Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to the United States in 1983 could have been threatened with an assassination attempt. This stems from declassified Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) documents. However, judging by the contents of the documents, this was a verbal threat from a loner, and not a large and serious conspiracy.
This week the FBI released a a bundle of previously classified documents which are associated with the many visits to the United States of Queen Elizabeth who died last year.
The documents show that some of the threats handled by the FBI came from the Irish Republican Army (IRA): many of the Queen’s visits took place during the bloody Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Reports of one of the threats came from San Francisco on February 4, 1983, about a month before Queen Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip visited.
A policeman who frequented an Irish pub in the city told the FBI that an Irishman he met at the pub told him he wanted to kill the Queen to avenge his daughter, who was killed by a rubber bullet in North Ireland.
“He was going to harm Queen Elizabeth, either by throwing something from the Golden Gate Bridge at the passing Royal Yacht Britannia, or by trying to kill Queen Elizabeth during her visit to Yosemite National Park,” the document reads. .
Due to this threat, the British intelligence services decided to close the Golden Gate Bridge to pedestrians for the duration of the passage of the royal yacht.
What steps were taken in Yosemite National Park, the document does not say, but the queen went there. There is also no information on the arrest of the person who threatened to assassinate him.
Elizabeth’s second cousin and her husband’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, was killed – blown up on his yacht – by an IRA fighter in Ireland in 1979.
The released documents show how seriously the FBI took potential threats to the Queen’s life and health from radical Irish people.
For example, prior to the Queen’s private visit to Kentucky in 1989, FBI management recalled in a memo that the threat of IRA action against the British monarch remained serious and ordered Boston units and New York to keep a close eye on IRA members and pass on information immediately. in Kentucky.
The Queen owned her own racehorses and traveled to Kentucky several times for races, including the famous Kentucky Derby.
FBI officials told NBC News they would release other documents in addition to those released this week, but did not specify when exactly they would.
Source: delfi
