Plot to Kill Queen Elizabeth II in U.S. Revealed in FBI Files

0
49

The late Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom faced the threat of assassination during a visit to the U.S. in 1983, recently published FBI files have revealed.

Documents show that the agency was alerted to a potential plot, believed to be motivated by the Troubles in Ireland at the time, to either kill her as her yacht traveled under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco or during a visit to Yosemite National Park.

The Troubles refer to three decades of deadly conflict between British soldiers and Irish republican and British loyalist forces when over 3,500 people died. The mass violence ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement.

The British monarch, who died in September 2022 at the age of 96, was the country’s longest-serving head of state. She faced several assassination attempts during her reign—most recently on Christmas Day in 2021, when a man was caught on the grounds of Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow. He later pleaded guilty to treason.

The Queen regularly topped lists of the most influential and well-known women around the world and was seen by those who made attempts on her life as a figurehead for Britain’s colonial past.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II stands beside President Ronald Reagan at a welcome ceremony upon her arrival in Santa Barbara, California on March 1, 1983. Newly-released FBI files reveal a plot to kill the monarch during the trip.
Getty Images/Tim Graham

On Monday, the FBI released a 102-page document detailing intelligence gathering and mitigating steps U.S. law enforcement took to thwart the 1983 plot, as well as protection plans for the monarch during visits in 1976 and 1991.

According to the file, a San Francisco police officer who was a “regular patron” of a bar “that is frequented by sympathizers with the Provisional Irish Republican Army,” a terrorist group that sought a united Republic of Ireland, had received a call on February 4, 1983, from a man he had met there.

The man “claimed that his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet,” and 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.”

It went on to note that the San Francisco Police Department had alerted the Secret Service to the threat, which had in turn decided to close the walkways to the Golden Gate Bridge when the yacht neared. The document does not detail any security plans for the Queen’s visit to Yosemite.

The assassination threat was made just over a month before Queen Elizabeth accompanied then-President Ronald Reagan on a tour of the West Coast, including a visit to his Santa Barbara ranch.

After the trip was complicated by severe rain, the Queen joked in a speech on March 3 that year: “I knew before we came that we had exported many of our traditions to the United States, I had not realized before that weather was one of them.”

In a missive to Reagan after departing, the monarch wrote: “I realise that a tremendous amount of work was involved in the arrangements for our visit and I should be grateful if you would express our appreciation to everyone who worked so hard to ensure its success.”

As the Troubles in Ireland continued to cause bloodshed and disruption, threats against the Queen continued during her trips to the U.S.

The FBI file also revealed that ahead of a 1989 trip to Kentucky, “the possibility of threats against the British Monarchy is ever-present from the Irish Republican Army (IRA).”

Internal memos regarding a trip to Maryland, in 1991 by the Queen, her husband Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and then-President George H. W. Bush to attend a Baltimore Orioles baseball game revealed impending protests.

The document noted that “anti-British feelings are running high as a result of well-publicized injustices inflicted on the Birmingham Six” and “the recent rash of brutal murders of unarmed Irish nationalists” by loyalist militias.

The Birmingham Six were a group of Irishmen who were wrongfully convicted of carrying out two bombings in Birmingham, England, in 1974. Their convictions were overturned on March 14, 1991—around two months before the visit to Baltimore.

The FBI records were released following a Freedom of Information request, and are listed under the title “Part 01.”

In a letter to NBC News on Tuesday, the FBI said that “additional records” on the subject “may exist” beyond those released this week, but it did not say when it intended to release them.

Newsweek approached the FBI for further comment via email on Friday.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here