MI5 files suggest queen was not briefed on spy in royal household for nine years

The late Queen Elizabeth II was not told for almost 10 years that Anthony Blunt, a surveyor of the queen’s pictures and a member of the royal household, had confessed to being a Soviet double agent, previously secret security files suggest.

Declassified MI5 documents throw intriguing new light on how the security services closely guarded news that the art historian, of the notorious Cambridge Five spy ring, had confessed in April 1964, with records indicating the queen was only informed in 1973.

Only with fears over Blunt’s health, and of ensuing negative publicity should his confession and immunity from prosecution emerge upon his death, did Edward Heath’s government request the monarch’s private secretary, Martin Charteris, fully brief her.

Charteris reported back that “she took it all very calmly and without surprise: she remembered that he had been under suspicion way back in the aftermath of the Burgess/Maclean case. Obviously somebody mentioned something to her in the early 1950s, perhaps quite soon after the succession,” MI5’s then director general, Michael Hanley, noted in March 1973.

Hanley had urged the palace four months previously to sever ties with Blunt, who remained in post and was even knighted after his confession that he had spied for the Russians while a senior MI5 officer, after being recruited as a Cambridge don in the 1930s.

Only Charteris and his deputy, Philip Moore, “know about it at the palace,” Hanley wrote in November 1972. “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.” Blunt was about to retire aged 65 from his post. Charteris “affirmed that the queen was not at all keen on Blunt and saw him rarely”.

The files, released to the National Archives, indicate the queen’s then private secretary, Michael Adeane, was informed only of MI5’s intention to question Blunt on new evidence in 1964, but was not briefed on Blunt’s actual confession until 1967. In 1971 the Home Office told Hanley of Blunt that “the Queen knew nothing about his security record”. Hanley noted wryly: “I said that on his death she might learn a good deal from the newspapers.”

The files appear to question the previous narrative in media reports and in books that the queen was made aware shortly after the confessions. According to an official history of MI5 by Prof Christopher Andrew, Heath was later informed the queen had not been entirely in the dark as she had been told “in more general terms about a decade earlier”.

If she was kept in ignorance, she was in good company. Security files have previously shown Alec Douglas-Home, who was prime minister in 1964, was not informed until the confession was made public by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Blunt was allowed to retain his royal post because “the greater public interest is in no change becoming apparent in his overt status”.

Blunt, who died aged 75 in 1983, was one of the Cambridge Five, along with Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross, who had been recruited by the Russians while at or after Cambridge University in the 1930s, and worked their way into senior positions in British intelligence, the Foreign Office and Whitehall.

The MI5 agent Arthur Martin describes in vivid detail confronting Blunt in his flat above the Courtauld Institute on 23 April 1964 with testimony from Michael Straight, an American whom Blunt recruited at Cambridge. Blunt had been under MI5 suspicion and questioned 11 times since the 1951 defections of Burgess and Maclean to Russia.

Blunt’s “right cheek was twitching a great deal” as he dismissed Straight’s account as “pure fantasy”. Martin induced Blunt with immunity from prosecution. After sitting in silence for some time, “Blunt’s answer was: ‘Give me five minutes while I wrestle with my conscience,’” Martin wrote. “He went out of the room, got himself a drink, came back and stood at the tall window looking out on Portman Square. I gave him several minutes of silence and then appealed to him again to get it all off his chest. He came back to his chair and told his story.”

As his confession unfolded Blunt’s nervousness was apparent: “Every question was followed by a long pause during which Blunt seemed to be debating with himself how he should answer it.” At the end, “he seemed to be genuinely shattered,” wrote Martin. Blunt expressed his “profound relief”.

Over the course of several interviews, Blunt described how Burgess, based at the British embassy in Washington with Philby, had suddenly returned to the UK in 1951 to warn Maclean, in the Foreign Office, he was in danger of being exposed and must get to Russia.

Burgess, a known drunkard, was in “an appalling state”, “behaving outrageously”, Blunt said, telling him the Russians “have told me I must go, too”. Blunt doubted this as it could expose Philby and himself. That was not the plan, he said. If Burgess also went, “it was really blowing everything”. Blunt believed Burgess persuaded his Russian handler, “Peter” – Yuri Modin – to let him go because he knew “his life in England was finished”.

When he came to say goodbye, Burgess was “in a state of really absolute total collapse and he’d been taking, oh all the wrong kind of drugs together with a lot of drink”, said Blunt.

Blunt then found himself “on tap” to Burgess’s handler. He only met “Peter” twice, he said, after being given instruction to find a “white chalk cross” in a particular place, which went wrong because “something that looked like a white chalk cross wasn’t.”

Blunt said that when they did meet, “Peter” said “you must go too”. Blunt said “Peter” thrust “packets of dollars and pound notes” at him, and “absolutely insane instructions” to go to Paris, then Helsinki and then Russia.

“Quite apart from the fact that I had no intention of going, it became perfectly clear to me that they simply hadn’t made any plans whatsoever,” he told Martin. He remembered being “faintly surprised” at the handler “not being more violent” when he refused to go.

The files are being released before the opening in spring of an exhibition focusing on the work of MI5 at the National Archives in Kew, south-west London. Exhibits will include a vivid report of Blunt’s interview and a first-hand account of Philby’s confession in 1963.