FBI reveals possible IRA plot to try to kill Elizabeth II during 1983 visit to U.S.

Shortly before a visit of Isabel II to San Francisco in 1983, a city police officer who frequented an Irish bar warned the FBI about a possible threat against the queen by an Irish Republican Army (IRA) sympathizer, which ultimately was not carried out.

This is revealed by several documents that the FBI has now declassified and to which NBC News has had access, who claims that the IRA sympathizer sought to avenge the death of his daughter.

The policeman who tipped off the threat claimed that on February 4, 1983, a month before Ronald and Nancy Reagan hosted Elizabeth II and her husband, received a phone call from a man he knew from the above-mentioned bar “who claimed that his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet,” the network notes.

“This man said he was going to try to harm Queen Elizabeth and that he would do it. by throwing some object off the Golden Gate Bridge at the royal yacht Britannia as it passed underneath, or would attempt to kill the queen Elizabeth when she visited Yosemite,” the documents note.

“A persistent source of danger to the queen.”

Although the documents indicate that the threat against Elizabeth II in San Francisco. was no more than a warningThe US network states that “they clearly reflect a persistent source of potential danger for the Queen every time she visited the US: the IRA and its sympathizers”.

The IRA, formed in the early 20th century but converted into an armed wing of the nationalist political movement Sinn Féin in the 1960s, sought the British forces to leave Northern Ireland. and unify Ireland, often by violent means.

Documents show that the FBI shared intelligence and preparations with the U.S. Secret Service, local police agencies and other law enforcement agencies about the IRA in advance of and during the Queen’s state visits.

IRA had already attacked the British Monarchy.

Such a level of concern was not unfounded. In 1979, Elizabeth’s second cousin, Lord “Dickie” Mountbattenclose to the then Prince Charles, was killed in a bomb attack IRA bombing in Ireland, NBC recalls.

In 1989, prior to the Queen’s visit to the East Coast and parts of the southern United States, an internal FBI memo noted that, despite not knowing of specific dangers, “the possibility of threats against the British Monarchy is always present. by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).”