A collection of newly disclosed FBI documents has exposed an alleged IRA conspiracy to assassinate Queen Elizabeth while she was on a state visit to the United States in 1983.
Following their release on Monday, the records say that federal agents received solid intelligence of threats to the Queen’s life while she and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, were visiting California 40 years ago.
The documents state that a San Francisco police officer received a call from “a man who claimed his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet” after a meeting at a bar. The tavern was described as “frequented by sympathisers with the Provisional Irish Republican Army.”
The individual also threatened to hurt the monarch “either by dropping some object off the Golden Gate Bridge onto the royal yacht Britannia when it sails beneath, or by attempting to kill Queen Elizabeth when she visited Yosemite National Park,” according to the decades-old intelligence.
The US Secret Service planned to close the walkways on the San Francisco bridge as the boat approached, according to the records, though they make no mention of security measures for the Queen’s visit to Yosemite. There was no mention of any arrests related to the probe.
Another document in the 103 pages released by the FBI in response to a freedom of information request by US media outlets shows that in 1976, a man faced legal proceedings for flying a small plane over New York with a sign reading “England, Get out of Ireland” while the Queen was visiting the city.
An internal FBI memo from 1989 detailed the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) “ever-present” threat to the British monarchy, while the Secret Service was warned in 1991 that “Irish groups” were planning to protest en masse against the Queen at a baseball game she planned to attend with then-US President George H.W. Bush.
Lord Mountbatten, the Queen’s second cousin, was slain by an IRA bomb in County Sligo, Ireland, in 1979.
