Newly-released FBI files reveal a possible plot to assassinate the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II while she was visiting California in 1983.
One document recounts a tip San Francisco police gathered approximately a month before that visit relating to a phone call from "a man who claimed that his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet."
"This man additionally claimed that he was going to attempt to harm Queen Elizabeth and would do this either by dropping some object off the Golden Gate Bridge onto the Royal Yacht Britannia when it sails underneath, or would attempt to kill Queen Elizabeth when she visited Yosemite National Park," the document read.
The same document states that "it is the intention of the Secret Service to close the walkways on the Golden Gate Bridge when the yacht nears."
Nothing is mentioned about precautions that may have been taken at the national park and the files do not mention if any arrests were made.
The late queen and her husband, Prince Philip, visited the west coast of the United States in February and March 1983 without incident.
In 1979, the queen’s second cousin, Louis Mountbatten was killed in a bomb attack by Irish Republican Army paramilitaries opposed to British rule in Northern Ireland. Mountbatten was the last colonial governor of India.
A document dated 1989 states that although the FBI was not aware of any specific threats against the U.K. head of state, "the possibility of threats against the British monarchy is ever present from the Irish Republican Army."
The queen, who died at 96 in September, had previously been the target of other unsuccessful assassination plots.
In 1970, suspected IRA sympathizers tried to derail her train west of Sydney, and, in 1981, the IRA attempted to bomb her while she visited Shetland, off the coast of Scotland, according to Agence France-Presse.
In a second attempt to harm the queen, that same year, a mentally ill teenager fired one shot at the monarch’s car during a visit to New Zealand.
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