As Idi Amin lay in a coma Wednesday, Medford resident Jay Mullen fondly remembered the day he punched the former Ugandan dictator in the nose.

But Mullen, then a CIA agent serving in Uganda, didn’t fear for his life. Mullen dealt the accidental blow as he and Amin swam in a backstroke competition at a social club swimming pool that both families frequented. A poor swimmer, Amin lost the race but laughed it off, Mullen recalled.

"Everyone thinks ‘You punched Idi Amin in the nose? Why weren’t you killed? How can you have fun with a guy like Idi Amin?’ " Mullen said.

But of course, Amin didn’t know Mullen’s true identity as an American spy. The former dictator presumably never discovered Mullen’s secret and most likely wouldn’t remember him if the two met today, Mullen said.

Advertisement

Amin — believed to be 80 years old — remained in coma Wednesday at a hospital in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, where he and relatives have lived for years in exile, according to newspaper reports. Amin reportedly has been comatose since Friday when he was admitted for high blood pressure.

Mullen witnessed Amin’s rise to power and bloody rule while living in Uganda between 1971 and 1973. Mullen said he would be the first to proclaim Amin a brutal tyrant. But the dictator, who was blamed for torturing and murdering more than 200,000 of his citizens, also had a benign sense of fun, Mullen said, citing Amin’s efforts to strike down colonial African stereotypes with humor.

In a good-natured role reversal, Amin solicited several white rugby players to carry him through the streets in a sedan chair, mocking social conventions of the colonial era.

"If you ever saw the picture of it, (the white men) thought it was hilarious," Mullen said.

Amin refused British foreign aid after he took power in Uganda, a former colony. But as the British pound lost value during the early 1970s, Amin urged Ugandans to bring bananas to the capital for the hungry British. Amin proceeded to pile pounds and pounds of bananas around a Union Jack, erected to commemorate Britain’s colonization of Uganda, Mullen said.

Mullen profiled Amin in a humorous account of his CIA service in Uganda, titled "I was Idi Amin’s Basketball Czar." The memoir was printed in a 1979 edition of Oregon Magazine after a federal court battle with the CIA over a 16-word sentence that contained operational details of the intelligence agency.

While living in Uganda with his wife and three children, Mullen posed as a university professor and also coached Uganda’s national basketball team. Mullen’s children were ignorant of their father’s spy activities. But they now chuckle that they played with the brutal dictator Idi Amin on outings to the swimming pool, Mullen said.

"He was kind of a big kid himself," Mullen said. "He liked to throw my kids around (in the pool).

"It’s kind of like, ‘Would you let your kids play with a cobra?’ "

Mullen, 63, retired from the CIA in 1977 but disclosed his former life as a spy one year later during an unsuccessful bid for the state Senate against Sen. Lenn Hannon of Ashland. A former president of the Democratic Central Committee of Jackson County, Mullen is a full-time history professor at Southern Oregon University. His students spent part of spring quarter discussing Idi Amin.

Reach reporter Sarah Lemon at 776-4487, or e-mail slemon@mailtribune.com