by Jay Winik

About the author: Historian Jay Winik is a scholar at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Affairs and the author of April 1865: The Month That Saved America.

In 1995, a little-known operative, Abdul Hakim Murad, was arrested in the Philippines on a policeman’s hunch. Inside Murad’s apartment were passports and a homemade bomb factory—beakers, filters, fuses and funnels; gallons of sulfuric acid and nitric acid; large cooking kettles.

Handed over to intelligence agents, Murad was violently tortured. For weeks, according to the book “Under the Crescent Moon,” agents struck him with a chair and pounded him with a heavy piece of wood, breaking nearly every rib. But Mu- rad said nothing. He taunted them. So they...