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Excerpts from Exposé 'Journalist' Conned Colleagues For 35 Years as Spy for Tobacco

PROBE (MN) [04/99]

http://probenewsletter.com/articles/199904_spy.html

A tobacco public relations man, masquerading as a journalist, spied on "anti-tobacco" science, scientists, and scientific organizations for more than a third of a century.

He spied on newsmen and newswomen, too. This industrial espionage took place during the height of the cigarette wars, starting in the early '60s.

The PR man cum journalist is Leonard S. Zahn, of Great Neck, N.Y., a Long Island suburb of New York City. Starting in 1955, and continuing until the mid-'90s, Zahn represented the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR), an industry front group. The CTR has been dissolved, pursuant to an agreement last year with New York State, the state's attorney general says. However, CTR was still answering its phone last month.

In a key earlier trial, Cipollone v. Liggett et al., in which damaging tobacco documents first began to flood into public view, U.S. District Judge H. Lee Sarokin said of CTR: "The creation of this entity, and the work [it] performed was nothing but a hoax created for public relations purposes, with no intention of seeking the truth or publishing it."

Role Is Assessed

Some information on Zahn's work came to light earlier, and has already been reported. But newly released documents, including thousands of pages of his files, show that he played a far greater role in cigarette makers' efforts to denigrate and deny scientific evidence linking smoking to illness and death than has previously been known.

Much new information by and about Zahn was uncovered by the firm Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi here. This law firm subpoenaed the files, and built and litigated the landmark Minnesota case that ended successfully last spring; it led to the subsequent national settlement between the states and the tobacco industry.

The massive document file from the case has been opened to the public as part of the settlement. It can be accessed at the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository, located in an industrial mall here near the University of Minnesota.

Leonard Zahn is a life member of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), as are we. A decade ago, based on court documents, we published an expose of Zahn's use of working-journalist credentials to enter pressrooms at scientific meetings to serve his client, tobacco. (ScienceWriters [SW] Spring '89). This double-dealing is frowned upon by health organizations like the American Heart Association (AHA) and American Cancer Society (ACS) that run pressrooms to help science writers cover the news.

Pivotal Role Seen

The newly available court papers, however, provide a more complete picture of Zahn's work - as spy. They document, in his own words, his enormous service to this "resolute" and "unflinching" industry. They also reveal that, for decades, Zahn played a pivotal role between the tobacco industry, including its lawyers and trade organizations, on the one hand, and science, medicine, the press - and thus the public - on the other.

Zahn used his press room entre to spy on scientists surreptitiously and challenge them openly at press conferences and in corridor conversations. He was an agent provocateur.

Pro-tobacco Report Boosted

In a report on the AHA symposium, Zahn also bragged that with the aid of "the K.C. people" - the industry's long-time attorneys, the law firm of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, in Kansas City - "I was able to deal directly with a Pittsburgh research[er] who was about to have published a helpful article. A press release was drafted, and he had his institution issue it at the proper time."

The documents reveal, however, that Zahn was much more than a flack or a spy. He was the industry's point man with science writers, who are the narrow informational conduit through which scientific findings for and against cigarettes reached the American public. As R.J. Reynolds executive Charles Wade wrote to Zahn's CTR boss in 1971, "Leonard proved to be invaluable" in handling a threat that had arisen at a meeting in London.

Tasks Accomplished

Zahn served as NASW's program chairman in this period, sat on its executive committee, and, perhaps most important, he helped its officers and its one paid administrator when there were tasks to do, such as banquet tickets to distribute at an annual meeting. Zahn was a consistent presssroom presence for many years, we recall.

Zahn began working for tobacco when he was hired by the Hill and Knowlton (H and K) PR agency in 1955. H and K was the industry's major public relations advisor at the time.

It helped create the long-range strategy in which the tobacco companies swore, in print, that their customers' well-being was their primary concern; that they would rely on science to resolve questions about smoking's alleged hazards to health; and that they would create the CTR (its original name was the Tobacco Industry Research Committee) to provide funding and leadership to speed the search for the "truth" about tobacco - which then would be swiftly conveyed to the public.

