The CIA is airing its dirty laundry from more than three decades ago by releasing the bulk of a key dossier on the agency’s role in assassination attempts, kidnapping, and domestic surveillance efforts that may have been illegal or unauthorized.

The 702-page collection posted on the Web yesterday was the product of a 1973 call by the then director of central intelligence, James Schlesinger, for all agency employees to report any incident where officials might have violated the CIA’s charter. The resulting compilation of alleged agency misdeeds was considered so sensitive that it was dubbed “the family jewels.”

The director of the research group that requested the file 15 years ago, the National Security Archive, said the records fill in blanks about activities investigated by congressional committees in the 1970s. “There are just some real juicy details in here,” a researcher, Thomas Blanton, said.

Among them are that a White House aide convicted in the Watergate affair, E. Howard Hunt Jr., contacted his former colleagues at the CIA just months before the break-in to inquire about hiring “a lockpicker who might be retiring or resigning from the agency.” A résumé for a recently retired technician was sent to Hunt, the papers say.

One action viewed as flatly illegal by some in the agency was the detention from 1964 to 1967 of a Russian defector, Yuri Nosenko. The records say he was kept at a safehouse in Clinton, Md., for more than a year before being transferred “to a specially constructed ‘jail’ in a remote wooded area.” CIA lawyers “became increasingly concerned about the illegality of the Agency’s position,” the documents indicate. Mr. Nosenko was eventually given better digs and a new identity.

Despite the misgivings among some at the CIA about wiretapping and physical surveillance aimed at journalists publishing classified information, the records show that some of the work proved quite successful. “Project Mockingbird,” which involved snooping on two newspaper columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott, was “particularly productive in identifying contacts of the newsmen, their method of operation, and many of their sources of information,” an agency memo said. A dozen senators, six congressmen, 11 congressional aides, and White House officials were pegged as leakers.

Other targets of the CIA’s anti-leak efforts included a Washington Post reporter, Michael Getler, and a prominent columnist, Jack Anderson. Some of Anderson’s “leg men” were also followed, including Brit Hume, who is now a Fox News anchor.

Mr. Getler, who is now the ombudsman for PBS, said yesterday that he had no inkling about the surveillance at the time but was briefed on it in 1975 by the then director of central intelligence, William Colby. “Colby apologized. He said it never should have happened and they were wrong,” the newsman said. “He made it clear it was quite extensive at the time they were doing it. They were sort of around-the-clock.”

Some of the records show concern inside the CIA decades ago about surveillance efforts similar to the warrantless wiretapping program President Bush authorized after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

To aid anti-drug efforts, the CIA worked with the National Security Agency to intercept phone calls between Latin American countries and America. However, the CIA broke off its involvement in 1973 on advice of its lawyers. “The General Counsel has ruled that such intercept is … in violation of CIA’s statutory responsibilities,” one memo reports. The legal opinion does not seem to apply directly to the program Mr. Bush set up, which is being challenged in the courts.

Many of the records discuss surveillance and analysis of domestic dissident groups, particularly those protesting the Vietnam War. The CIA tracked John Lennon’s donations to anti-war groups and attempted to determine whether those groups might disrupt the Republican Convention in 1972.

There are several New York connections to the disclosed documents. One reportedly satisfied recipient of a CIA report on black radicalism in the Caribbean was a White House aide who went on to become a senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Some of the CIA reports discuss ties between foreign radicals and black militants in America, but it is unclear whether the future senator saw those documents.

The papers also discuss a program set up at a postal facility at John F. Kennedy International Airport to examine mail to and from the Soviet Union, as well as some other mail that was not described further. “The mail was placed in bags by the regular Post Office employees and stacked,” one memo reads. “After their departure for the night, the Agency employees would open the mail and photograph it.”

Some of the family jewels are remaining under wraps, as are details such as the location of the makeshift jail set up for Mr. Nosenko. “Even though this is a historical set of documents, some of the information remains relevant and needs to be protected,” a CIA spokesman, George Little, said.

The agency also released more than 10,000 pages of analytical reports yesterday on China, the Soviet Union, and relations between the two countries.