North Korea’s tactics of delaying and deceiving have been central to its diplomacy for decades, including charges of trying to pass off animal bones as war remains in 2011.
Forensic anthropologists with the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency will now weigh whether the North’s latest concession to President Trump this week of returning U.S. service members’ remains from the Korean War is what it appears to be.
The agency says the regime’s record on the most recent returns of U.S. troops is good. In 2007, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Anthony Principi negotiated the North’s handover of six boxes of remains.
“Out of those six boxes, seven identifications have been made,” said Kelly McKeague, DPAA director.
So far, the small team of DPAA scientists is certain that human — and likely American — bones are contained in the 55 cases turned over by North Korea and repatriated to Hawaii this week. About 5,300 Americans are estimated to still be missing in North Korea 75 years after the war ended in an armistice.
The U.K. had a different experience in 2011, when it was seeking to thaw relations with the North. As part of the diplomacy effort, the regime turned over what it said were the remains of a British fighter pilot who was shot down during the Korean War, which raged on the peninsula from 1950 to 1953.
Lab tests showed that the remains were actually animal bones, according to a memoir of a high-level North Korean defector published in March. The U.K. government reportedly kept the embarrassing revelation quiet for years.
The DPAA initial assessment of the 55 containers was cursory and done in the field before the remains were flown out of South Korea. Actual identification of all the remains could take months or years of forensic work, all while the Trump administration is negotiating with the North over its burgeoning intercontinental nuclear missile program.
Trump and the Pentagon have pointed to the return of remains as an initial win in the negotiations aimed at convincing North Korea to abandon its nuclear arsenal. The North has shown few other signs it may give up the weapons following Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June.
The opinion that Americans are among the remains is based partly on skeletal morphology, or the shape and size of the bones, said John Byrd, a chief scientist at the DPAA. The idea is that people of European descent have varying bone structures from Asians and that Western troops lost in the war were overwhelmingly American.
“There is a range of completeness and a range in the state of preservation of the remains in all of these 55 boxes. In some cases, there are complete, or near complete, bones that, in size and shape, I feel confident are quite likely American,” Byrd said. “And then, in other cases, there are bones that are very badly preserved, and I can’t say that it’s an American to the exclusion of anyone else, but there’s no reason to doubt it could be an American given the context.”
The turnover included little information on the remains, but each box came with a short description about the potential locations where they were found. Along with the bone fragments, the North also provided several boxes of boots, canteens, buttons, and uniform buckles.
One U.S. dog tag was included, and the unidentified family of that service member was notified and given a realistic appraisal that their lost loved one might or might not be identified by the remains, Byrd said.
The turnover of seven sets of remains negotiated by Richardson and Principi in 2007 included three dog tags used for identification.
The DPAA will now start DNA testing of the bone fragments in the coming weeks and try to match the results with a pool of 8,000 family member donors of Korean War missing.
“I can’t tell you that we could get expect an easy identification in a week, nor can I tell you that they will all be done in five years,” Byrd said.
