Queen Elizabeth II was kept in the dark for nearly a decade over the fact that one of her most senior courtiers was a notorious double agent, according to newly-released intelligence files.
Sir Anthony Blunt, the surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, finally confessed in 1964 that he had been a Russian spy since the 1930s, when he was recruited into the notorious Cambridge spy ring. The group, which included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, “Kim” Philby and Anthony Blunt, were recruited as Soviet spies while at Cambridge University.
As a senior MI5 officer during the Second World War, Blunt passed on swathes of top-secret intelligence to the KGB. But he stayed in his post for years due to fears that the truth would cause a major scandal.
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When the Queen was finally told the full story in the 1970s, she took the news “all very calmly and without surprise,” according to declassified MI5 files.
Intelligence chiefs agreed to inform the Queen as concerns mounted in Whitehall that the truth would come out after Blunt’s death, as he grew increasingly ill with cancer.
In 1973, the-then Prime Minister Edward Heath put plans in place for the negative publicity, with instructions for Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary, to inform the monarch. MI5 director general Michael Hanley reported that the cabinet secretary Sir Burke Trend had shown him a “personal manuscript letter” from Sir Martin confirming she had finally been told.
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“Charteris wrote that he had spoken to the Queen about the Blunt case. She took it all very calmly and without surprise,” Mr Hanley noted. An official history of MI5 by Professor Christopher Andrew said that Mr Heath was later informed the Queen had been told “in more general terms about a decade earlier”.
In November 1972, Mr Hanley had met Sir Martin to urge the Palace to sever its links with Blunt. But Sir Martin refused, saying Blunt’s position was drawing to a close and “the Queen was not at all keen on Blunt and saw him rarely.”
Blunt was finally unmasked by Margaret Thatcher in a Commons statement in 1979. He died in 1983 aged 75 having been stripped of his knighthood.