The British American Tobacco (BAT) company deliberately sought to undermine the work of health experts in southern Africa in the 1990s.
And it did so partly by wooing carefully-selected journalists, according to company documents which have come to light.
The documents are part of a collection of more than eight million pages of material that the company made public at a depository in Guildford, England, as part of its settlement of a smoking damages case.
Although the depository was established in 1998, researchers are still sifting through the papers.
'Care should be taken in selection of journalists' BAT is the second-largest transnational tobacco manufacturer in the world after Philip Morris, and sells about 900 billion cigarettes a year.
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Its South African subsidiary controls 95 percent of the local market with brandnames that include Peter Stuyvesant, Benson and Hedges and Lucky Strike.
Much of the company's concern in the early 1990s centred on what the documents term the "outspoken, infamous anti-tobacco campaigner from South Africa", Dr Derek Yach.
Then an epidemiologist with the Medical Research Council, Yach is currently the World Health Organisation's Geneva-based executive director of noncommunicable diseases.
In 1993 he was one of the leading figures behind the All Africa Conference on Tobacco Control, which was held in Harare in November and backed by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
'To show the important social and economic contribution of tobacco' According to a BAT strategy document that was compiled in June 1993, Harare was likely to be the forerunner to similar "high profile attacks on the industry".
"Even if this conference has a minimal impact, the fact that it is happening necessitates the need for action," it said.
The documents said that the company's objective was to minimise the impact of the Harare conference through a comprehensive media-relations programme.
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