By Allan Lengel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 28, 2006
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.
"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.
In 1997, a few weeks after capturing the CIA killer in Pakistan, Garrett was back home working the triple slaying at a Georgetown area Starbucks, which appeared to be a robbery that went bad.
He teamed up with Jim Trainum, a skilled D.C. police detective. They played good cop-bad cop with suspect Carl Cooper, with whom they had spoken but had not arrested. Cooper hated Trainum and talked of harming him.
But not Garrett.
"He ain't never disrespected me or my wife," Cooper said in a conversation that was taped secretly by investigators. "I kind of like" him, Cooper said, describing the agent as "cool."
In the end, after a cat-and-mouse game of more than a year, Cooper confessed. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
"We would have never solved the Starbucks case if it hadn't been for Brad Garrett's abilities and energy," Trainum said. "He taught me so much. He spoiled me. He's the person you want to have on every case."
In the summer of 2001, Garrett entered the Levy case, and shortly after the Washington area sniper suspects were arrested in October 2002, Garrett and a Fairfax County detective met with Lee Boyd Malvo.
"I couldn't get him to look at me," Garrett said. "He kept looking over the top of me."
So Garrett tried to engage the teenager. "We started talking about movies, the Mel Gibson movie 'We Were Soldiers,' " Garrett said. "And he eventually . . . said [that] as they were driving away from the shooting at Home Depot, they were watching 'We Were Soldiers' on a DVD in this car.
"The movie he latched [onto] the most was 'The Matrix,' and the only thing he would say about what had occurred was, 'It's all about 'The Matrix.' "
Then the teenager who had been taught how to shoot guns by John Allen Muhammad laid out the details of their deadly spree.
For all of Garrett's successes, other cases fill his brain, including the Levy case and the 1999 slayings of an Iraqi, Fuad K. Taima, his wife, Dorothy, and 16-year-old son, Leith.
But perhaps the one that haunts him most deeply is the killing of Kieuoanh Thi "Nina" Nguyen, 35, and her son Ryobi, 2. Mother and child were kidnapped from their Franconia home in November 1995. A ransom demand was made by phone from the home to the husband, who was in Vietnam on business, but no further contact was made.
About six months later, a fisherman found a trash can in a Springfield pond. Inside, the mother and son were bound and gagged, facing each other.
"It's an image you can't get out of your mind," Garrett said.
What does such a storied ex-FBI agent do for an encore? Garrett plans to start an investigative consulting business.
But he'll miss being an agent.
"There's a tremendous intensity working these cases," he said. "It becomes addictive to a certain extent. I'm sure for a period of time I'll feel a tremendous loss."
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