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The FBI has released a trove of previously classified documents covering decades of Queen Elizabeth II’s visits to the United States, including fears of assassination by pro-Irish sympathisers.
Over 100 pages of FBI records about the late Monarch were publicly released on Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act by media outlets after her death in September 2022.
Records released by the FBI show how agents persistently braced for potential threats from sympathisers of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the late Monarch’s various visits to United States.
The documents reveal one particularly scary incident which occurred on the eve of Elizabeth II’s visit to San Francisco in 1983.
According to the file, a city police officer who regularly drank at an Irish pub warned federal agents about a threat against the Monarch by an IRA sympathiser who was bent on revenge for the death of his daughter.
The unidentified police officer claimed that in February he received a phone call from a man he knew from the pub “who claimed that his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet”.
The call came about a month before then-President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan hosted the 57-year-old Queen and Prince Philip in California.
“This man additionally claimed that 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 chilling memo states.
While the 1983 incident was one of the most concerning FBI tip offs, other documents reveal similar paranoia during earlier visits to the United States by Elizabeth and Phillip.
During Elizabeth’s visit to New York City for the Bicentennial celebrations in 1976, one of the memos described a New York police officer reporting a pilot had been issued with a summon to stop him from flying a plane carrying the banner: “England, Get out of Ireland”.
In 1981, the FBI warned about “potential attacks” during Elizabeth II’s visit to strongly Irish-American cities like Boston and New York as “the possibility of threats against the British Monarchy is ever present from the Irish Republican Army”.
The newly released memos reveal the pervasive sense of danger surrounding the British Monarchy during the height of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland and the rise of paramilitary organisations like the IRA.
In 1979, the IRA murdered the Queen’s second cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten and three others after loading his fishing boat with explosives and detonating the vessel.
Mountbatten died alongside his grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, crew member Paul Maxwell and Nicholas’ paternal grandmother Doreen, Dowager Lady Brabourne.
In 1984, just one year after the threat on the Queen was made in California, the IRA would bomb the Grand Hotel in Brighton in an assassination attempt on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
