Records recently released by the FBI of Queen Elizabeth II’s several official visits to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s reveal threats and a possible plot to assassinate the ruler.
Among those documents released on the FBI website, one note specifically concerns the 1983 trip of Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, to the West Coast of the United States.
According to information obtained by San Francisco police through a source close to Irish nationalist circles, a man who claimed “his daughter was killed by a rubber bullet in Northern Ireland” initiated the plan, ” to harm Queen Elizabeth”.
He would do this “by either dropping an object from the Golden Gate Bridge onto the Royal Yacht Britannia passing beneath it, or by attempting to kill the Queen during her visit to Yosemite National Park.”
Four years earlier, in 1979, the paramilitary group Irish Republican Army had bombed Elizabeth II’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, as Republicans and Northern Ireland Unionists clashed.
Another note, relating to a 1991 state visit by the Queen, mentions threats by Irish groups to disrupt events the monarch was supposed to be attending, such as a baseball game and a White House reception.
Another document from 1989 said that while no specific threats had been made against the Queen, “the possibility of Irish Republican Army (IRA) threats against the British monarchy always exists”.
The Queen, who died last September at the age of 96, has been the subject of several assassination attempts.
In 1970, suspected IRA sympathizers attempted to derail his train west of Sydney, Australia, and in 1981, during a visit to northern Scotland, the IRA planned a bomb attack.