“We have only to be lucky once; you will have to be lucky always.”
— Statement by the Irish Republican Army Council after its failed 1984 attempt to blow up British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and other Conservative Party leaders.
On October 12, 1984, members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), the once infamous “Provos,” attempted to decapitate the British government. The PIRA knew that the 1984 Conservative Party Conference at the Grand Hotel in Brighton provided a predictable opportunity to strike at Prime Minister Thatcher, the members of her Cabinet, and many of the other Conservative parliamentary leaders.
A huge bomb with a long-delay fuse was planted in the hotel three weeks before the event. When detonated in the middle of the night, it caused massive damage to one wing of the hotel. Five people were killed, and many others were injured. The collapse of upper stories drove huge amounts of debris into Thatcher’s bathroom, but she was at her desk in another part of her hotel suite. If she’d happened to have been in the bathroom at the time, she would have quite likely been killed.
In the aftermath of the bombing, the Iron Lady was famously defiant, insisting that the conference go forward, taking to the podium after two minutes of silence to condemn the attack as an attempt to destroy the country’s democratically elected government. But the IRA leadership was equally — and even more famously defiant — memorably proclaiming: “We have only to be lucky once; you will have to be lucky always.”
I’ve been haunted by these words since reading about the plot to attack last Sunday night’s UFC event at the White House. The details are still coming out and will no doubt continue to emerge in the days and weeks ahead. What’s clear, however, is the scope and ambition of the plotter’s intentions and the extent of the conspiracy, with official reports suggesting at least 23 active participants.
Taking advantage of the fact that the event was taking place outdoors on the White House lawn, they meant to strike first with explosive carrying drones, creating significant casualties, but — and this was the larger purpose — creating panicked flight along routes that would be covered by carefully placed snipers. More recently, testimony has emerged to suggest that, in the aftermath of the first strike, some plotters were tasked with making an armed attack on the White House itself.
This was not — and this bears repeating — one of those silly exercises in performative attack planning infiltrated by FBI informants. Had it not been for the courageous action of the mother of one of the plotters, the threat quite likely would not have been detected in time. Would it have actually succeeded had the plan been able to run its course? That’s hard to say, since there were many moving parts involved.
Even a partial success, however, could have been catastrophic. Even small commercially available drones, each with only a couple of pounds of explosive, could have wrought havoc on the event. The panicked evacuation that the plotters anticipated was only too likely. And even a single sniper’s success — five were planned — could have been devastating. One need only recall how a single amateur sniper perpetrated the single most devastating mass murder in U.S. history in Las Vegas in 2017, killing 60 people and wounding 413 others.
Moreover, the scale of the plot is daunting. I spent the greater part of my professional career working in the parallel disciplines of executive protection and critical infrastructure protection. We tended to expect that the bigger the plot, the more likely it would be detected in advance and dismantled well before it could actually carry out the planned attack.
We also worked with the assumption that assembling a large-scale conspiracy and orchestrating a complicated attack with multiple moving parts was the province of professionals, state-sponsored teams akin to the Russian Spetsnaz or, of course, our own Delta Force or SEAL Team 6. Or even when it came to the threat of a single assassin, we understood that, outside the movies, a Day of the Jackal-like skill set was surpassingly rare.
Don’t get me wrong. Such threats were never ignored in the calculus of security — instead, they claimed the greater part of the resources devoted to threat intelligence. Herein, however, lies one of the more haunting aspects of the UFC plot. Between the large-scale and carefully orchestrated professional threats and the threats posed by one or a couple of rank amateurs working alone, there exists a middle ground, one harder to anticipate and devastating in its potential effect.
That appears to have been the case with the UFC plot, and for this reason alone, we should treat it with the seriousness it deserves, rather than allowing the media to pigeonhole it as somehow trivial. And one hopes that all of the various security and law enforcement agencies involved in protecting against this kind of threat will take it as an object lesson and study it carefully, asking all the necessary “what if” questions and taking the lessons learned seriously.
But the lessons of the event reach far beyond those to be studied by security professionals. As a country, we need to recognize that even a partial success on the part of the plotters, for example, one that caused significant casualties while not achieving their dream of taking out the president or the vice president, would have occasioned huge and incalculable repercussions.
Attacks, and the threat of attacks, have become distressingly common. Furthermore, those who would carry out such attacks find encouragement in the everyday demonization of political leaders, business executives, or law enforcement officers. We’re subjected daily to “Trump I Hitler,” or “pharma executives are criminals,” or “ICE is the Gestapo.” (RELATED: The Hypocrisy of the ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ Contingent)
We’re told that this is merely “free expression,” and that it can’t possibly be viewed as an incitement to lethal violence. Ironically, we hear this from the very same people who also insisted that cigarette or liquor advertising needed to be banned because of its undue influence and contribution to bad behavior. You can’t have it both ways. Either the drumbeat of hatred exerts an influence, or it doesn’t, and, if it does, then the drummers deserve to be held to account. (RELATED: Now We Know What ‘Maximum Warfare, Everywhere, All the Time’ Means)
At the very least, however, it creates a climate in which plots such as the UFC plot can flourish and grow. It creates an environment in which those who know the plotters might dismiss the signs of threat behavior, where some non-participants might unwittingly assist. This was very much the case back in my days in Germany, when the depredations of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang were enabled by a much broader pool of “sympathisanten,” the broad network of students, artists, and intellectuals who tacitly backed the group.
Above all, we should be deeply concerned at the increasing frequency of such events, notably, but not exclusively, the assassination threats aimed at President Trump. From Butler to the White House Correspondents’ dinner, to the plot against the UFC event, we’re reminded that those who provide security must be ever more vigilant, ever more prepared. But we’re also reminded that in every such event, there is an element of luck, a shooter who misses by less than an inch, or a mother who takes the emotionally enormous step of turning in her own child. (RELATED: Bullet Points and Blind Spots)
The more these threats proliferate, the luckier we have to be. And as the events of October 1984 should remind us, we have to be lucky every time. The bad guys need only get lucky once.
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James H. McGee is a retired nuclear security and counter-terrorism professional. His most recent novel, The Zebras from Minsk, was featured among National Review’s favorite books in 2025. You can find The Zebras from Minsk and his previous thriller, Letter of Reprisal, in paperback and Kindle editions at Amazon.
