In 2008, almost two decades after the Cold War was officially consigned to the history books, an average American guy in his twenties helped to bring down a top Russian spy based at the United Nations. This American had no formal espionage training. Everything he knew about spying he'd learned from books, movies, video games, and TV. And yet, with the help of an initially reluctant FBI duo, he ended up at the center of a highly successful counterintelligence operation that targeted Russian espionage in America. How to Catch a Russian Spy is an American civilian's first-person account of how a post-college adventure became a real-life U.S. intelligence coup. For four nerve-wracking years, he worked as a double agent, spying on America for the Russians, trading cash for sensitive U.S. military secrets, handing over thumb-drives of valuable technical data, pretending to sell out his country across noisy restaurant tables and in quiet parking lots. Now, for the first time, he will reveal the fascinating mechanics behind his double-agent operation--from cutting-edge spy gear to coded signals on Craigslist to the Russians' propensity for Hooters' buffalo wings--that helped disrupt Russia's New York-based espionage apparatus and forced Moscow to reassign its top operatives.