Vice President Cheney is fighting — and may be losing — a pitched battle with a government watchdog responsible for monitoring compliance with federal rules for protecting top-secret information.

According to congressional investigators, Mr. Cheney’s office refused an on-site inspection by the Information Security Oversight Office and subsequently urged that the unit, which is part of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, be abolished.

In a letter to the vice president yesterday, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Henry Waxman of California, challenged “the legality and the wisdom” of Mr. Cheney’s position that his office does not have to comply with an executive order that governs the handling of classified information at federal agencies.

“Your decision to exempt your office from the President’s order is problematic because it could place national security secrets at risk,” Mr. Waxman wrote. “It would appear particularly irresponsible to give an office with your history of security breaches an exemption from the safeguards that apply to all other executive branch officials.”

Aides to Mr. Cheney have asserted that they are not obligated to follow those rules because the vice president has legislative duties — as the president of the Senate — that render his office a hybrid of the executive and legislative branches. “We are confident that we are conducting the office properly under the law,” a spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Megan McGinn, said.

Mr. Waxman said the claimed exemption was galling because the vice president’s office “may have the worst record in the executive branch for safeguarding classified information.” He said the recent trial of Mr. Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., on obstruction of justice charges showed that he leaked the identity of a CIA operative.

Ms. McGinn did not respond to that, but she said a vice-presidential aide Mr. Waxman singled out for illegally passing classified information to Filipino dissidents began work under Vice President Gore.

Details of Mr. Cheney’s efforts to escape oversight of his use of classified information came as the Central Intelligence Agency promised to place some of its most embarrassing secrets on public display.

Speaking in Virginia yesterday at a conference of foreign-relations historians, the CIA director, General Michael Hayden, promised to release the bulk of a 693-page dossier known as the “family jewels.” The closely held records, gathered in 1973 by the director of central intelligence at the time, James Schlesinger, detailed a variety of CIA activities that were arguably illegal or unauthorized. “The documents provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency,” General Hayden said, according to a prepared text released by Langley.

A Washington-based research group, the National Security Archive, said other government records indicate that the “family jewels” include the extralegal detention of a Soviet defector on American soil for two years, the screening of mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, as well as surveillance of anti-war activists and a number of journalists. One target was Brit Hume, a Fox News anchor who worked in those years for a prominent columnist, Jack Anderson. The records, with limited deletions, are expected to be made public by the CIA next week.

The penchant for secrecy on the part of Mr. Cheney and his aides has been known about for some time. Indeed, in 2003, the vice president stopped reporting to the National Archives on his office’s statistics for classification and declassification. However, Mr. Waxman’s letter provided new details, such as the claim that Mr. Cheney’s staff urged that the information security office be abolished. The congressman said this and other actions “could be construed as retaliation.”

In January, the director of the security office, J. William Leonard, wrote to Attorney General Gonzales, asking him to resolve the dispute about whether Mr. Cheney’s office is subject to supervision under the executive order.

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Erik Ablin, said yesterday that the request was “under review.” He would not elaborate.

While Mr. Cheney’s office is claiming immunity from the executive order, another entity within the White House, the National Security Council, complies with the requirements. “He just thinks his office should be treated the same way the president is treated, that no one looks over his shoulder, and that’s not what the executive order says,” a classification-policy analyst who filed a formal complaint over the issue, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, said. Mr. Aftergood said it was not improper for the vice president to seek an exemption or even to seek to do away with the oversight office, but it was unacceptable for him to simply ignore the existing rules. “If anyone can unilaterally disregard the requirements of the executive order, then we are headed for chaos,” the analyst said.

Mr. Waxman’s letter said Mr. Leonard, the director of the security office, reported that an interagency group had rejected the recommendation that the oversight office be shut down.

Such a rejection, when viewed in the context of recent administration decisions to pursue talks with Iran and North Korea, could be evidence that the vice president’s influence in the administration is waning. Mr. Cheney could still go around the interagency process and intervene directly with Mr. Bush.