For nearly ten years beginning in 1993, Robert Eringer lived a clandestine life of intrigue, conducting a spectrum of covert operations for the FBI's foreign counterintelligence division. His primary assignment: to lure American traitor Edward Lee Howard to capture.

About to be arrested by the FBI for spying for Moscow, CIA officer Howard defected to the Soviet Union in 1985. But then he wanted to tell his story to the World. Utilizing cover as a book publishing consultant, the author gained Howard's trust as his editor and confidant. As Eringer's skillfully orchestrated ruse progressed, he pierced not only Howard's inner circle of KGB cronies—including the KGB's former chairman, making him an unwitting intelligence asset—but also Howard's Cuban intelligence contact network in Havana. Only at the eleventh hour did a highly politicized Justice Department order Howard's "extraordinary rendition" scrapped; he died mysteriously under ominous circumstances in Moscow in 2002. Nonetheless, the secrets Eringer gathered shed light on such sensitive espionage cases as the treachery of senior CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames and FBI traitor Robert Hanssen.

In addition to his counter-espionage docket, Eringer undertook assignments for the FBI's criminal division, including a ruse he devised to hasten the extradition from France of notorious convicted murderer Ira Einhorn. Ruse tells the unknown side of a significant piece of U.S. intelligence history, an unvarnished insider's view of the FBI between the end of the Cold War and the events of 9/11.