Queen Elizabeth II, who died on September 8, 2022, made numerous official visits to the United States. But in the 1980s and 1990s, dark plans aimed to kill the British sovereign. These threats were revealed by the recent release of FBI archives.
Among these documents, published on the FBI website, a note concerns in particular the trip made by Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip to the west coast of the United States in 1983. According to information obtained by the San Francisco police via a source close to Irish nationalist circles, a man who claimed that “his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet”, issued the plan “to harm Queen Elizabeth”.
An object thrown from the Golden Gate
He would do so “either by dropping an object from the Golden Gate Bridge onto the Royal Yacht Britannia as it passed under it, or by attempting to kill the Queen during her visit to Yosemite National Park.” Four years earlier, in 1979, the paramilitary group of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had killed in a bomb attack Lord Louis Mountbatten, the cousin of Elizabeth II, in the midst of Troubles which saw s confront Republicans and Northern Irish Unionists.
Another note, relating to a state visit by the queen in 1991, mentions threats from Irish groups to disrupt events the monarch was to attend, such as a baseball game and a reception at the White House.
Several assassination attempts
Another document from 1989 states that although no specific threats were made against the Queen, “the possibility of threats from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) against the British Monarchy is always present”. The queen, who died last September at the age of 96, was the subject of several assassination attempts.
In 1970, suspected IRA sympathizers attempted to derail his train west of Sydney, Australia, and in 1981 the IRA planned a bombing during a visit to northern Scotland.