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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.

Anthony Blunt, an art historian and the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures overseeing the official Royal Art Collection, confessed in 1964 that he had been a Soviet agent since the 1930s. However, the queen was not fully informed about Blunt for around another nine years, according to files from Britain's domestic MI5 spy agency released by the National Archives.

She took it "very calmly and without surprise", according to the records.

It was decided to tell the monarch when ministers became concerned that the truth would become public when Blunt died.

He had been recruited by the Soviets while he was at the University of Cambridge, joining a spy ring that included other infamous double agents Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

Blunt was a senior MI5 officer during World War II and passed vast quantities of secret intelligence to his handlers from the KGB Soviet spy agency.

He was questioned several times after Maclean and Burgess fled to the Soviet Union in the 1950s. But without a confession, he was allowed to keep his position at the heart of the British establishment until the early 1960s.