Hidden Purpose Revealed

As it has turned out, as revealed in the many cigarette papers opened to the public in the last decade, CTR was in reality a decoy - a deadly one. It was used constantly to promote the false idea that the question of cigarettes' hazards had not been resolved - It had! - in order to keep the last nail from being driven into their coffin.

The Tobacco Institute is being closed pursuant to the national agreement between the states and the tobacco industry last year, according to the New York Attorney General's office.

Reporters and press room managers may not have known, or may not have wished to know, what Zahn was doing. But he is absolutely explicit, in a 1978 letter to an R.J. Reynolds vice president for example, about his assignments. He says, "I issue to the various companies two kinds of meeting memos that I believe are of some value":

1. "Advance information about what will be reported by whom.

2. "A full report on what was reported, plus other relevant information I am able to obtain."

Zahn goes on to say:

"Of importance is the fact that I have access to the pressrooms where I can obtain materials and information denied [even] to others at the meeting."

In science pressrooms, reporters can obtain the written texts of researchers' oral reports. These texts are not available to the researchers' colleagues who are attending the conference.

In another memo, Zahn writes that he has just attended an American Cancer Society science writers' briefing, in St. Augustine, Fla., and has passed on "the full package of papers given by various scientists" there to a tobacco industry associate.

Zahn's industry alerts also went to its lawyers, Shook, Hardy & Bacon.

When writing to scientific conference sponsors, Zahn identified himself as a journalist, as in this 1983 letter to an organization in Belgium:

"As a freelance medical journalist, I will be in [Europe] in March to attend several medical meetings. I understand that you are sponsoring a meeting on Tobacco and Cancer . . . in Brussels on March 25-26, and I plan to cover it."

In registering for these meetings, Zahn claimed over the years to work for one of two or three medical news companies.

Editor Complained

One was Selecta, a German weekly medical magazine. Another was the International Medical News Group, in Rockville, Md., which publishes newspapers in internal medicine, obstetrics-gynecology, and other specialties.

This reporter found no bylined stories in these or any other medical publications in Zahn's CTR files. There were two "To Whom it May Concern" letters from William Rubin, the International Medical News Group editor, identifying Zahn and his wife as his correspondents. There is also a tart letter from Rubin to Zahn, complaining about stories he submitted on speculation, in 1981, but also, apparently, had sent to another American publication.

"This is the second time," Rubin writes, "that you sent us stuff that really wasn't what we needed, but was from meetings we might have wanted something out of."

Zahn also obtained press credentials from Bill Ingram, who was editor of Medical Tribune, a tabloid published in New York.

Ingram (who was once our editor) says he knew that Zahn was "using Med Tribune to keep his cachet with the medical community." He adds, "I knew that his regular job was to represent tobacco."

Zahn did produce an occasional "middle-run" medical story for Medical Tribune on non-tobacco subjects, Ingram added.

Reporters Called Cowards

While he cordially glad-handed reporters to their faces, Zahn was less kind in appraising them behind their backs for his tobacco clients and bosses. He says science reporters lazily accept what's dished out by anti-smoking agencies. "Few writers," Zahn says, "have the courage to question or criticize" the anti-smoking heart or cancer organizations, or similar groups.

"As a rule," Zahn said in another report to CTR, reporters "do not bother to check the accuracy of any report or study that attacks smoking. They don't often care to do that."

"From my continuous association with the science writers," Zahn added, "I suspect they are frequently bored with what they consider the same old stuff. On the other hand, as we know all too well, they'll . . . continue to write on what they conceive to be newsworthy topics - such as passive smoking . . ."

According to protocol, when industry flacks are admitted to pressrooms and press conferences, they are discouraged, if not forbidden, to buttonhole working reporters for promotional purposes. Zahn, however, because of his close rapport with reporters and pressroom managers, evaded this restriction.

