Possible Remains of U.S. Troops, Turned Over by North Korea, Are Sent for Analysis

Two Air Force cargo planes left South Korea for Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii on Wednesday carrying 55 flag-draped crates that are thought to contain the remains of U.S. troops lost during the Korean War.

The bones, which were turned over by the North Korean government after a meeting in June between President Donald Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, are bound for a forensic laboratory run by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Honolulu, for testing that may finally offer answers to families that have been waiting for 65 years or more.

“I was a kid who would run to the phone and the mailbox every day, hoping there was some news about my dad — it never came,” said John Zimmerlee, 69, whose father was a navigator in a B-26 bomber that was shot down over Korea in 1952.

But if past efforts to identify remains returned by the secretive dictatorship are any indication, experts say, it will be no simple task to put names to any of the latest batch, and the job may never be entirely completed.

To start with, it is unlikely that the 55 crates — the most in a single release from North Korea since just after the fighting ended — contain the remains of just 55 men. Bones from several bodies have often been jumbled together: The total of 208 caskets delivered in the 1990s turned out to include remains from at least 400 people.

“I was there when they opened one of the crates that the North Koreans said held one soldier and his identification card,” said Paul Cole, a former researcher for the RAND Corp. who wrote a series of government reports on the locations of Korean War dead. “It turned out to be a partial skull, five femurs, and a cheap wallet calendar.”

Many of the remains returned in past releases showed signs that they had been out of the ground a long time and had been stored in what Cole’s research suggested was an abandoned mine.

Complicating things further, the intermingled bones have often been handed over without any personal effects that might have been found with them or any explanation of where they were found — erasing some of the primary clues the agency uses for identification.

As a result, only 181 of the roughly 450 sets of remains returned by North Korea in past years have ever been identified, and many of them were not Americans. The rest sit in storage.

Officials at the accounting agency said on Wednesday that the new batch of remains appeared to be in a similar state of disarray.

Still, Trump thanked Kim early Thursday for “starting the process of sending home the remains.”

During a thaw in relations between 1996 and 2005, North Korea allowed teams of U.S. experts, assisted by local workers, to excavate 33 sites in the North, where they recovered 229 sets of remains. But in some cases, the North Koreans had salted the sites with bones from distant graveyards. A decade later, one-third of the remains recovered in those digs have yet to be identified.

In some instances, bones turned over by North Korea have not even been human, as the family of one British fighter pilot learned when DNA tests showed that the remains returned to them were animal bones.

“I don’t know if it’s incompetence or intentional deception,” Cole said. “But there is no evidence that North Korea has ever accurately identified the remains of any American service member missing from the Korean War.”

Dr. John Byrd, the agency’s laboratory director, said at a news conference Tuesday that in a quick forensic review, the remains in the 55 latest caskets appeared to be consistent with Korean War remains and “are likely to be American remains.”

Byrd said the shipment also included boots, canteens and other military equipment, as well as a single dog tag. The military said it had notified the family of the man whose dog tag was returned, but did not release the name.

After the fighting in Korea ended in 1953, the U.S. military gathered thousands of battlefield records and personal accounts from troops to pinpoint the locations of battles, temporary cemeteries and prisoner-of-war camps in the North, so that one day the dead could be collected. The accounting agency hopes that a thaw in relations will once again allow its archaeology teams to excavate remains in the North in a way that will make identifying them more straightforward.

Kelly McKeague, the director of the agency, said in an interview that he remained optimistic, even after a report this week suggesting that North Korea is continuing to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“We look at this as a positive first step, one we hope to build on,” McKeague said of the delivery of remains. “Despite the fact that generations have passed on, that void in heart and mind is something that needs to be filled.” Families of missing troops have overwhelmingly welcomed the return of remains from North Korea. At the same time, some of them fault the accounting agency for not doing more to identify the large number of remains already on home soil.

Nearly 800 are buried a few miles from the accounting agency’s central lab at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, better known as the Punchbowl.

After the war, all unknown remains were sent there. Enlisted personnel making hasty reviews without modern techniques like DNA testing often labeled remains “unidentifiable” that could easily be identified today, Cole said — perhaps 60 percent of the total, an agency study estimated.

“The Punchbowl is our biggest opportunity,” he said, “and every guy you dig up in the Punchbowl is a guy you don’t have to look for in Korea.”