The FBI reports that Queen Elizabeth II has been the target of an assassination attempt in the United States.

Is there a cop to rescue the queen? Reality, for its part, is less clear than fiction… Archives recently released by the FBI reveal threats and a possible plan to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Among these documents, a note refers, in particular, to The trip of the Empress and her husband Prince Philip to the West Coast of America in 1983.

According to information obtained by the San Francisco police from a source close to Irish nationalist circles, a man who claimed “his daughter was killed in Northern Ireland with a rubber bullet” issued a plan to “harm Queen Elizabeth”. He would have done this by “either dropping an object from the Golden Gate Bridge onto the royal yacht Britannia as it passed under it, or attempting to kill the Queen during her visit to Yosemite National Park.”

Other death threats

Four years ago, in 1979, an Irish Republican Army paramilitary group killed Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, in a bomb blast, in the midst of riots that clashed between Republicans and Northern Irish Unionists. Another note relating to the Queen’s 1991 state visit refers to threats from Irish groups to disrupt events the monarch was due to attend, such as a baseball game and a reception at the White House.

Another document dated 1989 shows that while no specific threats have been made to the Queen, “there is always the possibility of threats from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) of the British Monarchy”.

In 1970, alleged IRA sympathizers attempted to derail his train west of Sydney, Australia, and in 1981 the IRA planned an explosion during a visit to northern Scotland. That same year, a teenager with mental health issues shot at the car the Queen was traveling in during a visit to Dunedin, New Zealand. The attempt was hushed up by the police until 2018 with the publication of documents from the special services at the request of local media.

In 1981, another teenager fired six blanks at the Queen during a horse parade in London. The empress quickly calmed the horse and continued on her way, and the young man arrested by the police said that he “wants to become famous.”

Finally, in 1982, a man named Michael Fagan managed to break into the Queen’s bedroom at Buckingham Palace and talked to her for ten minutes while sitting on her bed before she could sound the alarm.