"Often," he reported to CTR in 1980, "I am able to ask questions at press conferences, or to have questions asked [by reporters]. Certainly, I talk with writers following the conferences, and many of them frequently seek me out for my views. I discuss the smoking-health situation with media people whenever possible."

Smoking Reporters' Help Sought

Zahn spent considerable effort chatting up reporters whom he felt might either balance reports on "anti-smoking" science, or cover the "objective" pro-tobacco stories he fed them, suggesting, for example, that bird droppings may cause cancer.

His memos and reports do not say that many, if not most of his press contacts were, as we recall, smokers - who thus had their own reasons for rationalizing tobacco's risks. This minority of smokers among the science press was, in effect, Zahn's potent secret weapon.

In another instance, as the 10th anniversary of the first Surgeon General's Report approached, Zahn talked with Philadelphia Bulletin sciencewriter David Cleary, a heavy smoker, whom Zahn characterized to his bosses as "perhaps the only major newspaper science writer who believes that the case against smoking . . . is not proved."

Cleary died in 1993.

Lobbying Described

Zahn worked diligently in these years to discredit the findings of Hirayama and others on the hazards of environmental exposure to tobacco smoke. He advised "The Today Show" in 1977 that passive smoking "does not appear to represent a health hazard."

He lobbied scientists as well as writers. Reporting on a Heart Association meeting in Dallas, Zahn says that he had "advance information" about a paper by pathologist David Spain, M.D., on sudden heart attacks in women smokers. He adds:

"In personal discussion with Spain prior to his press conference [I] brought out the weakness of how he obtained his smoking histories. Spain himself voluntarily mentioned this weakness at opening of press conference, and also included it in actual delivery of his paper, though it was not part of his written text."

Genes Count in Cancer

Part of the "other side of the story" (see box, p. 7) that Zahn and the industry promoted to the public was the notion - which of course is true - that there are other, non-tobacco causes of cancer. To this end, Zahn became chummy with a member of the CTR scientific advisory board, preventive health specialist Henry T. Lynch, M.D., of Creighton University, in Omaha, Neb. "He's one of the most sincere and dedicated men I've every met," Zahn told a Philip Morris executive, Elizabeth B. Hopkins, in a 1985 letter. Lynch was raising money for a Hereditary Cancer Institute at Creighton, and Zahn suggested that Philip Morris might like to help.

"Lynch's goal," Zahn explained, "is to educate the public and the medical profession to the fact that hereditary cancer accounts for at least 5-10% of all cancers - 43,000 to 87,000 new cancers this year alone. Many doctors," he added, "are truly unaware of this."

Red Herring Launched

Clearly, Lynch's project did not rule out cigarettes as a preventable cause of cancer. But focusing public interest on his work might help divert attention from smoking. Zahn subsequently signed up Lynch's Institute as a client for his PR firm, at $1,250 per month, and helped with its fund-raising efforts.

Zahn was a skillful PR man: In the tens of thousands of Zahn's pages we scanned and in the hundreds of clippings he collected, we could find only one in which a reporter reports - very accurately, as the court released Tobacco Papers have now confirmed - what Zahn and his bosses and clients were actually trying to do. This piece appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal, in the late '70s; the date has been expunged from the clipping, and it is incomplete. Zahn is not mentioned, but one of CTR's scientific directors, Robert C. Hockett, is.

The reporter is Robert L. Peirce. The story, part of a series called The Tobacco War, is headlined: "Tobacco's Defenders: They fight a delaying action as evidence grows." Peirce writes:

"[T]he industry's scientific supporters . . . look for contradictions in anti-smoking research to create what a lawyer would call reasonable doubt. They argue that massive statistical evidence - and considerable evidence from the laboratory - is either mistaken or not strong enough to be 'proof.'"

That, from Zahn's files, describes exactly what Zahn did all day in the decades he represented the cigarette industry.

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