'MI5 investigated Royle Family star' Jason Deans Wednesday August 21, 2002 Ricky Tomlinson Clandestine operations by the secret services over the last 50 years are to be exposed in a new BBC series that will include disturbing details of the lengths to which MI5 went to track Royle Family actor Ricky Tomlinson. Confirming many conspiracy theories, the BBC2 documentary, True Spies, will show how government operatives infiltrated political groups, trade unions and media organisations Tomlinson, a former trade union activist, and the former Marxist Tariq Ali are among those confronted on camera by True Spies presenter Peter Taylor with evidence they featured in Special Branch and MI5 files. "All the conspiracy theories about the security services tapping phones and so on that we all dismissed turned out to be true," said Mr Taylor, whose credits include a number of award-winning documentaries about Northern Ireland and most recently the Iranian embassy siege. "They infiltrated everyone and everything, even Fleet Street and the BBC. The files they had were vast." It is known MI5 targeted BBC journalists in the 1970s - "subversive" journalists had files marked with little Christmas trees and BBC management submitted the names of journalists for vetting. But Taylor's documentary shows the extent of the secret service's investigations. "In some cases there was justification for what they did, but in many cases there was absolutely no justification whatsoever. They infiltrated things like Friends of the Earth and the anti-asbestos campaign. If you went on a CND demo, you could have ended up with a file," he said. "When I asked them 'what threat did organisations like this pose?', they said 'you never know until you find out'." Mr Taylor said he had not been allowed access to the files, but had interviewed a number of Special Branch officers for True Spies. Special Branch agents working undercover would infiltrate organisations in order to spy on their activities for MI5. Mr Taylor said both Tomlinson and Mr Ali were visibly shocked when confronted on camera with evidence that they had been the subject of secret service investigations. In the case of Mr Ali, a Special Branch undercover agent had infiltrated a leftwing organisation to which he belonged and made a copy of the office key so the secret service could gain access. Within the BBC in the 1970s and 1980s the secret services were particularly interested in the activities of broadcasting unions such as Bectu and the ACT, according to Mr Taylor. "When I asked about the BBC the interviewee said they had an inside source who told them about potential militants," Mr Taylor said. He added that the BBC no longer had an MI5 liaison officer who vetted employees and famously put the christmas tree-like signs on their files if they were thought to pose a potential threat to national security. "That post is no longer filled. I think it stopped in the early or mid-1990s," Mr Taylor said. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$L3BDXMZQBGU13QFIQMGCFFOAVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2002/08/22/nrick22.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/08/22/ixnewstop.html&_requestid=96117&_requestid=20381 Telegraph version.