Milan “Mike’’ Miskovsky, 83; helped resolve hostage cases
WASHINGTON - Milan C. “Mike’’ Miskovsky, 83, a onetime CIA lawyer who 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 and helped arrange the release of Cuban-Americans captured during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. He directed an inquiry into the underlying causes of racial unrest for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission.
On May 1, 1960, Powers’s high-altitude U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. He ejected from the aircraft and was captured on the ground. After recovering cameras and film from the crash site, Soviet authorities interrogated Powers for several months before sentencing him to 10 years in prison for espionage.
As a CIA officer, Mr. Miskovsky was careful not to deal directly with Soviet representatives, so he hired New York lawyer James Donovan to handle face-to-face negotiations. Powers was released in dramatic fashion on Feb. 10, 1962, when he walked across Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge and met US officials on the other side.
In exchange, a British-born Soviet spy known as Rudolf Abel, who had been convicted of espionage in New York in 1957, walked across the bridge from the other direction, passing Powers in the middle. Reporters dubbed the Glienicke the “Bridge of Spies.’’
In April 1961, after more than a year of planning by the CIA, a 1,400-man force of Cuban-American exiles called Brigade 2506 launched an ill-fated invasion of their homeland, with the intent of unseating Fidel Castro. They landed at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern coast but were quickly routed by the Cuban military. More than 100 members of Brigade 2506 were killed, and nearly 1,200 were captured.
Mr. Miskovsky, whose role in the negotiations has been documented in several histories of the Cold War, worked closely with US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and, once again, with Donovan, to arrange release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. In return for $50 million in baby food, pharmaceuticals, and humanitarian aid, the captives were set free in December 1962.
In 1967, after riots devastated several US cities, President Lyndon B. Johnson convened a commission led by the Democratic governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner Jr., to examine the causes of social unrest. Mr. Miskovsky, then working at the Treasury Department, directed the commission’s investigation, interviewing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders.
When the Kerner Commission’s report was released in 1968, its findings were unambiguous: “We have undertaken a broad range of studies and investigations. We have visited the riot cities; we have heard many witnesses; we have sought the counsel of experts across the country.
“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 US 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, eventually becoming the agency’s assistant general counsel.
He left the CIA in 1964 and worked at the Federal Maritime Commission and Treasury Department before becoming director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which provides legal help to victims of civil rights abuses. After a stint in private practice, he was general counsel to the Federal Home Loan Bank Board during the Carter administration.
From 1981 until his retirement in 2003, he was in private practice, most recently at Kirkland & Ellis, where he specialized in environmental and energy law.
Mr. Miskovsky, who attended Mass every day, helped establish the Archdiocesan Legal Network, providing free legal services to the poor in the Washington Archdiocese. He was chairman of the boards of Gonzaga College High School and Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center and a member of the board of Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School.
His wife of 52 years, Anne Grogan Miskovsky, died in 2004.
Mr. Miskovsky leaves six children, a brother, a sister, 14 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
He retained a lifelong interest in woodlands and practiced sustainable techniques on timberland he owned in Maine.