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Queen Elizabeth II was kept in the dark for a long time about a major scandal during her reign.
Newly released MI5 files reveal that, for nearly 10 years, the late monarch didn’t know that royal household member Anthony Blunt was actually a Soviet double agent.
According to the BBC, Blunt confessed to the British royals in 1964 that he was a senior officer for the Russians during World War II.
However, Elizabeth wasn’t clued in about this until nine years later.
Blunt, an art historian, worked at Buckingham Palace as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures for decades.
He was under suspicion for being connected to the Soviets for years before he admitted the truth.
The MI5 files, released to the National Archives, reportedly contain Blunt’s full confession.
Shortly before he was set to retire at age 65, Blunt came clean in April 1964 to MI5 interrogator Arthur Martin, who promised him immunity for prosecution.
The files said that Blunt was not “at ease” as he spoke during his interrogation, and every question “was followed by a long pause” while he “seemed to be debating with himself how to answer it,” per the BBC.
Blunt confirmed that he worked with the Soviets during the war and also admitted to being in touch with the Russian Intelligence Service after the war.
Elizabeth’s private secretary at the time, Martin Charteris, and his deputy, Philip Moore, were the only people at the palace who knew about Blunt’s confession.
“Charteris thought that the queen did not know and he saw no advantage in telling her about it now; it would only add to her worries.” MI5’s then director general, Michael Hanley, reportedly wrote in the files.
The queen, according to what Charteris told Hanley, “was not at all keen on Blunt and saw him rarely.”
But once Blunt fell ill in March 1973, Elizabeth was officially informed that her former employee was a Soviet spy. She was notified only then, when Blunt fell ill, in case a media uproar took place following his death.
Charteris said in the files that “she took it all very calmly and without surprise” and “remembered that he had been under suspicion” back in the 1950s.
Blunt’s role as a spy was publicly exposed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons in November 1979.
He was stripped of his knighthood but was not prosecuted.
Blunt died in 1983 at the age of 75.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, ruled the UK and the other Commonwealth realms until her death at age 96 in September 2022.
She never publicly spoke about the scandal involving Blunt during her 70-year reign.