Declassified files reveal new details about notorious British spies — and how Queen Elizabeth II was kept in the dark
CBSN
Queen Elizabeth II wasn't told details of her long-time art adviser's double life as a Soviet spy because palace officials didn't want to add to her worries, newly declassified documents reveal.
The files about royal art historian Anthony Blunt are among a trove from the intelligence agency MI5 released Tuesday by Britain's National Archives. They shed new light on a spy ring linked to Cambridge University in the 1930s, whose members spilled secrets to the Soviet Union from the heart of the U.K. intelligence establishment.
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.
