“I’m really not employed by Afghani terrorists”: The ‘Die Hard’ writer who became the centre of an FBI investigation
Once upon a time, if you were being investigated by the FBI and you were actually a criminal or an artist, you were doing something right.
These days, that reputation has been completely obliterated as the Donald Trump regime took a sledgehammer to it. When the agency’s director, a position once considered to be among the most influential people in American politics, is being compromised by random hackers, having his vacation photos leaked, and facing snubs from national sports teams, is it really to your credit that you have caught their eye?
It was very different for Jonathan Hensleigh, the writer of Die Hard with a Vengeance, for whom it was a matter of pride that the FBI were perplexed by his screenplay and launched an investigation into it. That was a different era, where you could use something like that to promote your film’s posters, and audiences would immediately know that you had come up with something worth watching.
If that happened today, and the Die Hard with a Vengeance poster had a tagline – The movie Kash Patel called ‘suspicious’, people would immediately assume that it’s either a euphemism for a porno title parodying the FBI director, or it’s produced by Patel and the Trump administration himself, with at least three scenes shot in Mar-a-Lago and a cameo from Kid Rock.
Why did the 1995 Die Hard sequel raise flags at the NYPD and the FBI? Well, according to Hensleigh himself, the authorities were concerned that the writer had done some not-so-legal research about the Federal Reserve because there was no way that he had come up with the heist plans outlined in the script on his own.
The New York Police had to vet the script, and the intricately described way in which Hensleigh’s antagonist robs the Federal Reserve was so realistic that it was almost too plausible. Was Hensleigh talking to a criminal actually planning this stuff, or was Die Hard with a Vengeance a front designed to actually rob the Reserve by first discrediting the attempt in mainstream media?
“One day, I got a call from the FBI,” Hensleigh revealed in an interview. “They were extremely concerned about how I knew so much about the Federal Reserve, and how the Federal Reserve’s vaults were really close to a subway spur, and logistically about the aqueduct tunnel, etc.”
That’s right, Heinsleigh had nailed the logistical and architectural outlines of the Federal Reserve to such an extent that the authorities suspected something fishy was going on. But what was the nefarious reason that the writer had so much knowledge about one of the most protected institutions in the country? Well, he was simply allowed to go there.
As he explained to the police and the FBI, to complete his research for the script, he obtained access to all the schematics and blueprints for the building, which, in hindsight, might not have been such a bright idea, but nobody can say that Heinsleigh did not do his due diligence. He even had to put this as a disclaimer, “So I’m really not employed by Afghani terrorists. I really don’t have any kind of secret proprietary knowledge that I shouldn’t have.”
If you, on the other hand, are employed by such an organisation and have to rob an equally secure institution, have you thought about going down there and just asking for blueprints while wearing a Hollywood cap? Chances are you might just get away with the whole thing, given that the FBI’s current director has bigger fish to fry, like hiding the rest of his vacation photos.
