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.

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 files about royal art historian Anthony Blunt are among a trove from the intelligence agency MI5 released Tuesday by Britain’s National Archives.

British secret intelligence did not tell Queen Elizabeth II that her royal art adviser confessed to spying for the Soviet Union for almost a decade, according to newly released documents. The revelations come from a large tranche of documents made public by British intelligence service MI5 on Tuesday.

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.

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,

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