We all know that cigarettes are addictive and harmful but even in the early 1990s it was not a completely settled question. Or, perhaps more accurately, it was far from a settled question publically. Science had already arrived at that conclusion; but who controlled that science, and how it was to be disseminated, remained up in the air. Meanwhile, families of deceased smokers were suing; state attorneys general had prepared litigation against tobacco companies in the hopes of recouping some of the gargantuan health care costs; and the federal government was soon to hold hearings on the matter. Big Tobacco, however, had yet to blink.

When Jeffrey Wigand was hired by Brown and Williamson in 1988, he was walking into a brewing storm he did not quite understand. Wigand was a scientist, with a Ph.D. in biochemistry from SUNY-Buffalo, and for 17 years had worked at a series of healthcare-related firms. He was a straight-shooter who had nevertheless been able to work his way up the corporate ladder. Now, for $300,000 a year, he would head the R&D department at the nation’s third largest tobacco company.

His family moved to Louisville, where B&W was headquartered. Wigand was told he would be in charge of developing a competitor cigarette to R.J. Reynolds’s Premier, which sported a reduced level of tar. While Wigand was less than thrilled by the ethics of moving from healthcare to cigarettes, he was happy to be working on a safer cigarette; besides, the money and the title were enough to let him sleep at night.

Shortly after Wigand was surprised to learn that B&W had neither a toxicologist nor a physicist on staff. There was little hard science being done. Soon, Wigand noticed other strange details in his workplace: research records shipped offshore, minutes from meetings on cigarette health that had been heavily edited and redacted, strange code words—“Ariel” and “Hippo”—uttered by colleagues who then clammed up.

Meanwhile, RJR pulled the Premier from the market because of its unpleasant smoking experience. His search for a safer cigarette, it seemed, was not a shared priority in the industry.

Wigand also chafed at his workplace surroundings. Citified, he was an ill cultural fit among his more traditional colleagues as well. He began butting heads with other executives. One of whom, Thomas Sandefur, had, in Wigand’s eyes dismissed his safer cigarette search offhand, worried it would affect sales of other products by making them seem unsafe. Wigand began keeping a diary to document his workplace travails. By 1991, Wigand’s company evaluations reflected his tension with his officemates.

In 1992, Wigand read a report from the National Toxicology Program spelling out the carcinogenic dangers of coumarin, an additive in B&W’s Sir Walter Raleigh line of pipe tobacco. When Wigand brought up removing the compound—related to rat poison—Sandefur rebuffed him. The episode was something of a breaking point. In January of 1993, Sandefur was promoted to company CEO and in March, Wigand was fired.

In spring 1993, CBS 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman found a crate of papers dumped on his front porch in San Francisco: technical proprietary documents, it turned out, from tobacco giant Philip Morris. An expert in massaging sensitive information from unlikely places, Bergman was unsurprised to find such a cache plopped on his doorstep. Still, unschooled in cigarette science, he needed help making sense of the information.

Wigand, meanwhile, was having trouble finding a job. He had listed B&W colleagues as his references; they seemed to be doing him no favors. On his way out, the company had also forced him to sign an onerous confidentiality agreement, lasting until his death. The lasting unemployment began to strain Wigand’s marriage; after years of sobriety, he began drinking again.

An intermediary put Bergman, the 60 Minutes producer, in touch with Wigand. Wigand was bound by his confidentiality agreement not to discuss anything Brown & Williamson with Bergman, but began working as a consultant for Bergman interpreting the stack of Philip Morris documents. He was struck to see Philip Morris’s science, ahead of where he understood his old company’s to be. When CBS broadcast a separate exposé on Philip Morris’s fire-safe cigarettes, Wigand was incensed to see that the knowhow was there all along, despite his having been led to believe otherwise.

Pressure on the tobacco companies was mounting. In 1994, ABC broadcast a special on Philip Morris’s manipulation of nicotine levels in their cigarettes. In response, Philip Morris announced that they were suing ABC for $10 billion for libel. That spring, Harry Waxman, a congressman from California, held a public hearing on C-SPAN questioning the heads of the nation’s seven largest tobacco companies. Wigand’s old boss, Sandefur, testified, “I believe that nicotine is not addictive.”

Andrew Tisch said the same thing. Tisch was president of Lorillard, another tobacco company, and the son of CBS chairman Laurence Tisch. Watching their testimony enraged Wigand, as he knew them to be purveying misinformation. By this time, Wigand was helping the federal government in its tobacco inquiries, schooling administration figures in the ins and outs of the science and helping them avoid traps like “document dumping”—in which subpoenaed tobacco companies would send their documents to opposing litigants in dump trucks alongside literal truckloads of other, useless documents.

