Newly released FBI files show that the US security authorities were concerned about threats to Queen Elizabeth II by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during visits to America. The documents reveal that FBI agents shared intelligence with the US Secret Service about the IRA and its sympathisers during royal visits. A memo warning FBI agents in Boston and New York to remain “alert for any threats” ahead of a 1989 visit was among 102 pages of records released about the Queen. Other details include a police tip-off about a threat from an IRA sympathiser who wanted revenge for the death of his daughter.
The officer who provided the information claimed that a month before then-US President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy Reagan hosted the Queen and Prince Philip in 1983, he received a phone call from a man he knew from an Irish pub. According to the memo, the man said his daughter was killed by a rubber bullet in Northern Ireland. The man claimed that he was going to attempt to harm Queen Elizabeth by dropping an object off the Golden Gate Bridge onto the royal yacht Britannia when it sailed underneath or by attempting to kill her when she visited Yosemite National Park.
The FBI’s concerns about potential IRA violence against members of the royal family were not unfounded. In 1979, Queen Elizabeth II’s second cousin, Lord “Dickie” Mountbatten, was killed in an IRA bombing in Ireland. The records on threats to the late British monarch’s life were released after a freedom of information request submitted after her death.
