The image is not accidental. It was promoted through Hollywood specifically to reassure Americans that their security was in the ablest possible hands, and to awe would-be foes with the agency's supposed invincibility.

A fresh batch of newly declassified CIA documents, however, provides a more nuanced picture of the CIA's directorate of science and technology. The documents - requested under the Freedom of Information Act by Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the national security archive in Washington - chart the development of the extraordinary US spy satellites as well as the U-2 and A-12 spy planes. But they also record some of the gaffes and wrong turns along the way, which reveal the CIA's boffins to be as accident-prone as any government institution.

Some of the new documents cast light on the ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA experiments with mind-altering drugs aimed at developing a chemical aid for interrogations. The experiments involved the administration of LSD to hapless Pentagon employees. In November 1953, one of the guinea pigs, Frank Olson, is recorded to have "committed suicide a week or so after having been administered LSD by an agency representative."

An internal memo explained that: "On the day following the experiment, Olson began to behave in a peculiar and erratic manner and was later placed under the care of a psychiatrist. A few days later, Olson crashed through a window in a New York hotel in an apparent suicide."

The CIA's supply of LSD was impounded immediately afterwards. In another snapshot of folly offered by the new files, a memo dated 1967 on "Views of Trained Cats" looks into the possibility of surgically inserting microphones and transmitters into cats and using them as walking bugs. The operation was codenamed "Acoustic Kitty" and was a resounding failure.

Having wired their first trained cat for sound, they released it near a park with strict orders to eavesdrop on two men on a bench, but the poor animal was run over by a taxi before it had taken more than a few steps towards its target.

The CIA researchers came to the conclusion that they could train cats to move short distances, but that "the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that for our (intelligence) purposes, it would not be practical."

The science directorate's most bizarre adventure was perhaps its attempt to use psychics in California to "see" details of secret military installations in the distant Soviet Union. As recently as 1975, an experiment was carried out to study the credibility of what the agency described as "remote viewing".

The supposed psychic, codenamed SG1J, was given a rough description of a suspect site in Russia, and then asked to visualise it and provide details.

The experiment was another dismal failure. The psychic got a few things right (there were a few squat buildings there and a crane) but far more telling details wrong. The researcher theorised wryly that: "One explanation of this discrepancy could be that if he mentioned enough specific objects, he would surely hit on one object that is actually present."

The experiment, codenamed URDF-3, was declared unsuccessful and consigned, until now, to the CIA archives.