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Soviet secret agents bugged Princess Margaret’s telephone and ­listened in on the conversations of other senior royals. Listening devices were planted in the Princess’s bedroom during an official trip to Copenhagen in 1964. Until last week the Russians had always denied the ­covert operation, which was first exposed by the Sunday Express in 1994.

We disclosed that Colonel Vadim Goncharov, the KGB chief in charge of snooping operations on key western targets, installed listening devices in Princess Margaret’s lighter, cigarette case, ashtrays and telephones, eavesdropping on conversations that were “most interesting, even scandalous”.

A dossier was compiled on her love affair with Robin Douglas-Home and relationships with Roddy Llewellyn, Colin Tennant and Dominic Ewes, a painter who later committed suicide.

Details passed to Moscow included photographs, tape recordings and reports of society gossip involving senior royal figures. Attempts were also made to obtain information from a therapist, Kay Kiernan, who treated Margaret and the Queen. Intelligence was also gathered on Prince Philip via society osteopath and artist Stephen Ward, who boasted of a 15-year friendship with the Prince and who committed suicide at the height of the Profumo affair.

Soviet spies also carried out a failed sting operation to try to compromise future Prime Minister Harold Wilson in a Moscow hotel “honey trap”.

At the time the Foreign Intelligence Service in Moscow “categorically denied” the claims, fearing the report would cast a shadow over the Queen’s historic first and only trip to Russia. Goncharov, who was 73 at the time but has since died, was even ordered to go on television to deny what he had done.

Last week, however, Russia’s biggest newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, boasted that among Goncharov’s successes was “the bugging of drunken parties of the British Princess Margaret”.