The surgeon general doesn't know the half of it: H. Keith Melton's got a cigarette that isn't just bad for your health. It can kill, abruptly and noisily.

''You stick it in your mouth,'' Melton explains, gesturing, ``pull it sharply like this to release the safety, and then you squeeze the filter to fire a .22-caliber bullet.''

If you think the cigarette-gun sounds like a daffy outtake from the spy spoof Get Smart, you're on the right track . . . almost. It was a real weapon issued to American spies during World War II by the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. And now it's one of thousands of espionage artifacts that Melton maintains in a private museum in his Palm Beach County home.

From microdot film barely visible to the human eye to a midget one-man submarine, Melton -- an intelligence historian whose latest book, Spycraft (Dutton, $29.95), is a fascinating and often funny compendium of spook contraptions -- has packed his house with espionage exotica:

• The bat bomb. During World War II, OSS scientists experimented with a scheme to parachute cages filled with a million bats strapped with tiny incendiary bombs over Japan. The idea was that the cages would open during descent, and the bats would flock like furry little suicide bombers to the attics and eaves of Japanese houses, igniting a catastrophic firestorm.

''It turned out the bats didn't travel well, so they abandoned the idea,'' explains Melton as he examines one of the bomb-shaped cages. ``But from a technical standpoint, the idea worked perfectly -- really perfectly. Some of the bats got loose during a test and burned down an air base in New Mexico.''

• The killer umbrella. In 1978, Bulgarian intelligence agents assassinated an exile critic of their country's communist regime as he waited at a London bus stop. The weapon: an umbrella that contained a tube of compressed gas, which fired a pellet the size of a pinhead into his skin. ''It was filled with ricin, one of the most toxic substances on Earth,'' Melton says. ``The KGB manufactured these umbrellas and used them for political assassinations around the world.''

• The spy who loved me or, at least, turned me on. During the 1950s, the CIA began passing messages to its spies overseas in microdots -- photographic negatives so tiny they could be concealed in the dot of a typed exclamation point like this! But for a spy to keep a microscope around the house to read the microdots would invite detection. Happily, the CIA found a photographic novelty company that manufactured small, unobtrusive lenses, and ordered 100 of them. ''When they arrived, it turned out they were pre-loaded with porn photos,'' Melton cackles. ``That's what they were used for, porn peep-viewers.''

The museum, a sort of little brother to the 20,000-square-foot International Spy Museum that Melton runs in Washington, D.C., consumes three large visible rooms in Melton's house and who knows how many hidden ones behind the 37 -- no kidding, 37 -- secret doors, hidden panels and fake bookcases. (''I just love stuff like that,'' he concedes.)

It's not all devoted to gizmos. The shelves are stacked with everything from the mundane (the tea samovar used by KGB spy Kim Philby after he fled Great Britain for Moscow) to the macabre (the model skull prepared by Mexican authorities in their investigation of the murder of exiled Communist renegade Leon Trotsky). There's even an official spy in residence -- the ashes of defected Soviet intelligence officer Alexander Orlov, along with the whistle he always wore around his neck to summon aid if Stalin's agents tried to kidnap him.

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