Rising expectations that the Pyongyang regime will hand over the remains of some of the American dead from the Korean war have reawakened cautious hope among surviving relatives.

Reports say the bones of up to 250 soldiers, marines and airmen are due to be handed over at a South Korean airbase, in line with a pledge from the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, to Donald Trump at their summit in Singapore on 12 June.

In a speech at a rally in Minnesota on Tuesday night, Trump claimed the bodies of 200 servicemen had already returned, saying: “We got back our great fallen heroes, the remains sent back today, already 200 got sent back.” There has been no confirmation from the White House or any government agency that this repatriation has occurred.

Trump presented Kim’s offer as an unprecedented breakthrough but repatriation of remains has been happening on and off since 1990. There are 7,700 US troops still missing from the conflict – 5,300 of them lost in North Korea – and only 459 bodies have been identified from repatriated remains so far.

Relatives and descendants of the Korean war dead have learned to be patient and sceptical about promises that they will finally be able to bury the long-lost bodies.

John Zimmerlee was three when his father’s plane went down over North Korea in March 1952, and he was six when he listened to US army officers swear to his mother that they were actively looking for clues.

“I was the one who went to the mailbox every day to see if there was any news,” Zimerlee said. He is now 69, and still waiting. “It is a big void in my life that never goes away.”

Only those who experience it know what it’s like. Rick Downes, son of missing serviceman

The sense of uncertainty has only been heightened by his own research, which turned up reports that some of the crew members of his father’s plane may have been seen alive in North Korea after it crashed, raising the prospect his father, also named John, could have been taken prisoner.

Rick Downes’ father, Hal, went missing in January 1952 when his B26 bomber was shot down, and the pursuit of information about his fate has also lasted a lifetime.

“This is something that only those who experience it know what it’s like,” Downes said. “The lack of closure creates a wound that never heals. It’s just there, and it goes on for generations.”

He is the president of a coalition of families of Korean and cold war prisoners of war (POWs) and soldiers missing in action (MIAs), but was taken by surprise by talk of an imminent handover of remains.

This week, he emailed his contacts at the Defence POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), which is tasked with recovering the remains of the war dead, but they had not been informed of what appears to have been a hastily arranged deal in Singapore. In his joint statement with Trump, Kim offered the immediate delivery of remains which the regime says it has identified as American in recent years.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, and secretary of state Madeleine Albright meet in Pyongyang in 2000, during a ‘thaw’ between the countries. Photograph: David Guttenfelder/AP

Cooperative efforts to repatriate the bodies of US troops from North Korea date back to 1996, two years after the Bill Clinton administration negotiated the Agreed Framework, a denuclearisation deal with Pyongyang. Ever since, repatriation has been a hostage to fortune in bilateral relations, and exploited as a source of cash by the Korean People’s Army (KPA).

The hundred billion-dollar question

“Invariably they wanted to discuss price tags at the outset. Someone at one of the first meetings said the work would cost a hundred billion dollars,” said Kurt Campbell, who led the first delegation to Pyongyang to discuss repatriation in 1996.



“We stayed in a guest house with security guards and this magnificent food, when the country was on the verge of the worst famine in its history,” said Campbell, who went on to become assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs.

“We would meet with one or two folks from the foreign ministry and political officers from the military. They would just rail at us about the imperialist war and our negative global role.”

Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un meet in Singapore, where the US president said repatriation was discussed. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP

Then the question of money would be raised. Technically the US could not pay for the remains but could reimburse the KPA for “legitimate costs” associated with the recovery of remains.

“It was like negotiating with the mafia, which they were – a worldwide criminal network,” said Wallace “Chip” Gregson, a retired marine lieutenant general who took part in the early negotiations.

In the ensuing decade there were 33 joint missions across the country, and US officers and forensic scientists brought back 229 caskets of bones and personal effects, from which 153 missing Americans have so far been identified.

North Korea had unilaterally handed over 208 caskets, though many of the bones inside were not US soldiers and some were not even human. From those remains a further 181 of the war dead have been accounted for.

The joint field missions were stopped in 2005

and the only repatriations since then have been seven bodies handed over to the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson in 2007, as a goodwill gesture.

The Americans paid about a million dollars for the bodies in 2007.

People walk through the Korean war veterans memorial in Washington, DC. Photograph: Leah Millis/Reuters

“They told us they had these boxes of bones from their excavations but they had collected them at tremendous cost,” said Victor Cha, a former director of Asian affairs at the national security council who was in Richardson’s delegation. “In theory we were paying for costs incurred, but basically it was a kind of pay-off.”

It is unclear whether money has been a factor in the Singapore deal on repatriation.

A waiting game

After Barack Obama sealed a short-lived agreement with Pyongyang in 2012, there was another attempt to restart repatriation of remains, but US and South Korean military exercises led to the breakdown of both the missile deal and the repatriation effort.

If the repatriation of remains agreed in Singapore goes ahead it will be the first in 11 years. But the families of the dead are not expecting it to lead to quick answers.

The DPAA labs in Hawaii and in Nebraska have limited space and capacity to apply DNA identification techniques, the relatives say. There are still hundreds of bodies repatriated more than 20 years ago that have not yet been identified.

“My concern is that they are not going to have the volume they will need,” said Joan Morris, whose uncle, Lieutenant Robert Schmitt was killed in the battle for Chosin Reservoir in 1950. “They have all these bones they haven’t identified and now they are going to get more bones … They need to hire some more DNA experts and get this over with.”