Crowe alleges terrorist plot

Osama bin Laden has often been accused of disdaining Western culture. Now, someone has claimed that the terrorist mastermind plotted to do something about it — by striking at the very heart of Hollywood.

In one of the more bizarre terrorist plots alleged to date, Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe, who was on campus in 2001 filming "A Beautiful Mind," recently claimed that he was the target of an al Qaeda kidnapping plot.

The FBI was so concerned for the actor's safety in the face of the threat that they protected him for several years — including the time he was in Princeton — Crowe told GQ Australia, a local version of the popular men's magazine, in their March issue.

An FBI official with knowledge of the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the threat against Crowe but said it was more "criminal" than "terrorist" in nature. "It was not al Qaeda-related," the official said.

A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles FBI field office, which handled Crowe's case, also said that the Bureau investigated a threat against the actor in 2001 but denied that Crowe was ever provided a protective detail.

"We at no time provided protection to Russell Crowe. My understanding is that he had his own security detail," Laura Eimiller said in an interview Monday. "At the time we believed the threat was absolutely serious. It was investigated to determine its credibility. After a lengthy investigation it was determined to not be credible."

Crowe, the star of Hollywood hit movies "Gladiator" and "Master and Commander," said in the GQ interview that the FBI first contacted him regarding the perceived threat against him — a sort of "cultural destabilization plan" — in early 2001, several months before the attacks of Sept. 11.

A call to Crowe's publicist, Robin Baum, seeking clarification on the actor's comments was not returned. An assistant to Baum said Crowe and his publicist had no comment on the GQ story.

In the GQ piece, Crowe recalled speaking with the FBI about the threat. "That was the first conversation in my life that I'd ever heard the phrase al Qaeda," GQ quoted Crowe as saying. "And it was something to do with some recording picked up by a French policewoman, I think, in either Libya or Algiers. It was about — and here's another little touch of irony — taking iconographic Americans out of the picture as a sort of cultural destabilization plan."

Though he now spends a lot of his time in the United States, Crowe is not an American citizen. He was born in New Zealand and has lived most of his life in Australia.

Public safety deputy director Charles Davall, who was a captain in the Princeton Borough police when Crowe was filming on campus, said Monday in an email, "No one from the FBI notified us that they had a detail watching Crowe."

Though the Bureau does not always notify law enforcement of local activities, if federal agents were in Princeton protecting Crowe "they probably [would have] notified us as a courtesy," Davall said.

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The actor, according to the BBC, told GQ he initially thought the al Qaeda plot was part of a bizarrely hatched publicity stunt to win sympathy for an Oscar nod from Academy judges, but he was eventually persuaded that the threat against him was serious.

In time, however, the FBI came to believe that the kidnapping plot had "probably, or had possibly been overstated, and then they started to question their sources," Crowe said.

Throughout the ordeal, Crowe apparently remained confused about the nature of the threat against him. "Suddenly it looks like I think I'm f--king Elvis Presley, because everywhere I go there are all these FBI guys," he told GQ. "I never fully understood what the f--k was going on."