A file photo of CIA Director Michael Hayden attending an announcement by President George W. Bush in the East Room of the White House in Washington, September 6, 2006. The CIA is declassifying hundreds of pages of documents on secret operations from over three decades ago, Hayden said. REUTERS/Jim Young

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Central Intelligence Agency is declassifying hundreds of pages of documents on secret operations from over three decades ago, CIA Director Michael Hayden said.

The so-called “Family Jewels” document overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, according to a summary posted on the Web site of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The documents to be released next week also include accounts of break-ins and theft, surveillance of U.S. journalists, the agency’s opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, and “behavior modification” experiments on “unwitting” U.S. civilians.

“Much of it has been in the press before, and most of it is unflattering, but it’s the CIA’s history,” Hayden said in a speech on Thursday to the American Foreign Relations Conference.

“This is about telling the American people what we have done in their name,” Hayden said.

The CIA chief said the documents provide a glimpse of “a very different time and a very difference agency.”

Hayden said 147 documents, 11,000 pages of analysis done between 1953 and 1973, would be available on the CIA’s Web site.