Queen Elizabeth II was not told officially for nearly a decade that one of her most senior courtiers had admitted he was a Soviet spy, newly declassified British files revealed Tuesday.

Declassified documents confirm that the late Queen Elizabeth II of England was not informed until many years later that she had a KGB spy amongst her members of staff. She didn't like him anyway. Secrecy is the art of espionage.

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

The identity of a Russian spy among Queen Elizabeth II's courtiers was kept from the monarch for almost a decade, but she took the news with her typically calm demeanour

Newly declassified files reveal the late Queen's very unexpected reaction to the art historian's shocking secret.

MI5 reveals confessions of three members of infamous Cambridge Five spy ring as tranche of documents released into National Archives

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.

For a decade, Queen Elizabeth II lived without knowing that her own art advisor, Anthony Blunt, a trusted man in charge of overseeing the invaluable Royal Collection, was living a double life as a Soviet agent.