Some of the best stuff in Spycraft, the book H. Keith Melton wrote with co-authors Robert Wallace and Henry Robert Schlesinger, is unfortunately not on display in his museum:

• The acoustic kitty: Trying to figure a way to plant a bug on an Asian leader, CIA spy techs learned he loved cats and let them wander freely in and out of his office. They implanted a microphone in a cat's ear, a transmitter in the loose skin on the back of her neck and an antenna woven into her fur. Didn't work. ''You really can train a cat to move small distances on command,'' Melton says. ''But only in a familiar environment. In a new place with new sounds and smells, it didn't work.'' The gray-and-white tabby, name still withheld as a national security secret, was unwired ''and lived a happy, normal life,'' Melton says.

• The untasty rat: The concept of the dead-drop -- the term spies use for places they pass covert messages and equipment -- turned disconcertingly literal in the early 1970s when it occurred to somebody that even the most hardcore KGB officers were unlikely to pick up a dead rat to see if something was hidden inside. CIA technicians immediately began to freeze-dry rat corpses with a little Velcro-fastened cavity inside where stuff could be hidden. They quickly discovered the rats also had to be treated with a healthy dose of Tabasco sauce to discourage relatives of the acoustic kitty. ''I've seen some of the rats, but I don't have one of my own,'' says a disappointed Melton.

• The exploding pancake: During World War II, OSS operatives in China figured out a way to mix high explosives into flour that could be made into pancakes -- but would also blow up if hooked to a detonator. No word on how the stuff tasted, possibly because no one lived to tell.

-- GLENN GARVIN

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