Milan C. Miskovsky, 83; lawyer had worked for CIA

WASHINGTON - Milan C. "Mike" Miskovsky, 83, a onetime CIA lawyer who quietly worked behind the scenes in high-profile hostage negotiations and also investigated the causes of racial turmoil in the 1960s, died Thursday of lung cancer at his home in Washington.

Mr. Miskovsky's varied career began when he was a forester in the Western United States and took him to flash points of the Cold War and civil rights movement.

He negotiated a prisoner exchange that freed U-2 spy-plane pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962 - in exchange for a Soviet spy - and helped arrange the release of nearly 1,200 Cuban Americans captured during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, in exchange for $50 million in baby food, pharmaceuticals and humanitarian aid.

He later directed an inquiry into the underlying causes of racial unrest for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission.

As a CIA officer, Mr. Miskovsky was careful not to deal directly with Soviet representatives on gaining Powers' freedom, so he hired New York lawyer James Donovan to handle face-to-face talks.

In exchange, a British-born Soviet spy known as Rudolf Abel, convicted of espionage in New York in 1957, walked across Berlin's Glienicke Bridge from the other direction, passing Powers in the middle.

Mr. Miskovsky, whose role in the Cuba negotiations has been documented in several histories of the Cold War, worked closely with U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and, once again, with Donovan, to arrange the Bay of Pigs prisoners' release.

In 1967, after riots devastated several U.S. cities, President Lyndon B. Johnson convened a commission led by the Democratic governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner Jr., to examine the unrest's causes.

Mr. Miskovsky, then working at the Treasury Department, directed the commission's investigation.

When the Kerner Commission's report was released in 1968, its findings were unambiguous: "This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."

Milan Carl Miskovsky was born May 11, 1926, in Chicago and graduated from the University of Michigan, where he also received a master's degree in forestry in 1949. He spent two years with the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho, Montana and Washington state before being transferred to the District of Columbia in 1951.

He was quickly hired by the CIA as an analyst of forestry resources in the Eastern Bloc. After graduating from George Washington University law school in 1956, he joined the CIA's legal office.