Queen kept in dark over palace traitor Anthony Blunt, declassified documents reveal
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The Queen was left in the dark for almost a decade over the full scale of the treachery of one of her most senior courtiers, according to newly-released files. In 1964, Sir Anthony Blunt, the surveyor of the Queen's pictures and distinguished art historian, finally confessed he had been a Soviet agent since the 1930s.
When he was a young don at Cambridge he was recruited into one of the most notorious spy rings of the 20th century. As a senior MI5 officer during the Second World War, he passed vast quantities of secret intelligence to his KGB handlers. Read more:The spies that betrayed Britain - the Cambridge Ring.
However, he was allowed to keep his position at the heart of the British establishment amid fears of a major scandal if the truth became public. When the Queen was finally told the full story in the 1970s, she was characteristically unflappable - taking it "all very calmly and without surprise" - according to declassified MI5 files released to the National Archives in Kew, west London.
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In the same tranche of declassified files, it has been revealed that film star Dirk Bogarde was warned by MI5 that he could be the target of a gay "entrapment" attempt by the KGB. Bogarde, who died in 1999, never came out publicly as gay, although he maintained a long-term relationship with his manager, Anthony Forwood.
