“Mazes within mazes,” he said. “People get lost in mazes.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I nodded to keep him going.

“See the movie ‘The Name of the Rose,’ " he suggested. “The blind librarian. There’s a parallel.”

A parallel with what?

“It was life in the notebooks,” he said. “Big, black notebooks. They were three-ring binders, and they looked innocent enough, but those books . . . it was our Bible.”

We sat facing each other in the lounge of a private club in downtown Washington. There was an air of shabby gentility to the place, the residue of better days. Veritas had made anonymity a condition of the meeting, and, except for one waitress, we were alone in the room. I waited for him to explain, although such restraint did not come readily to me.

“There was a paradigm.” Veritas pursed his lips, and made a noise like a buzzer. “They trained you . . . b-z-z . . . they programmed it into you . . . b-z-z … you had to study it like the Catechism . . . b-z-z.”

He intended the odd buzzing noise to mimic a conditioned reflex. I asked cautiously, “Those notebooks, did they actually exist?”

“Three-ring binders,” he said. “They were real. Everything was scripted. The script was etched in stone.”

His use of the word “script” brought the code words and phrases into focus, and I began to understand what he was getting at. Veritas was talking about the tobacco industry’s strategy. Of course, there was a script, I thought to myself. Why hadn’t I seen that earlier?

TOBACCO’S EXPANSIVE POWER

When we began our investigation of tobacco at the Food and Drug Administration, we had no idea of the power wielded by the tobacco companies, but we soon learned why the industry was for decades considered untouchable. Tobacco employed some of the most prestigious law firms in the country and commanded the allegiance of a significant section of the Congress. It also had access to the services of widely admired public figures, ranging from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to Sen. Howard Baker. With its limitless resources and a corporate culture that was aggressively defensive, the industry perceived threats everywhere and responded to them ferociously.

Tobacco also reached out and bought the services of Charlie Edwards, a former commissioner of the FDA and one of my predecessors. He was a man I had respected-someone, ironically enough, who had been influential in my selection as commissioner. But after I began my investigation into the industry, he testified before a Senate committee and tried to discredit me. Later, I discovered he was on retainer from Philip Morris. There was nothing illegal about the transaction. It was his privilege to take the money; it was my privilege to think poorly of it.

I was at a disadvantage with Veritas. Over the years I had spoken with dozens of informants from the tobacco industry, but usually I had been with members of the team I assembled in the early 1990s. The tobacco team’s assignment had been to ask whether nicotine was a drug and thus should be regulated by the FDA. Team members were trained professionals, men like Tom Doyle and Gary Light, with backgrounds at the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Army Criminal Investigative Division. I recruited others who had begun their careers on Capitol Hill and in journalism. Each had years of experience in the art of investigation. They had guided and protected me in the past, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves. But I was no longer FDA commissioner, and now I was on my own. I asked myself how Tom and Gary would have handled this situation.

“Let him talk,” Gary would have said. “Schmooze with him, don’t press him. Keep it light.”

“He’s all wound up, he’s tight. He wants to talk, every informant wants to talk, that’s why he’s here.”

He’s carrying around a load of guilt. You’ve got to let him work through that guilt. Just let him talk.”

I never developed the interviewing skills that Gary and Tom possessed. But I tried to go slowly with Veritas each time we met.

THE NEW PARADIGM

“Tell me about the true believers,” I said to Veritas, referring to the men who made tobacco their livelihood.

“You mean the Southern gentlemen,” he said. “The old-time guys, they were tobacco men, not businessmen. They were part of an agricultural society that saw tobacco as just another farm product. It was a highly profitable product, but it could have been soybeans or cotton as far as they were concerned. Profits were important to these people, but so was the tradition in which they had been raised.”

Veritas continued, “They believed there was a controversy. The true believers were the moral part of the play.”

I looked up from my notepad. I was struck by Veritas’s long, drawn face. He seemed in complete control of himself, sitting utterly still as he spoke. He did not gesture or nod. “By the 1980s the farmers were out and the M.B.A.s were in. The original proprietors were replaced by executives with little or no connection to the land. The lawyers created the paradigm.”

Devised in the 1950s and ’60s, the tobacco industry’s strategy was embodied in a script written by the lawyers. Every tobacco company executive in the public eye was told to learn the script backwards and forwards, no deviation allowed. The basic premise was simple—smoking had not been proved to cause cancer. Not proven, not proven, not proven—this would be stated insistently and repeatedly. Inject a thin wedge of doubt, create controversy, never deviate from the prepared lines. It was a simple plan, and it worked.

“It made us look like horses’ asses,” said Veritas. But the industry never lost a case, and that was all that mattered to them.

Embedded in this defensive strategy to neutralize the cancer issue, however, was a secret that posed as great a danger to the industry: the addictive and pharmacological nature of nicotine. In the 1950s, this had not been considered a factor threatening to the tobacco interests. By the 1970s, the industry had come to recognize that research on nicotine’s pharmacological effects could be useful, but it had to be done covertly. If it were ever discovered that the tobacco companies knew that nicotine was an addictive drug, the FDA might try to regulate cigarettes, and that was what they feared most. Because of this, the script that had been so carefully followed had to be broadened. Industry dogma began to express two fundamentals: that smoking had not been proved to cause cancer and that there was no scientific proof that nicotine was an addictive substance.

“Did we get it right?” I asked Veritas, referring to our investigation, which had led the FDA to assert jurisdiction over the nicotine in tobacco.

Veritas looked nervously around the room. He obviously did not want anyone he knew to see the two of us together. “You hit the bull’s-eye three times,” he said. “You were right to focus on nicotine as an addictive drug. You were right to elevate the discourse to the level of public health. You were right to focus on the addiction of children.”

