WASHINGTON: According to recently revealed FBI records, Queen Elizabeth II was the target of a possible murder attempt in 1983 while visiting the United States.
Several documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the late Queen’s trips to the US have been made public.
They demonstrate how the FBI was concerned about IRA threats while assisting in securing the monarch’s safety throughout her travels.
A San Francisco police officer detected the death threat call, the BBC said.
The file states that a police officer who frequently visited an Irish bar in San Francisco alerted federal investigators to a call from a man he had met there.
The guy allegedly informed the police that he was seeking retribution for his daughter who “had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet.”
The threat was made on February 4, 1983, around a month or so before Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s visit to California.
“He was going to attempt to harm Queen Elizabeth and would do this either by dropping some object off the Golden Gate Bridge onto the Royal Yacht Britannia when it sails underneath, or would attempt to kill Queen Elizabeth when she visited Yosemite National Park,” the document read.
The Secret Service had prepared to “close the walkways on the Golden Gate Bridge as the yacht nears” in reaction to the threat. It is unknown what steps were taken in Yosemite, but the trip nevertheless happened. The FBI released no information about arrests.
Following a Freedom of Information Act request made by US media outlets, the 102-page cache was posted to the Vault, the FBI’s information website, on Monday.
Many of the late Queen’s state trips to the US, such as her trip to the West Coast in 1983, took place during a time of particularly high tension related to the troubles in Northern Ireland.
The records explain how a pilot was issued a summons for flying a light plane over Battery Park while holding a placard that said, “England, Get out of Ireland.”
The records demonstrate how the FBI stayed on high alert for what it believed to be genuine threats against the late Queen.
Lord Mountbatten, her second cousin, was killed in a 1979 IRA explosion off the coast of County Sligo in the Republic of Ireland.
Prior to the late Queen’s visit to Kentucky in 1989, an official FBI letter read: “the possibility of threats against the British Monarchy is ever-present from the Irish Republican Army (IRA)”.
During her lifetime, the late Queen, who owned racehorses, made frequent trips to Kentucky to take in the state’s equestrian events, including the Kentucky Derby.
