Declassified files reveal new details about notorious British spies – and how Queen Elizabeth II was kept in the dark

Queen Elizabeth II he was not told details of his longtime art adviser’s double life as a Soviet spy because palace officials did not want to add to his concerns, newly released documents reveal.

Files on royal art historian Anthony Blunt are among information from the MI5 intelligence agency released on Tuesday by Britain’s National Archives. They shed new light on a spy ring linked to Cambridge University in the 1930s, whose members leaked secrets to the Soviet Union from the heart of the UK’s intelligence establishment.

Blunt, who worked at Buckingham Palace as the Queen’s Portrait Inspector, was under suspicion for years before he admitted in 1964 that, as a senior MI5 officer during World War II, he had passed classified information to Soviet agents.

In one of the newly released files, an MI5 official notes that Blunt said he felt “very relieved” about acquitting himself. In exchange for the information she provided, Blunt was allowed to keep her job, her heroism and her public 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 felt it was useless to tell her now; it would add to her anxiety and nothing could be done about her. .”

The government decided to tell the king in 1973, when Blunt was ill, fearing a media frenzy if Blunt died and journalists could publish the news without fear of corruption charges.

Charteris reported that he “took it all calmly and without surprise,” and “remembered that he had been accused long ago” in the early 1950s. Historian Christopher Andrew says in MI5’s official history that the Queen had previously been briefed on Blunt “in casual terms.”

Queen Elizabeth II He died in 2022 at the age of 96.

Blunt was publicly exposed as a spy by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons in November 1979. He was eventually stripped of his knighthood, but never prosecuted, and died in 1983 at the age of 75.

Files held by Britain’s secret intelligence services have typically remained classified for several decades, but the agencies are moving closer to being more open. Some of the newly released documents will be featured in an exhibition, titled “MI5: Official Secrets,” which opens at the National Archives in London later this year.

Two Cambridge spies, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, fled to Russia in 1951. A third, Kim Philby, continued to work for the foreign intelligence agency MI6 despite the accusations. As evidence of his recidivism, he was confronted in Beirut in January 1963 by his friend and MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott.

The declassified files include Philby’s written confession and a transcript of his interview with Elliott.

In it, Philby admitted to betraying Konstantin Volkov, a KGB officer who tried to defect to the West in 1945, bringing information to a mole inside British intelligence – including Philby himself. Thanks to Philby’s intervention, Volkov was captured in Istanbul, brought back to Moscow and executed.

Elliott reported that Philby said that if he had his life to live again, he would probably have behaved the same way.

“I really felt loyal to MI6. I was treated very well in it and I made some very good friends there,” Philby said, according to the transcript. “But overindulgence was the other way around.”

Philby told Elliott that the choice he faced now that he had been exposed was “between suicide and prosecution.” Instead, he fled to Moscow, where he died in 1988.

The Cambridge spies have inspired dozens of books, movies and TV shows, including the 2023 series “A Spy Among Friends,” starring Guy Pearce as Philby and Damian Lewis as Elliott. Blunt was featured in the 2019 episode of “The Crown,” played by Samuel West.

According to files released in 2014, members of the Cambridge spy agency were seen by their Soviet superiors as hopeless drunks who could not keep secrets, the BBC reported.

One passage describes Burgess as a man who is “always late,” and another note describes Maclean as “very good at keeping secrets,” the BBC reported. It adds that he was “always drunk” and binged on alcohol.