FBI Reveals Queen Elizabeth Faced Assassination in the US Decades Ago
Queen Elizabeth died on September 8, 2022. But she nearly expired in the US, forty years ago – at the
Ivy Griffith
Queen Elizabeth died on September 8, 2022.
But she nearly expired in the US, forty years ago – at the hands of violence. Kinda.
Newly released documents form the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the US have revealed that Queen Elizabeth faced a potential assassination threat as she prepared for a trip to the united states decades ago.
103 pages were posted to the FBI’s online records site, The Vault, this week, revealing preparations for several trips the Queen was preparing to make to the US.
One of those trips was a 1983 official tour of West Coast states with her husband Prince Phillip.
In one document, agents detail a tip that was received a month before that trip from police in San Francisco.
The tip explains that they received a phone call from “a man who claimed that his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet.”
The document adds, “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.”
A royal visit to the U.S. in the 1980s. An assignation plot targeting Queen Elizabeth II. It’s no longer just the plot to the 1988 comedy ‘The Naked Gun,’ but something the FBI was genuinely concerned about when the Queen visited the U.S. in 1983. https://t.co/2O4RaRbyaM
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) May 26, 2023
The document also adds that, “it is the intention of the Secret Service to close walkways on the Golden Gate Bridge when the yacht nears.”
However, the document does not note what (if any) precautions were made to protect the Queen at the national park. It also does not reveal whether or not arrests were made on the case.
CNN reports, “The files illustrate the FBI’s hypervigilance at possible threats to the visiting British monarch, collaboration with the US Secret Service and concerns about the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its sympathizers during royal visits.
The Queen’s cousin, Louis Mountbatten, was assassinated by the Provisional IRA in 1979, using a bomb planted in his fishing boat. Three others died in the same explosion, including two children. Many of the Queen’s trips to the US took place amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the documents reveal the FBI was closely monitoring as it prepared for royal visits over the years.
Ahead of a private visit to Kentucky in 1989, one document notes that while the FBI was unaware of any specific threats to the Queen, ‘the possibility of threats against the British monarchy is everpresent from the Irish Republican Army (IRA).’
Elsewhere in the files, a document preparing for the Queen’s state visit in 1991 outlines concern about Irish groups organizing protests at several scheduled engagements, including a baseball game the monarch was due to attend and a White House event. Citing information printed in a Philadelphia Irish newspaper titled Irish Edition, the page read: ‘The article stated anti-British feelings are running high as a result of well publicized injustices inflicted on the Birmingham Six by the corrupt English judicial system and the recent rash of brutal murders of unarmed Irish nationalists in the six counties by loyalist death squads.’”
The document adds that, “Though the article contained no threats against the President or the Queen, the statements could be viewed as being inflammatory. The article stated that an Irish group had reserved a large block of grand stand tickets.”
And in 1976, on an occasion when Queen Elizabeth traveled back to the US to celebrate America’s bicentennial with stops in Philidelphia, Washington and New York, a summons was issued for a pilot flying a two-seater plane over Battery Park. He was pulling a sign which read “England, Get out of Ireland.”
The document dump is an interesting peek into behind-the-scenes tension with Britain’s long-reigning monarch, and reveals that ill-wishes towards the British monarchy extend well beyond the kingdom’s borders.