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MI5: Queen Elizabeth II was not told of spy on royal staff for years

The Soviet flag hangs at half mast at the Russian Embassy in Washington on February 10, 1984, marking the death of Soviet Union President Yuri Andropov. Classified documents released Tuesday by Britain's MI5 50 years on reveal the extent of communist-era espionage involving the country's infamous Cambridge Five to the extent that one of the spies was a member of Queen Elizabeth II's royal household, but it was kept from her. File photo by Don Rypka/UPI.
The Soviet flag hangs at half mast at the Russian Embassy in Washington on February 10, 1984, marking the death of Soviet Union President Yuri Andropov. Classified documents released Tuesday by Britain's MI5 50 years on reveal the extent of communist-era espionage involving the country's infamous Cambridge Five to the extent that one of the spies was a member of Queen Elizabeth II's royal household, but it was kept from her. File photo by Don Rypka/UPI. | License Photo

Jan. 14 (UPI) -- 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.

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 Soviet double agent back in 1964.

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The then-Conservative government of Edward Heath only instructed the queen's private security to break the news to her because it was feared Blunt might not have long to live amid fears of a public scandal if the facts regarding his confession and the plea deal under which he was granted immunity from prosecution came out after his death.

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Michael Hanley, who was head of MI5, said at the time that the queen's aide, Martin Charteris, reported that she took the news in stride and did not seem shocked.

"She remembered that he [Blunt] had been under suspicion way back in the aftermath of the Burgess/Maclean [two other members of the Cambridge Five] case. Obviously, somebody mentioned something to her in the early 1950s, perhaps quite soon after the succession" in 1952.

Hanley had pushed for the queen to be notified months earlier but with Blunt's retirement imminent after 28 years in the job, Charteris, who believed she knew nothing, was of the view that doing so would only add to her worries unnecessarily.

However, Charteris reported that the queen was "not at all keen on Blunt and saw him rarely."

MI5 was secretive about the case in the extreme, with the record showing Charteris' predecessor also knew and earlier files passed to the National Archive indicating Alec Douglas-Hume, prime minister in 1964, did not find out until Margaret Thatcher outed Blunt in 1979 and stripped him of all his titles.

Blunt was recruited by MI5 during World War II but the secret services became suspicious of him after Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, whom he had been close friends with since their days at Cambridge University in the 1930s, defected to Russia in 1951.

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He was interrogated 11 times but denied spying until Kim Philby, the group's so-called "Third Man," defected in 1963 and American Michael Straight, a former Cambridge alumni and speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt, with a background check looming, told the FBI that Blunt had recruited him as a Russian agent.

The new files, containing Blunt's subsequent confession in full for the first time, reveal that as well as his wartime activities, he told his MI5 interrogator contact with the Russian Intelligence Service continued after World War II ended in 1945.

He admitted meeting a Russian agent who tried to persuade him to also defect and that he was afraid his handler would use violence to force him to comply.

The tranche of documents, which are not covered by Freedom of Information laws and released at MI5's discretion subject to redactions, also reveal Philby confessing to MI6 officer and friend Nicholas Elliott that he had no regrets about working for Soviet Russia and would do it over again.

An exhibition featuring the declassified files is due to open at The National Archives in Kew in west London in the spring.

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