The US Central Intelligence Agency is to declassify hundreds of documents detailing some of the agency's worst illegal abuses from the 1950s to 1970s.


The papers, to be released next week, will detail assassination plots, domestic spying and wiretapping, kidnapping and human experiments.

Many of the incidents are already known, but the documents are expected to give more comprehensive accounts.

It is "unflattering" but part of agency history, CIA chief Michael Hayden said.

"This is about telling the American people what we have done in their name," Gen Hayden told a conference of foreign policy historians.

The documents, dubbed the "Family Jewels", offer a "glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency".

The full 693-page file detailing CIA illegal activities was compiled on the orders of the then CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973.

He had been alarmed by accounts of CIA involvement in the Watergate scandal under his predecessor and asked CIA officials to inform him of all activities that fell outside the agency's legal charter.