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The theory that usually stands up to the most objective scrutiny is that Pearl Harbor, with a little help from what would be judged the failure to read signals that now seem obvious, was an ambush of epic proportions on a nation more engaged in protecting its side of the Atlantic, where warships were roiling the waters far more violently.

''If you want to look at it in a macro context, the Japanese had to attack Pearl Harbor because they had to protect their open flank. They wanted to attack the Philippines and Southeast Asia,'' says Drea, a former US Air Force intelligence officer. ''There is no question a lot of mistakes were made,'' he says, but intentionally sacrificing US lives wasn't one of them.

The other argument lingers. ''Day of Deceit,'' a 1999 book by journalist Robert Stinnett, claimed that Roosevelt didn't just know about the attack in advance, but had a plan for provoking it. Even the Web site of Scholastic, the nation's leading school-book supplier, has a page devoted to Pearl Harbor in which the only survivor quoted states without qualification that Roosevelt had word of the installation's attack but failed to act on it.

''I would be willing to bet my bottom buck that there was a deliberate attempt in Washington to forget the warnings out of Honolulu,'' says Edwin J. Putzell Jr., former executive officer to General Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence agency created during World War II.

Putzell says that Roosevelt probably never meant for Pearl Harbor's destruction and the loss of life of American military personnel, but he says it's logical that the Oval Office took the first hit to get Americans behind the war effort.

Rather than argue the issue point by point, which could fill filmmaker Oliver Stone's oeuvre for a few decades, Larry Jewell, a 20-year US Navy veteran, has created a Web site that includes 25,000 primary resource documents devoted to Pearl Harbor and related issues, including 5,000 pages from the 1946 Congressional investigation of the attack.

Why? To dare people to find evidence that Pearl Harbor was a conspiracy. ''It's very simple: I'm tired of history by sound bite,'' says Jewell, of Lafayette, Ind. ''I do entire documents. Whenever I see an ellipsis I know something has been taken out.'' Referring somebody to Jewell's site (www.ibiblio.org/pha) is usually enough to end an argument. ''We're talking Elvis lives, Sasquatch, that kind of thing,'' he says.

Every wave of declassified intelligence records usually triggers books which often make a point that could easily be met with a counterpoint using exactly the same material. Malcolm Lovell's memos are just part of the 3 million records that the US intelligence community has declassified since 1999, when President Clinton ordered the CIA to release any records that may shed light on the last world war.

The yellowed pages from the past are rich with the sort of data the CIA has in the past refused to yield: the names of sources, suspects, and spies and the mechanics of missions both mundane and ambitious, successful and tragic, and sometimes hilariously inept. As a panorama of field reports of a war being waged by fallible humans racing against time, the data show just how sloppy the accumulation of what will become grist for historic interpretation can be, how hindsight can strain to create a pat rationale for what were mostly rash or reflexive reactions to unpredictable events.