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		Convicted assassin PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - In his letters, Kasi says the seeds of the idea were planted while he watched U.S. warplanes bomb Iraqi troops as they withdrew from Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. "Once the Iraqis withdrew from Kuwait then the continued bombings of Iraq were not justified," he wrote. "I did not want to become famous. I wanted to punish those who do wrong things against Muslim countries like Iraq." While Kasi admits to the shootings, he disputes a key part of the prosecution's case: that he shot one of his victims, CIA employee Frank Darling, in the back, and then shot him again in the head. "I started shooting at cars in front of me. When the shooting finished I was returning back to my Isuzu pickup ... I shot at him from front. I did not [go] back and to the back of his car. I shot him several times from the front. I sat in my pickup and drove away," he wrote in one letter. In another, he explained: "[Darling's] car was the last one on the left [of the] left turning lanes and he was looking at me ... I looked at him before shooting ... There was a child also in the car, in the front seat standing [and] looking at me. He was I think maybe five or six years old. I didn't see the wife of Darling in the car." Actually there was no child in the car. FBI spokeswoman Susan Lloyd speculated that Kasi mistook the head of Darling's wife, Judy, who was trying to get under the dashboard of their Volkswagen Golf, for a child. Kasi did not think he would get away after the shootings. "I thought I will be arrested, or maybe killed in a shootout with CIA guards or police," Kasi said. Instead, he just hopped back into his Isuzu pickup truck and drove off, leaving the bloody carnage in his rear-view mirror. Kasi painted a rosy picture of his four-and-a-half-year sojourn in Afghanistan after the killings, saying he was welcomed as a "hero" by fundamentalist Muslims who took power in May 1992, including then-Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. "Would you believe I rode with the prime minister in his black Mercedes to a place of worship -- I did!" Kasi wrote. "I was respected by the people there as a hero, and in the four years there not a single person told me you did a wrong thing by attacking the CIA. They all said you did a great job." Kasi spent most of his time in the border regions near Pakistan, traveling with and protected by his fellow Pushtun tribesman. One day he was sitting under a tree listening to his radio when he heard a report that the man wanted in the CIA killings had been captured. "First, I got surprised. Who have they arrested? And then I started laughing with myself and saying to myself, I am sitting under this tree and they are saying the man has been arrested. It was real funny -- and I enjoyed hearing such news." On another occasion he heard that two men had been arrested in Quetta by the FBI and taken to Islamabad. "They had arrested the wrong Aimal. After a week or 10 days they came back home to Quetta." An FBI agent who worked on the case disputed this element of Kasi's account. "There were reports like that all the time over there. I stopped reading them." As the years passed, Kasi drifted from place to place in Afghanistan, usually not staying more than two weeks in any one spot, dreaming of a permanent safe haven somewhere -- perhaps in Iran, perhaps in the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. He'd been to Iran in 1984, he told me, but didn't find much to admire in the Iranian revolution. He also fantasized about going to Greece, getting a job on a ship and slipping back into the U.S. to hit the CIA again. "I'd take a taxi to CIA headquarters, and when the taxi reached the same lights and the left-turning lanes outside CIA headquarters, I will jump out of taxi and shoot some more CIA officials," he told me, then "escape in one of the dead official's car." "These were the thoughts that used to come into my mind." Kasi began to believe that the U.S. and Pakistani security services had given up on trying to find him. He often crossed into Pakistan to buy newspapers or see friends and "nobody ever interrogated me," he says. "All they ask[ed] was who are you, and I will say I am an Afghan ... and if they want to see my I.D. I will show them a false I.D.," which he said were easy to get. If a guard balked, he'd give him "100 rupees" -- less than three cents -- and waltz through. His life on the lam began to unravel in June 1997, however, when some fellow Pushtun tribesmen -- reportedly persuaded by millions of dollars in American reward money -- inveigled him into an alleged scheme to smuggle Russian electronic goods into Pakistan. "The promises were doing a business deal, buying a large amount of Russian goods in Afghanistan, selling them in (Pakistan)," he wrote, adding that he was also promised an "I.D. and legal documents (from) this area." Last June 15, Kasi was lured to Dera Ghazi Khan, a dusty bazaar town in central Pakistan, and booked a room in a hotel. At 4 a.m., a team of FBI agents busted into his room, nabbed him and flew him back to the United States without an extradition hearing. The move caused howls of outrage in Pakistan, and the U.S. government has never admitted it caught Kasi there. Speculation was rife in Pakistan that relatives of Farook Leghari, then Pakistan's president, had helped set up Kasi. But Kasi refused to identify anyone, saying, "People will get killed." "I want to make it clear (that) the people who tricked me ... were Pushtuns, they were owners of land in the Leghari and Khosa clan areas in Dera Ghazi Khan," but "I will never name them," he wrote. Kasi's likely death sentence has hardly dampened his fury. But he insisted that "I am not against the USA or the American people. I am against the policies of the U.S. government toward Islamic countries or toward Muslims." "A lot of young people in Pakistan," he said, "think mostly the same." SALON | Jan. 22, 1998 Jeff Stein covers national security and criminal justice issues for Salon.