In accordance with the 102-page doc on the FBI’s on-line vault, the menace got here in a telephone name from a person who claimed his daughter had been killed by a rubber bullet fired by British forces in Northern Eire.
The person stated he “was going to aim to hurt Queen Elizabeth” throughout her journey by dropping an object onto the royal yacht from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge or in an assault when she visited Yosemite Nationwide Park, the report stated.
The intelligence got here through a police officer who frequented a pub fashionable with sympathizers of the paramilitary Irish Republican Military (IRA), which opposed British rule in Northern Eire, the report added.
The report additionally famous that the U.S. Secret Service was planning to shut the Golden Gate Bridge’s pedestrian walkway, however the doc didn’t comprise particulars of any arrests.
The recordsdata give an perception into the FBI’s efforts to handle dangers arising from the monarch’s non-public and public visits to the USA from the Seventies onward, they usually notice that “a number of nameless threatening phone calls” about her had been made to native police.
Lots of the perceived threats the FBI assessed had been associated to the IRA, which killed the queen’s cousin Louis Mountbatten with a bomb planted on his fishing boat in Eire in 1979.
In one other entry about Elizabeth’s 1983 go to, police warned the FBI that “it is going to be very exhausting to anticipate and stop incidents which can embarrass both the queen” or the then-president, Ronald Reagan.
In the long run, her go to passed off with none main incidents. Reagan hosted the queen at an official dinner the place she toasted the USA’ contribution to “the western alliance,” and he or she in flip welcomed the Reagans on the Royal Yacht Britannia for his or her thirty first wedding ceremony anniversary. Among the queen’s schedule was canceled due to heavy rain — prompting her to joke that the USA had caught British climate, The Washington Submit reported on the time.
The FBI data reveal the company’s concerns about different protests deliberate for the queen’s visits — together with a Northern Irish group’s plans to carry a soup line with free beer to protest the go to, demonstrations deliberate for when the queen attended a baseball recreation and an incident through which a pilot obtained a summons after flying a small aircraft trailing a banner bearing the phrases “England, get out of Eire” over New York’s Battery Park through the monarch’s go to for the USA Bicentennial in 1976.
The FBI, which launched the knowledge in response to a Freedom of Info Act request from NBC Information, stated extra recordsdata might exist, though it didn’t specify once they may be launched.
From the late Sixties till the Good Friday Settlement of 1998, violence between Irish nationalists and pro-British unionists in Northern Eire claimed the lives of three,600 individuals and wounded tens of hundreds extra.
The queen’s loss of life final 12 months sparked blended reactions within the Republic of Eire, the place the legacy of decades-long violence and colonialism are nonetheless felt.
In 2011, Elizabeth turned the primary British monarch to journey to the Republic of Eire since its independence in 1922 — voicing her “honest ideas and deep sympathy” to “all those that have suffered as a consequence of our troubled previous.”
“With the advantage of historic hindsight, we will all see issues which we would need had been carried out in a different way or under no circumstances,” she stated on the time, a 12 months earlier than she shared a historic handshake with a former commander of the IRA.