Queen Elizabeth II was not told about Soviet spy in her palace - declassified MI5 documents

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II was not told details of her longtime art adviser's double life as a Soviet spy because palace officials did not want to add to her anxiety, newly declassified documents show, AP reports, UNN writes.

Details

The files on the Royal Art Historian Anthony Blunt are among the valuable MI5 documents released on Tuesday by the UK's National Archives. They shed new light on a spy network linked to Cambridge University in the 1930s, whose members passed secrets to the Soviet Union from the heart of Britain's intelligence agency.

Blunt, who worked at Buckingham Palace as an inspector of the Queen's paintings, was under suspicion for many years before he finally confessed in 1964 that, as a senior MI5 officer during World War II, he had passed classified information to the Russian intelligence agency KGB.

In one of the newly released files, an MI5 officer notes that Blunt said he was "deeply relieved" to be off the hook. In exchange for the information he provided, Blunt was allowed to keep his job, knighthood and position in society, and the Queen was apparently kept in the dark, the newspaper writes.

In 1972, her private secretary Martin Charteris told MI5 chief Michael Hanley that "the Queen did not know, and he saw no point in telling her now; it would only increase her anxiety and there was nothing to be done about it.

The government decided to tell the monarch in 1973, when Blunt was ill, fearing a media uproar after Blunt's death, and journalists could publish articles without fear of libel suits.

Charters reported that "she took it all very calmly and without surprise" and "remembered that he had been under suspicion since the early 1950s. In the official MI5 history, historian Christopher Andrew says that the Queen had previously been told about Blunt in "general terms".

Addendum

Blunt was publicly exposed as a spy by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons in November 1979. He was finally stripped of his knighthood, but was never prosecuted and died in 1983 at the age of 75.

Blunt appeared in the 2019 episode of The Crown, where he was played by Samuel West.