It sounds like the well-used plot to an espionage novel: an extremely wealthy international cartel of business leaders who put out a product dangerous to public health use spies, political influence and large amounts of money to sabotage the efforts of independent researchers and advocates working to get that product banned or severely restricted.

According to a new 240-page report by the World Health Organization (WHO), truth is much stranger than fiction: WHO leaders say the have been under covert and overt attack from the tobacco industry for years, and they have the documents to prove it, the Washington Post reports.

WHO officials say "Big Tobacco" spied on the organization -- specifically their research programs and the Tobacco Free Initiative -- planted pro-tobacco operatives in WHO's Geneva headquarters and otherwise worked to cut funding and disrupt the group's relations with other United Nations organizations.

In addition, the industry used allegedly independent researchers paid by tobacco interests to distort and challenge anti-smoking data, the Post reports.

The group's specific accusations are contained in a report entitled "Tobacco Company Strategies to Undermine Tobacco Control Activities at the World Health Organization". (The report requires the free Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 software to view it.)

"The tobacco companies' own documents show that they viewed WHO, an international public health agency, as one of their foremost enemies. The documents show further that the tobacco companies instigated global strategies to discredit and impede WHO's ability to carry out its mission," the document states.

The WHO report was prepared by the director of the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health, Thomas Zeltner, and three other public health and government relations experts, the newspaper reports.

Many of their findings were based on documents released by the tobacco industry during various U.S. court proceedings.

WHO claims the tobacco industry fought the international health group on a number of fronts -- ranging from persuading U.N. agricultural officials to downplay anti-tobacco crop production campaigns in Third World countries to urging individual nations to cut contributions that would support such WHO efforts as World No-Tobacco Day.

One tobacco industry representative told the Post that the WHO report is at least partially based in fact.

Philip Morris International executive David Davies told the newspaper some of his company's documents included in the report "do not reflect an approach that today we would adopt with WHO. ...They are the product of a polarized and unproductive environment in which few solutions were sought, and conflict prevailed over consensus. Philip Morris regrets this."

WHO estimates 4 million people a year die from tobacco-related causes, and that number could climb to 10 million within the next two to three decades. Poorer nations are expected to account for most of these deaths.

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