SAN FRANCISCO — For years, Uber secretly spied on key executives, drivers and employees at rival ride-hailing companies as part of a larger intelligence-gathering operation that spanned multiple countries, according to a letter made public in a federal court on Friday.

The 37-page letter, written on behalf of Richard Jacobs, a former Uber security employee, detailed what he described as the formation of separate internal teams designed “expressly for the purpose of acquiring trade secrets” from major ride-sharing competitors around the world.

Those teams then worked to infiltrate chat rooms and scraped websites for data on competitors, according to the letter. Uber security employees occasionally impersonated drivers to gain access to chat groups, illegally recorded phone calls, and secretly wiretapped and tailed executives at rival companies over the course of 2016, the letter said.

“Uber has engaged, and continues to engage, in illegal intelligence gathering on a global scale,” Mr. Jacobs wrote.

His letter underscores the lengths that Uber went to in order to get ahead of rivals under its former chief executive, Travis Kalanick, when it prized aggressiveness and the growth of its ride-hailing business above all else. The company is now trying to shift away from that image and stabilize after a year filled with scandals, executive departures and internal battles. Mr. Kalanick stepped down in June, and his successor, Dara Khosrowshahi, has been on an apology tour for Uber’s past behavior.

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