I read my first book about the secret doings of the CIA in 1964. It was an eye-opener called The Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross. They exposed the CIA's overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, its role at the Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba, against Sukarno in Indonesia, and covert operations in Laos and Vietnam.

From Random House, the CIA secretly got hold of the book's pre-publication galleys, and the director at the time, John McCone, demanded of Wise and Ross that they extensively delete. They held their ground and Random House did, too, warning McCone that if the agency bought up all its books the way it had threatened to do, the publisher would have to put out a second edition. So the CIA stuck with its backup plan, working to get bad reviews placed in various media.

Next week, according to this morning's Washington Post, at the behest of CIA Director Michael Hayden the agency will release hundreds of newly declassified pages relating to agency secrets from the 1950s, '60s and '70s, including illegal abuses of its authority. As the Post says, these are the "so-called 'family jewels' documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s ..." Not to mention drug experiments on unsuspecting victims.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs. "Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.

If McCone were still alive he'd probably deep-six Hayden.

The folks at The National Security Archive, one of the most compelling places to visit in wwwLand, must be drooling. The award-winning non-profit Archive based at George Washington University has been digging out classified documents for more than two decades through the Freedom of Information Act and has provided scholars and others with a wealth of information about government activity the powers-that-be would rather keep under wraps.

But the CIA's airing of its dirty laundry is what, in the Watergate days, was called a "modified limited hang-out" of documents from a long while back, and there are unlikely to be any major new revelations. We'll never know what got shredded or disposed of in burn bags. Still, the documents should add considerable detail to what was exposed by previous investigations. Some of the juiciest material as reported by the Post relates to the "rising sense of panic" in the Gerald Ford Administration as newspaper accounts revealed "skeletons in the CIA's closet."

A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was "just the tip of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation. Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow," saying, "For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro." Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964.

What may be of greatest interest is the CIA's highly illegal domestic activities, including infiltration of antiwar, African-American and other activist organizations.

Not mentioned in the Post story is the fact that the first inklings of those activities were exposed in 1967, when Robert Scheer, now at Truthdig.com, was writing for Ramparts magazine. He uncovered the CIA's infiltration and funding of the National Student Association to the tune of $400,000 a year. What the CIA got for its money was that NSA students abroad would collect information about the personalities, habits and views of foreign student leaders and the goals and policies of their organizations.

The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said yesterday, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency." Barred by secrecy restrictions from correcting "misinformation," he said, the CIA is at the mercy of the press. "Unfortunately, there seems to be an instinct among some in the media today to take a few pieces of information, which may or may not be accurate, and run with them to the darkest corner of the room," Hayden said.

Uh-huh. Sure. OK. But we'll have until a few more directors have sat at the helm of the CIA before more documents are declassified to tell us about drug-running, torture manuals and the like from the 1980s. And still more directors before we get a glimpse of how different the agency is today than it was all those years ago when it slipped LSD into the drinks of unsuspecting citizens and toppled governments at will.