Sri Lanka, Sept. 5 -- Somewhere in the American state of California, on the servers of the University of California, San Francisco, sits one of the world's great archives of corporate secrets -- the largest of a handful of collections that have prised open the internal papers of the tobacco industry. It holds more than fourteen million of them: memos, letters, marketing plans, research the industry buried, strategies it hoped would never see daylight. Board minutes. Handwritten notes. The private correspondence of executives who assumed they were writing only to one another.

These documents are not there because the industry repented. They are there because it was caught. Through the 1990s, as the American states sued the tobacco compan...