Celebrated FBI Agent Will Retire Haunted by Those Who Got Away

"He was screaming" so hard as the agents struggled to cuff him that they then gagged him, Garrett recalled. But he still wasn't sure they had the right guy. Kasi looked heavier than the shooter and had a beard. After the gag was removed, Kasi refused to give his name, instead hurling an expletive "in very clear, almost eloquent English."

"We laid him face down on the bed, and I had fingerprints with me in a bag and a fingerprint kit, so I took an ink pad and hit his thumb," Garrett said. Then Garrett took out a flashlight and a magnifying glass. The prints matched.

On the plane ride back to the United States, Kasi confessed to the slayings.

"He was sort of straightforward about it, saying, 'Look, it's not right what the U.S. is doing in Muslim countries, and they're using the CIA to manipulate governments,' " Garrett said.

The two developed a relationship. They exchanged letters, and Garrett visited Kasi occasionally. Garrett also watched Kasi die from a lethal injection at a prison in Jarratt, Va., in November 2002 and remembered walking away feeling "a sort of hollowness. It completely drains you of energy, emotions."

"He understood I was doing my job," Garrett said. "He respected me because I treated him with respect."

Garrett got a confession from another infamous fugitive, Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, while in Pakistan during an earlier, unsuccessful hunt for Kasi.

In February 1995, Pakistani authorities were about to nab Yousef in an Islamabad guesthouse, and Garrett got a call to accompany them. After Garrett helped transport Yousef to a secure facility, the former fugitive confessed to the U.S. agent that he had directed the bombing.

Garrett, an ex-Marine who grew up in Indiana, joined the FBI in Nashville before moving to the Washington field office in 1990, where he became adept at criminal profiling and hostage negotiations and earned a reputation as a tireless investigator.

"He works on his cases 24-7," said retired FBI agent and friend Susan Lloyd. "If need be, there's no such thing as a weekend or a close of business."

In recent years, Garrett said, he has gotten better about not obsessing about his cases on his off time, and last year he married a federal prosecutor who worked on the Levy case.

Throughout his career, Garrett has navigated easily back and forth between international and local cases.