US spying on states that challenge Western hegemony: Analyst

US intelligence agencies have been spying on states that pose a geopolitical challenge to Western hegemony, as well as allies, part of a decades-long policy dating back to the Cold War, a political analyst from Virginia says.

“Espionage conducted by the United States, whether it’s electronic surveillance or some other kind is nothing new,” said Keith Preston, chief editor and director of AttacktheSystem.com, a website dedicated to raising awareness against domestic and foreign US government policies.

“Ever since the end of World War ll since the late 1940s and the onset of the Cold War, the United States has conducted large-scale espionage operations all over the world against many, many different nations,” Preston told Press TV on Sunday.

“The United States has always had a habit of engaging in espionage, even when it comes to allied nations,” he added. “That’s been standard practice by the American intelligence services for well over half a century or longer.”

Preston made the comments as a new report shows that American intelligence agencies have been spying on Russian President Vladimir Putin for over the past twenty years.

The United States’ intelligence community started to show interest in Putin back in the 1990s when he was the deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, according to a report published in the British daily The Times on Saturday

“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 US congressional committee in 1999, the report added.

Preston said the new report about US spies tracking Putin “makes perfect sense” because “ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States has been concerned about which direction will Russia go in.”

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