Shortly before a visit by Elizabeth II to San Francisco in 1983, a city police officer who frequented an Irish bar warned the FBI about a possible threat against the queen by an Irish Republican Army (IRA) sympathizer, who finally did not take place.

This is revealed by various FBI documents now declassified and to which NBC News has had access, who assures that the IRA sympathizer was looking for the attack against the monarchwho died last year, avenge the death of her daughter.

The police officer who reported the threat stated that on February 4, 1983, a month before Ronald and Nancy Reagan received Elizabeth II and her husband, received a phone call from a man she knew from the aforementioned bar “who claimed that his daughter had been killed in Northern Ireland by a rubber bullet,” the chain says.

“This man also said that he was going to try to harm Queen Elizabeth and that he would do it by throwing an object from the Golden Gate Bridge the royal yacht Britannia as it passed under it, or attempt to kill Queen Elizabeth when she visited Yosemite,” the documents state.

This information is among 102 pages of FBI records on Elizabeth II that have been released publicly in response to a request submitted by NBC News and other outlets to the federal agency. after the queen’s death on 8 September. The records were posted on The Vault, the FBI’s publicly accessible website, and include documents relating to the Queen’s various visits to the United States, dating back to 1976.

Although the documents indicate that the threat against Elizabeth II in San Francisco was no more than a warning from an angry person, “they clearly reflect a persistent source of potential danger to the Queen whenever she visited the US: the IRA and its sympathizers“, specifies the American chain.

Formed in the early 20th century but became an armed wing of the nationalist political movement Sinn Féin in the 1960s, the IRA sought to drive British forces out of Northern Ireland and unify Ireland, often by violent means.

The documents show that FBI agents routinely shared intelligence and preparations with the US Secret Service, local police agencies and other law enforcement agencies on the IRA and its sympathizers in advance of and during the Queen’s state visits. The FBI’s concerns about possible IRA violence against members of the royal family were not unfounded.

In 1979, Elizabeth’s second cousin, Lord “Dickie” Mountbatten, close to then-Prince Charles, was killed in an IRA bombing in Ireland, NBC recalls. In 1989, prior to the Queen’s visit to the East Coast and parts of the southern United States, an internal FBI memo noted that, despite not knowing specific dangers“the possibility of threats against the British Monarchy is ever present from the Irish Republican Army (IRA)”.