KEY POINTS
- FBI records show there were concerns the IRA or its supporters could target Queen Elizabeth II during visits to the US.
- In one of the documents, the IRA is labelled an 'everpresent' threat.
- The IRA, a paramilitary group, wanted to remove Northern Ireland from British rule.
United States federal agents were warned of a potential threat against Queen Elizabeth II's life ahead of her 1983 visit to San Francisco, newly-released documents show.
The alert from an unidentified city police officer is contained in one of 102 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records, some heavily redacted, that relate to the Queen's visits to the US between 1976-1991 — a period that encompassed the Troubles.
They were published in the wake of a Freedom of Information Act request from US media outlet, NBC News, that was filed following her death in September last year.
The confidential memo states the officer was a regular patron of a pub that was frequented by "sympathisers" of the paramilitary organisation, the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
At the centre of the Troubles, a 30-year conflict that started in the late 1960s, was the issue of whether Northern Ireland should remain a part of the United Kingdom.
The IRA — which was responsible for around half of the more than 3,500 people killed, including King Charles' great uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten — was fighting to end British rule in Northern Ireland.
The police officer claimed, about a month before the Queen visited, that a man he knew from the venue had called him and "claimed that his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet".
According to the memo, the man claimed that he would "attempt to harm Queen Elizabeth" in one of two ways: by "dropping some object" off the Golden Gate Bridge and onto the Royal Yacht Britannia as it sailed under, or "attempting to kill" the monarch during her visit to Yosemite National Park.
The secret service had planned to "close the walkways on the Golden Gate Bridge" as the yacht approached, but bad weather ultimately forced the plan to sail in to be scrapped.
The documents don't show whether the threat developed in any way or what, if any, action was taken against the man.
But they do highlight that US law enforcement agencies were acutely aware of the potential danger the Queen faced from the IRA and its supporters.
Indeed, that reality was labelled "everpresent" in an internal FBI memo from 1989 when the royal made a "personal visit" to Versailles, Kentucky, where she stayed at her friends' farm.
"While FBIHQ is unaware of any specific threats against the Queen, the possibility of threats against the British monarchy is everpresent from the Irish Republican Army," the memo reads.
Another document from 1976 noted a summons was issued to a man who flew a light aircraft with a sign that read, "England, Get out of Ireland", over Battery Park in New York where the Queen toured during her stop in the state while on a US trip.
And in 1991, the FBI said that "Irish groups" were planning a protest at a stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, where the monarch and President George HW Bush attended a baseball match.
It pointed to an article in the "Philadelphia Irish Newspaper" that stated "anti-British feelings are running high as a result of well-publicised injustices inflicted on the Birmingham Six by the corrupt English judicial system and the recent rash of brutal murders of unarmed Irish nationalists in the six counties by Loyalists death squads.”
The "Birmingham Six" were six Irishmen who were wrongly jailed in England over an IRA bombing. After spending 17 years behind bars, their convictions were overturned a few months before the Queen's 1991 US visit.
