Queen Elizabeth II wasn’t told about Soviet spy in her palace, declassified MI5 files show

Declassified files reveal Queen Elizabeth II was kept in the dark about art adviser Anthony Blunt's double life as a spy.

Queen Elizabeth II wasn’t told details of her long-time art adviser's double life as a Soviet spy because palace officials didn’t want to add to her worries, newly declassified documents reveal.

The files about royal art historian Anthony Blunt are among a trove from the intelligence agency MI5 released Tuesday by Britain's National Archives. They shed new light on a spy ring linked to Cambridge University in the 1930s, whose members spilled secrets to the Soviet Union from the heart of the U.K. intelligence establishment.

Mr. Blunt, who worked at Buckingham Palace as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was under suspicion for years before he finally confessed in 1964 that, as a senior MI5 officer during World War II, he had passed secret information to Soviet agents.

In one of the newly released files, an MI5 officer notes that Mr. Blunt said he felt “profound relief” at unburdening himself. In return for the information he provided, Mr. Blunt was allowed to keep his job, his knighthood and his social standing — and the Queen was apparently kept in the dark.

In 1972, her private secretary, Martin Charteris, told MI5 chief Michael Hanley that “the Queen did not know and he saw no advantage in telling her about it now; it would only add to her worries and there was nothing that could done about him.”

The government decided to tell the monarch in 1973, when Mr. Blunt was ill, fearing a media uproar once Mr. Blunt died and journalists were able to publish stories without fear of libel suits.

Mr. Charteris reported that “she took it all very calmly and without surprise,” and “remembered that he had been under suspicion way back” in the early 1950s. Historian Christopher Andrew says in the official history of MI5 that the Queen had previously been told about Mr. Blunt in “general terms.”