US ready to search North Korea for war dead if Trump-Kim diplomacy advances

The Pentagon agency responsible for recovering America’s war dead is prepared to send teams back into North Korea for the first time in two decades if renewed diplomacy between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un opens the door.

“We’ve offered that to the White House; we are ready,” Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency director Kelly McKeague said Monday during a webinar hosted by The National Committee on North Korea.

About 5,300 of the roughly 7,400 Americans still missing from the Korean War are believed to be in North Korea, McKeague said.

DPAA wants Pyongyang to turn over remains already in its possession and allow American recovery teams to resume field operations similar to those carried out between 1995 and 2005, he said.

The possibility comes as Trump signals interest in renewing face-to-face talks with Kim.

The president told reporters Aug. 19 that he expects to meet with the North Korean leader later this year, although no summit has been announced. The two leaders met three times during Trump’s first term, in Singapore, Vietnam and within the Joint Security Area of the Demilitarized Zone.

On Aug. 16, Trump ordered the Pentagon to substantially reduce U.S. participation in joint military exercise with South Korea. Ulchi Freedom Shield — large-scale training that kicked off Aug. 17 — ended after five of 11 scheduled days.

Trump described the exercises on social media as sending a “totally inappropriate and hostile signal” to the North.

The first-term meetings were high in diplomatic drama but ultimately failed to deliver progress in dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and recovery and repatriation of troops still missing from the Korean War.

McKeague said Monday that the agency’s position in any such negotiations would be similar to those in talks during the first summits.

At that time, DPAA told the White House its top priorities were for North Korea to turn over remains it was holding and to resume joint field missions like those conducted for roughly a decade before ending in 2005, McKeague said.

Those missions ultimately led to the identification of about 300 U.S. service members, he said.

McKeague said he envisions negotiating a future recovery program similar to one in place from 1995 to 2005 because “North Koreans are comfortable with it.”

As it previously did, the program would focus on two sites, Unsan and Chosin, and operate four times a year for 42-day periods, he said.

Unsan county was the site of intense battles early in the war that spanned June 1950 to July 1953 and ended with an armistice agreement but no permanent treaty.

More than 1,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines were killed during a brutal winter campaign in late 1950 around the Chosin Reservoir following a massive counteroffensive by China.

Roughly 8,100 American and 100,000 South Korean troops were missing at the end of the war, McKeague said.

Last month, DPAA announced it had made its 800th identification of American remains from the war.

McKeague said a humanitarian effort to recover remains — apart from any other diplomatic agreements — could raise North Korea “in the eyes of the world.”

Such a cooperative mission would be a diplomatic opportunity for the U.S., China and a divided Korean Peninsula to open communication channels and build trust “without any pretensions of or expectations of anything much more beyond that.”