Celebrated FBI Agent Will Retire Haunted by Those Who Got Away

Time is running out for FBI agent Brad Garrett, who helped solve the Starbucks slayings in the Georgetown area, helped persuade sniper Lee Boyd Malvo to confess and flew to Pakistan to help nab the man who gunned down two CIA workers outside the agency's headquarters in McLean.

One of the most renowned agents to work in the FBI's Washington field office, he will retire Thursday after 16 years in Washington and 21 years in all -- regretfully, he said, before he can solve some of his most famous cases. The mandatory retirement age is 57. He is 58, finishing up a one-year extension approved by the FBI director.

In recent weeks, Garrett has hardly acted like a guy winding things down. Even now, he holds out a measure of hope, conducting interviews, checking criminal records -- and hopping on a plane recently to track a possible lead in the slaying of Chandra Levy.

Besides the Levy killing, Garrett has his sights on solving the case of a Vietnamese woman and her 2 1/2 -year-old son slain in Fairfax County in 1995, possibly the victims of Asian organized crime. And the 1999 execution-style slaying in McLean of an Iraqi woman, her son and her husband, who was working on a food-for-oil deal with Iraq.

"It causes me a lot of anxiety," Garrett said. "Not that somebody else can't solve these cases. Of course they can. Cases become sort of part of you, and these kind of cases tend to do that more so because they are investigated for so many years."

Prone to dressing in black, Garrett looks more like a music mogul than an FBI agent. But beyond the hip, calm exterior is a former probation officer with a doctorate in criminology who has gained gushing admiration from co-workers and police detectives -- and even the grudging approval of some criminals he has caught.

"He's accomplished, confident, he's a very patient interviewer," said FBI agent Chuck Knowles. "He makes that connection with people, and they want to tell him their secrets."

Ronald H. Chavarro, Garrett's FBI supervisor, added: "He's empathetic, he's nonjudgmental, he's approachable. . . . They don't come any better than him.

"He had no interest in going into management; he's had no interest but investigating cases," Chavarro added. "That's been his passion."

Co-workers said that fervor has helped Garrett chalk up one confession after another, including that of Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani who methodically fired an assault rifle into the car windows of CIA workers in 1993.

To coax that admission, Garrett and other agents first had to find Kasi, an odyssey that stretched across continents and 4 1/2 years.

On June 15, 1997, Garrett and three other FBI agents tracked Kasi to a seedy hotel in Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border. At 4 a.m., the FBI agents stood in the hall as an informant knocked on the door to wake Kasi for morning prayer. Words were exchanged in Urdu. Kasi unlocked the door, and the agents tackled him.