But being right did not mean we would win.

“You were really true believers,” he added. I nodded, though we had not been true believers at the beginning.

“You became like them,” he said. I started to object, but Veritas explained himself. “You became masters of shaping public opinion.”

There was some truth there. We had focused on collecting evidence of what the companies knew. No one had ever done that before, and, in the end, this evidence molded the public’s view.

“All we did was ask a simple question,” I pointed out, although I knew that was an understatement. None of us had ever done anything else with such intensity. “We asked whether or not nicotine was a drug. That was where the team was focused. Only over time did I realize that this question was aimed at the heart of the industry.”

Veritas nodded. “Frankly, I’m surprised that you didn’t come to see it sooner.”

Of course, I thought, that’s easy to say from your position. Your people created the maze. We had to find our way through it.

CODE-NAME RESEARCH

The network of contacts that Jack Mitchell had carefully cultivated in his years as an investigative journalist and a Senate investigator was paying off. Resumes of industry insiders began to come his way….

“…He was fired soon after arguing that coumarin, a tobacco additive, was toxic and should be removed from all B & W products.”

He had shown me the curriculum vitae of a Ph.D. biochemist who had once been vice president for research at Brown & Williamson. Jack had blacked out the name. He felt a tremendous sense of responsibility to potential informants, and protecting their confidentiality was always his first priority. I was impressed by the credentials of the scientist, but also cautious. We knew almost nothing about the man except what he had told Jack on the telephone—that he had been lured away from the pharmaceutical industry by Brown & Williamson at a salary of $300,000 a year with the assignment to reduce the toxins in cigarettes; that he began to feel isolated within the company; and that he was fired soon after arguing that coumarin, a tobacco additive, was toxic and should be removed from all B&W products. He looked like a promising contact but we could not be sure his story was true. Nor could we rule out the possibility that he was reporting back to B&W. I was focused on preparing for the hearing at that time and did not push Jack to pursue the lead.

But he stayed in touch with the scientist, who was soon code-named “Research.” Over the next few weeks, Research slowly warmed to the idea of talking to the FDA—on two conditions. First, he wanted assurances that he would not be asked about his work with Brown & Williamson, which would have been a direct violation of his confidentiality agreement. He told Jack that industry defectors got “pummeled, discredited, and wound up losing everything they had, both financially and professionally.”

His second condition was that he wanted to speak directly with me. He said that he did not want to “deal with anybody down in the bowels of the organization.” He wanted to go to the “top of the pyramid.” He thought I could benefit from his knowledge and would know what to do with it.

It was a highly unusual request. Although I had sat in on numerous phone interviews and had asked questions along with everyone else, I had never identified myself. Nor had I yet met face-to-face with a confidential informant or questioned one in my official capacity as commissioner. Jack did not close the door to Research’s meeting with me in person but said that first he had to be certain of what the scientist knew and what he was willing to tell us. At that point, Research began to open up…

The visit on May 13, 1994, was a cloak-and-dagger exercise. No one except Jack knew who Research was or how senior he was in the industry. Only a few people at the FDA even knew that he was coming. My calendar for that day identified the appointment simply as, “Cigarettes/Mitchell.”

Jack had sent Research a plane ticket by overnight mail. With him, as with all of our informants, we were careful not to pay for anything else; we did not want anyone to say we paid for information. Concerned that his movements might be traced, Research left his house two hours before flight time and took a circuitous route to the airport.

Even though he was to be gone only for the day, he parked in a long-term parking lot. When I heard about his preparations, I thought they might be overkill, but I understood his anxiety. Research had already had a preliminary conversation with Rep. Henry Waxman’s staff, which he dutifully reported to Brown & Williamson, in accordance with the terms of his confidentiality agreement. Soon afterwards, he claimed to have received an anonymous telephone call with the terse message, “Leave tobacco alone or watch your kids.” A second threat was allegedly made shortly afterward, followed by a series of hang-up calls to his unlisted telephone number.

Jack drove out to National Airport to meet Research. The men had exchanged descriptions of themselves, and they recognized each other easily. Research was a round-faced man of about fifty, of average height, stocky, with striking blue eyes and salt-and-pepper hair.

“He was circumspect and nervous, his eyes darting constantly around the room, as he struggled with how much information to share.”

I was waiting for them in my office. Jack sat quietly as I talked to Research informally about his family and educational background. I also went into my own background, but that turned out to be unnecessary. Research had done his homework on me….

During the first hour, Research talked generally about the cigarette development process and how a company designs a new product or revamps the formula of an old one. He was circumspect and nervous, his eyes darting constantly around the room, as he struggled with how much information to share. But his manner was at odds with his delivery, which was assured, fluent, precise.

Slowly, Research and I began to develop a rapport, partly because of my science background. During interviews with some other informants, [FDA investigators] had been furious with me because I pushed too hard. I thought of it as being direct, but the pros called it hammering. With Research, I struck a better balance. After we had been talking for almost two hours, I asked if we could tape the discussion. I had wanted to turn the recorder on much earlier, but had not wanted to risk shutting him down. Research agreed.

For a while, the conversation ran through territory that had become somewhat familiar to us. In clipped and rapid speech, Research talked about impact, irritants, and leaf position, about reconstituted tobacco and the control of nicotine levels during manufacturing. He also mentioned that ammonia facilitates the release of nicotine. Just as I was reaching cerebral overload, Research mentioned plants that had been genetically manipulated for high-nicotine levels. I stopped short. “Did I hear what I think I heard?” I wondered.