The secret files record how the country's security services only told her about the infamous Cambridge Five member and art historian, Anthony Blunt, who was employed as the monarch's surveyor of official pictures, in 1973 long after he had admitted being a ...

Anthony Blunt, who worked at Buckingham Palace as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was secretly a Soviet spy during WWII.

Queen Elizabeth II was not officially informed for almost a decade that one of her most senior courtiers had confessed to being a Soviet spy, according to newly released MI5 files.

MI5 documents reveal her private secretary ‘saw no advantage in telling her’ about treachery of Buckingham Palace art expert

When the Queen was finally told the full story in the 1970s, she was characteristically unflappable - taking it "all very calmly and without surprise".

Blunt was a senior MI5 officer during World War II and passed vast quantities of secret intelligence to his handlers from the KGB Soviet spy agency.

The identity of a Russian spy among Queen Elizabeth II's courtiers was kept from the monarch for almost a decade, but she took the news with her typically calm demeanour

Queen Elizabeth II was not told about her long-time art adviser's double life as a Soviet spy, newly declassified documents reveal.

Newly declassified British documents show that 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.