And he became like a, he had 15 minutes of fame,

became a minor celebrity.

Right.

And so he got asked to come on a few talk shows.

The ballots are all marked.

Now we're going to find out who the real ex-CIA agent in Edi Amins, Uganda really is.

Well, the real, Jay Mullen, please stand up.

So this First Amendment battle winds up with Jay

winning how much at the end of that episode of Tell the Truth?

100 bucks.

He fooled one person, one of the judges, into thinking he was not the CIA agent, which feels like an indictment of Jay on some level as a CIA agent, incidentally.

Exactly.

And so, what becomes of Jay Mullen after that?

After he disappears from television in that way, where does he go?

What happens to him?

So, he goes back to doing what his cover was.

He goes and becomes a history professor in Southern Oregon University.

He lives like a fairly boring life, and he once told me that he didn't care if the rest of his life was boring because his time in the CIA was so exciting.

He could be perfectly happy having a boring life from then on.

So this is where I should tell you that Jay Mullen did live a perfectly happy and perfectly boring life at his home in Oregon until 2016,

when Jay Mullin died of a heart attack at age 77.

And for the record here, I did not intend for the end of this episode to be an obituary.

What I found out is that something Nancy Joe said about her late husband, a compliment she almost casually paid him, still sticks with me today.

He was himself always.

I also think

that it was not hard to be married to him at all, and I miss him terribly.

He was himself

always.

I mean, on some level, this does feel like a

logical fallacy.

right?

Because Jay was a teacher and a spy and a coach and an author and a failed politician and

contestant number one on to tell the truth.

I should say that Ryan Cortez unfortunately was correct in his CIA profiling.

But him being himself always through all of that,

it also feels like the single best tribute in a real way to Jay's actual trajectory as a person.

I mean, Jay Mullen was, he he was a lot of different things to a lot of different people and a lot of different things at different times that are seemingly contradictory, but aren't really if you ever got to meet him.

If you did meet him, you could see how he could be a basketball coach and a CIA agent and a history professor and a beloved family man and someone who protested the Vietnam War, but then still joined the CIA.

He's just like...

you know, a very, very different kind of person.

But you could see that he enjoyed doing all those things.

And so, what I wanted to do at the very end here is just give you one more thing to enjoy.

Something Jay's daughter had shared with Sean, actually, in compact disc form.

And it just feels to me like one last bit of proof, baby, that Jay and Nancy Joe felt the exact same way about each other,

and that the real Jay Mullen really did love to sing.

simposible,

misiello conseparado

conseperado

vivir.

Yours till the stars lose their glory.

Yours till the birds cease to sing.

Yours till the end of life's story.

This pledge to you, dear,

I bring

yours till the gray of December

here or on far distant shores.

I've never loved anyone the way I love you.

How could I,

when I was born to be

just your.

For more reporting by Sean Raviv on the life story of Jay Mullen, I greatly encourage you to head over to our friends at Swartz Explains the World.

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark media production.

And I'll talk to you next time.