Wigand’s aid was somehow leaked to industry operatives. He began receiving death threats by phone against his daughters. His wife grew increasingly worried; the industry’s aggressive tactics—particularly the looming threat of cutting the family’s healthcare, since one of the Wigands’ daughters had spinal bifita—drove a wedge between Wigand and his family. One night, there was a call to the police for a domestic disturbance; alcohol was involved, and the spouses gave conflicting accounts of the incident, but no charges were filed.

Bergman became worried about Wigand’s mental health. He dispatched an assistant producer to get a preliminary interview with Wigand. After months, Berman finally cobbled together a segment that included his star witness. But by this time the stakes were too high. CBS was in talks for a potential corporate merger: management told the more gung-ho members of 60 Minutes’ staff that the risk of lawsuit for breaching Wigand’s confidentiality agreement was too great, while Laurence Tisch worried that a lawsuit might hurt CBS’s value for such a move. So too might Tisch have worried for his controlling stake in Lorillard tobacco losing its value. 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt and Tisch had butted heads about Tisch’s unhappiness over stories that the news program had recently run. Tisch, who was not a newsman, had less respect for the church-and-state separation of business and editorial departments than did Hewitt and his crew.

Still, CBS’s general counsel Ellen Kaden worried that CBS could be liable for Wigand breaking his confidentiality agreement. The technical term is tortious interference, which is defined as the intentional and improper interference with a valid contract. Earlier that year ABC had settled a lawsuit brought by Philip Morris and ended up issuing an apology to the company in one of the costliest libel settlements the country had ever seen. In the broadcast, ABC News had alleged that the tobacco giant added extra nicotine to its cigarettes to get smokers more easily addicted. Critics lambasted the network for selling out.

Amid great turmoil—Bergman at a loss, 60 Minutes anchor Mike Wallace apoplectic—the story was shelved throughout the summer and into the fall. In November of 1995, 60 Minutes ran a watered-down tobacco segment without Wigand’s damning testimony. The New York Times published a scathing op-ed claiming that 60 Minutes had betrayed its journalistic legacy. Consensus was that CBS had been successfully intimidated.

CBS was sold in December, with Tisch’s corporation clearing a cool $1 billion. CBS general counsel Kaden made around $5 million in the sale.

Elsewhere more revelations emerged. The year prior, a paralegal at a law firm that handled B&W documents had walked off with thousands of copied forms that indicated that B&W did in fact know of cigarettes’ harmful properties since the ’60s. The New York Times published information from the revelations, which corroborated Wigand’s account.

In December of 1995, braving potential retaliatory lawsuits, Wigand gave a deposition in a suit filed by the attorneys general of seven states for reimbursement of Medicaid expenses stemming from smoking-related illnesses. That deposition ratcheted up a vicious smear campaign by B&W against Wigand, harping on his alleged spousal abuse and accusing him of shoplifting, painting him as a petty fraud and an unabashed liar. Reporters called Wigand continuously for statements on his alleged misconduct, further wearing him out and frazzling him.

The smear campaign, though, ultimately backfired. In January of 1996, the Wall Street Journal published a front-page story detailing Wigand’s deposition. Later that month, a 500-page list of Wigand’s misbehavior was passed to the paper. Rather than reprint the material, the Journal published an exposé of the smear campaign against the ex-tobacconist. In late January, Wigand finally appeared on CBS, leveling the full weight of his accusations against Big Tobacco executives he had come to despise. His full interview, alongside a follow-up, appeared on 60 Minutes in early February.

Two years later, tobacco companies settled with the states that sued them for $246 billion, a decision that changed the way that tobacco has been marketed and treated in the United States ever since. As part of the settlement, the tobacco company dropped its legal actions against Wigand, who later moved to Charleston to form a foundation to keep kids from smoking.

The story brought renewed focus on the linkage between a newsroom’s business and its editorial decisions. The firewall between the two is erected to prevent conflicts of interest from hindering a newsroom’s ability to gather and deliver news to the public.

The case of CBS vs. B&W laid bare just how thin that line often is.

As for Wigand, lawyers who wrestled multi-million-dollar settlements from tobacco companies using information Wigand had supplied them, pooled their money to provide him with several million dollars in compensation. Meanwhile, Wigand’s story was turned into a movie called The Insider. Russell Crowe played Wigand, and was nominated for an Oscar.