The Trump administration is celebrating the return of the remains of Americans killed during the Korean War as a sign that its diplomacy with North Korea works. Speaking Friday at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said, “The remains were turned over … as initiated during the summit that President Trump had with Chairman Kim [Jong Un],” Mattis said, adding, “I think when you have that sort of communication going on it sets a positive environment and tone for other things in terms of international diplomacy. This humanitarian act is a step in the right direction.”
But is it possible that the Trump administration is getting played? Let’s put aside the fact that North Korea has yet to answer questions about the fates of American servicemen missing in action who were confirmed alive in North Korea, some of whom may have been transferred to the Soviet Union or to China. Both North Korea and China have scammed previous U.S. administrations. In 2008, under the George W. Bush administration, the Pentagon paid more than $100,000 in U.S. taxpayer money for the Chinese government’s archival assistance; China took the money but then refused to make the identified files accessible. Russia, likewise, refuses to release its KGB/GRU files.
Alas, the Obama team did little better. On June 19, 2015, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter appointed Lt. Gen. Michael Linnington to lead the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the organization in charge of accounting for and returning the remains of lost servicemen. Linnington promised POW/MIA families he would head the organization for a decade; after about a year, he resigned to take a better offer. That may be just as well. His meetings with the families of the Korean War missing appear to have been more about feigning concern rather than any sincere effort to resolve their cases. Indeed, demonstrating the government’s tendency to confuse spending with achievement, the DPAA sought to again sign an agreement with the Peoples’ Liberation Army Archives Department to pay China for its assistance in resolving the case of downed Korean War-era aircraft in Liaoning.
To the present: Neither Trump nor Mattis appear to ask tough questions about the “Ashley Five” who were confirmed alive but never recovered. The Pentagon still lists them as Missing in Action, despite declassified military intelligence records showing they were confirmed POWs. And, as Mark Sauter and John Zimmerlee, the two most important historians of the Korean War POW crisis discussed in their book American Trophies, the North Korea regime has long engaged in deception, often planting bodies in areas to be searched in order to claim cooperation. Subsequent examination, however, showed one battlefield remain actually had previously had its skull glued back together and another one had been used as a lab skeleton.
While North Korea may says the remains it returned this week were “discovered” by farmers, U.S. intelligence has reported that Pyongyang has warehoused perhaps hundreds of U.S. remains to slowly sell back to Washington for cash. In other cases, Pyongyang has returned mingled and misidentified remains and, in the case of case of a non-American but allied POW/MIA, the bones returned by North Korea turned out to be animal remains.
As Sauter and Zimmerlee write:
If North Korea truly returns U.S. POW/MIAs and accounts truthfully about those recovered alive, that would be good news. But Pyongyang regularly takes advantage of the fact that American administrations tend not to have institutional memory about what transpired before. Team Obama repeated the Bush administration’s mistakes, and it may soon transpire that Trump and Mattis have fallen for the same ploys in which North Korea has previously engaged. Alas, while Trump may praise the art of the deal, and Mattis may believe he has accomplished that in which his predecessors have failed, the reality is North Korea may be laughing its way to bank.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
