Washington, July 21 (RHC)-- U.S. intelligence agencies have been spying on Russian President Vladimir Putin for over the past twenty years, a report says. The United States’ intelligence community started to show interest in Putin back in the 1990’s when he was the deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, according to a report published in the British daily The Times.

“Mr. Putin . . . was part and parcel of looting the state; and he was involved in it for years,” a former CIA station chief in Moscow, Richard Palmer, was quoted as saying in the report. Palmer made the claims to a U.S. congressional committee in 1999, the report added.

Despite all the interest invested in Putin, little is actually known about the amount of the Russian president’s wealth or its locations, according to the report. Recently other reports have surfaced, implicating U.S. intelligence agencies in espionage on world leaders and officials.

In one of the latest revelations, WikiLeaks documents showed on July 4 that the U.S. National Security Agency had spied on several key Brazilian government officials, including President Dilma Rousseff.

In July, the whistleblower website released new documents pointing to NSA spying since the 1990s on high-profile German politicians, including Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel and others in the Ministries of Finance, Economy, and Agriculture.

In 2013, U.S. whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone was among the American agency’s targets.