Gormley named as informer for Special Branch

Up to 23 senior trade union leaders, including the former miners' leader Joe Gormley, helped Special Branch during the 1970s as part of a campaign to neutralise industrial militancy, a new documentary will claim this weekend.

An 18-month investigation by the BBC found evidence that the arm of the police that works with the security services operated a blacklist at Ford's Halewood plant in Liverpool and pressed senior BBC managers not to employ left-wingers.

Yesterday producers of the True Spies documentary, to be screened on Sunday on BBC2, said the three-part series would also expose Special Branch's role in defeating the miners strike in the 1980s and countering the fuel protests and the activities of animal rights extremists during the 1990s.

The programme also highlights the activities of an élite unit known as the "hairies", who worked undercover to target militants and trade unionists after the 1968 anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in London.

One was said to have become in effect deputy to Peter Hain, now the Minister for Europe, during the campaign against the South African rugby tour in 1970. Another said he posed as a Church of England vicar.

Former Special Branch officers interviewed for the programme said they targeted Jack Dromey, now a senior official at the Transport and General Workers' union, during a dispute in 1976 – which Mr Dromey described yesterday as "sinister and outrageous".

Dame Stella Rimington, former director general of MI5, told the programme: "Communist and Trotskyist organisations, by their philosophy, their published aims, would have fallen within the definition of subversion."