MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

CIA releases past secrets activities from the 1950s to 1970s.

The US Central Intelligence Agency has posted hundreds of once secret documents on its website.

The papers include documents known as the "Family Jewels" detailing some of the agency's worst abuses and illegal activities from the 1950s to 1970s. Other documents include the CIA's analysis of the Soviet and Chinese leaderships at the time. Many of the incidents were already known, but the documents provide more comprehensive accounts of events. Last week, CIA chief Michael Hayden announced the decision to declassify the records, saying the documents were "unflattering but part of CIA history". The "Family Jewels" documents consist of some 700 pages of responses from CIA employees to a 1973 directive from the agency's director, James Schlesinger. 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. The documents detail assassination plots, domestic spying, wiretapping, and kidnapping. The incidents include: ? the confinement of a Soviet KGB defector, Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko, in the mid-1960s ? attempts to use a suspected Mafia mobster, Johnny Roselli, in a plot to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro ? the wiretapping and surveillance of journalists, including in 1972 columnist Jack Anderson who broke a string of scandals. Among the documents is a request in 1972 for someone "who was accomplished at picking locks" who might be retiring or resigning from the agency. The other set of documents are known as the CAESAR-POLO-ESAU papers - 11,000 pages of analysis done between 1953 and 1973 on Soviet and Chinese internal politics and Sino-Soviet relations. Among the papers are an analysis of the Soviet leadership completed some four months after the death of Josef Stalin in 1953. The CIA's report, stamped "Top Secret", said the Soviets carried out a hasty shake-up of top posts to head off possible "panic and disarray" following Stalin's death. "It is strongly suggested that the leaders in this moment of crisis had moved swiftly to show their unity and to gird themselves for any battle that might be coming form inside and out," the CIA report said. More information: www.foia.cia.gov