FBI Reveals Assassination Threat During Queen Elizabeth II’s 1983 Visit to the United States
According to the 102-page document on the FBI’s online vault, the threat came from a phone call from a man who claimed his daughter was killed by a rubber bullet fired by British forces in Ireland North.
The man said he was ‘going to attempt to harm Queen Elizabeth’ on her trip by dropping an object onto the royal yacht from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco or in an attack while visiting the Yosemite National Park, according to the report.
The intelligence came from a police officer who frequented a pub popular with supporters of the paramilitary Irish Republican Army (IRA), which opposed British rule in Northern Ireland, the report added.
The report also noted that the US Secret Service planned to close the Golden Gate Bridge pedestrian walkway, but the document did not contain any details of the arrests.
The files provide insight into FBI efforts to manage risks arising from the monarch’s private and public visits to the United States beginning in the 1970s, and they note that “several anonymous threatening phone calls” about her were made to the local police.
Many of the threats perceived by the FBI were linked to the IRA, which killed the Queen’s cousin Louis Mountbatten with a bomb planted on his fishing boat in Ireland in 1979.
In another entry about Elizabeth’s visit in 1983, police warned the FBI that “it will be very difficult to anticipate and prevent incidents which might embarrass either the Queen” or the then President, Ronald Reagan.
In the end, his visit took place without major incidents. Reagan hosted the Queen at a state dinner where she toasted the United States’ contribution to “the Western alliance”, and she in turn hosted the Reagans on the Royal Yacht Britannia for their 31st birthday of marriage. Part of the Queen’s schedule was canceled due to heavy rain – prompting her to joke that the US had caught the British weather, The Washington Post reported at the time.
FBI files reveal the agency’s considerations for other demonstrations planned for the Queen’s visits – including plans by a Northern Irish group to hold a soup line with free beer to protest the visit, planned protests when the Queen attended a baseball game and an incident in which a pilot received a summons after flying a small plane dragging a banner with the words ‘England get out of Ireland’ above it of Battery Park in New York during the visit of the monarch for the bicentennial of the United States in 1976.
The FBI, which released the information in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from NBC News, said additional files may exist, although it did not say when they might be released.
From the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, violence between Irish nationalists and pro-British trade unionists in Northern Ireland claimed the lives of 3,600 people and injured tens of thousands more.
The queen’s death last year drew mixed reactions in the Republic of Ireland, where the legacy of decades of violence and colonialism is still being felt.
In 2011, Elizabeth became the first British monarch to visit the Republic of Ireland since independence in 1922, expressing her “sincere thoughts and deep sympathy” to “all those who have suffered the consequences of our troubled past”.
“Looking back historically, we can all see things we wish we had done differently or not at all,” she said at the time, a year before sharing a historic handshake with a former commander. IRA.
washingtonpost Gt
