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.

These skeletons, and the are many, include:

The confinement of a Soviet defector in the mid-1960s,
assassination plots of foreign leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro by a CIA funded Mafia group,
wiretapping and surveillance of journalists,
behaviour modification experiments (read, drug tests) on "unwitting" US citizens,
surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971,
opening from 1953 to 1973 of letters to and from the Soviet Union; from 1969 to 1972 of mail to and from China,

and on and on.... Hmmm, I wonder what will be exposed in the future of the CIA actions of recent years.

Read the BBC article

See the 'Jewels' yourself (scroll down to first article and click on "Family Jewels") via the CIA

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