In line with the 102-page doc on the FBI’s on-line vault, the menace got here in a cellphone 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 try 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 in style 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 include particulars of any arrests.
The information give an perception into the FBI’s efforts to handle dangers arising from the monarch’s non-public and public visits to america from the Nineteen Seventies onward, and so they word that “a number of nameless threatening phone calls” about her have been made to native police.
Lots of the perceived threats the FBI assessed have 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.
Ultimately, her go to happened with none main incidents. Reagan hosted the queen at an official dinner the place she toasted america’ 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 marriage ceremony anniversary. Among the queen’s schedule was canceled due to heavy rain — prompting her to joke that america had caught British climate, The Washington Put up reported on the time.
The FBI information reveal the company’s issues 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 sport and an incident through which a pilot acquired a summons after flying a small airplane trailing a banner bearing the phrases “England, get out of Eire” over New York’s Battery Park in the course of the monarch’s go to for america Bicentennial in 1976.
The FBI, which launched the knowledge in response to a Freedom of Info Act request from NBC Information, stated extra information might exist, though it didn’t specify after they could 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 1000’s extra.
The queen’s demise final yr sparked combined 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 good thing about historic hindsight, we are able to all see issues which we would need had been performed in a different way or under no circumstances,” she stated on the time, a yr earlier than she shared a historic handshake with a former commander of the IRA.
