Roberta Wohlstetter; her book on faulty US analysis before WWII resonates today

LOS ANGELES -- Roberta Wohlstetter, whose prize-winning 1962 study of intelligence failures leading to Japan's 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor has reverberated in national security discussions for decades and influenced the final report of the 9/11 commission, died of complications of pneumonia Jan. 6 in a New York City hospital. She was 94.

Mrs. Wohlstetter was a researcher for Rand Corp. when she wrote "Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision," a classic in its field that explained why the United States and its leaders were caught unawares by the catastrophe that drew the nation into World War II.

Forty years after its publication, the book was cited by the 9/11 commission to draw parallels to the 2001 terrorist strikes, which raised similar questions about military preparedness, intelligence, and politics.

Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often recommended the book -- before and after the 9/11 attacks -- for "laying out the difficulty of sorting through conflicting intelligence reports and coming to judgments about what one ought to do" about them.

She was the widow of Albert Wohlstetter, a specialist on strategic nuclear theory who also worked at Rand from 1951 until his death in 1997.

In a ceremony awarding both Wohlstetters the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985, President Ronald Reagan said that Roberta Wohlstetter's studies raised "essential questions" about terrorism and intelligence that "broke new ground and opened new alternatives for policy makers."

The Rand statement said Mrs. Wohlstetter's work focused on crisis and the "uses and limits of intelligence in decision-making" by political and military leaders.

She was "one of the world's leading scholars on military affairs and foreign policy," especially on issues relating to preparedness and "strategic warning of impending conflict," said James A. Thomson, chief executive of Rand. "Her seminal book on the intelligence failures that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor remains as relevant today as when she published it in 1962."

In that book, Mrs. Wohlstetter argued that despite having broken Japanese diplomatic and naval codes, US analysts had been unable to distinguish signals, or intelligence data that would reveal the enemy plan, from noise, or conflicting and misleading information.

In the months before the Dec. 7, 1941, attack, she wrote, there were numerous false alarms, and American analysts began worrying more about Japan attacking Siberia, the Panama Canal, the Philippines, and the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.

The book drew largely on 39 volumes of congressional hearings on the attack published in 1946. Meticulous in its detail, it offered a convincing argument against simplistic blame-laying, even though, as Mrs. Wohlstetter wrote, "Never before have we had so complete an intelligence picture of the enemy."

The problems included Army-Navy rivalries that hindered communication, a decentralized system of collecting and relaying intelligence, and errors of perception and judgment caused by as simple a phenomenon as wishful thinking.

"After the event, of course, a signal is always clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred," Mrs. Wohlstetter wrote. "But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."

The latter passage was quoted in the 9/11 commission report, which concluded that one of the chief failures leading to the 2001 attacks was that of "imagination." It echoed Mrs. Wohlstetter in asking whether "insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time, given the limits of what people then could reasonably have known or done."

Mrs. Wohlstetter, born in 1912 in Duluth, Minn., was the daughter of Harvard University law professor Edmund M. Morgan, who is credited with streamlining federal civil legal procedures and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

She graduated from Vassar College, earned degrees in psychology at Columbia University and comparative literature at Radcliffe College,and taught at the University of Chicago, Howard University, and Barnard College.

She joined Rand in 1948 and was named woman of the year in 1963 by The Los Angeles Times.

Mrs. Wohlstetter leaves a daughter, Joan, of Manhattan; a brother, Edmund S. Morgan of New Haven, Conn., a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian; and a stepgranddaughter.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this obituary.