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 Russia’s KGB spy agency.

Queen Elizabeth II was not officially informed for nearly a decade that Anthony Blunt was a Soviet spy, newly declassified documents reveal.

Documents newly declassified by MI5, Britain's internal intelligence agency, show the late Queen Elizabeth II was not informed for almost 10 years that a member of her staff had spied for the then-Soviet Union.

Newly declassified files reveal the late Queen's very unexpected reaction to the art historian's shocking secret.

British secret intelligence did not tell Queen Elizabeth II that her royal art adviser confessed to spying for the Soviet Union for almost a decade, according to newly released documents. The revelations come from a large tranche of documents made public by British intelligence service MI5 on Tuesday.