Sir Anthony Blunt, the Royal Family's picture surveyor and renowned art historian, finally admitted that he had been a Soviet agent since the 1930s.

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

Newly released MI5 documents have revealed that Queen Elizabeth II was not formally briefed about the full extent of royal art surveyor Anthony Blunt's Soviet spy activities until 1973, nearly a decade after his confession.

Anthony Blunt, who worked at Buckingham Palace as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was secretly a Soviet spy during WWII.

Queen Elizabeth II was not officially informed for almost a decade that one of her most senior courtiers had confessed to being a Soviet spy, according to newly released MI5 files.

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 Soviet agents.

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.

Documents from the British secret service MI5 reveal that Anthony Blunt, an art historian and supervisor of the official Royal Art Collection, was actually a member of the notorious spy organisation Cambridge Five,