Before Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to San Francisco in 1983, a city police officer who regularly patronized an Irish pub warned federal agents about a potential threat against the queen by an Irish Republican Army sympathizer who was bent on revenge for the death of his daughter, newly released FBI records show.
The unidentified police officer claimed that on Feb. 4, 1983 — about a month before Ronald and Nancy Reagan hosted the visit from the queen and Prince Philip — he received a phone call from a man he knew from the pub “who claimed that his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet,” according to a confidential FBI teletype.
“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 memo states.
The teletype is among 102 pages of FBI records about Elizabeth that were publicly released late Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by NBC News and other media to the agency following the queen’s death on Sept. 8.
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The records — posted in The Vault, the FBI’s public website where documents of widespread interest are often released — mostly reflect standard behind-the-scenes communications about a visiting head of state, including federal agents’ shared memos, itineraries, press clippings and other documents largely related the queen’s various visits to the United States, dating back to 1976.
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