Special to WorldTribune.com

Bill Gertz, Washington Free Beacon

The National Security Agency carried out electronic espionage against a senior Russian crime boss in a search for ties between organized crime groups and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A classified NSA newsletter from May 2003 made public this week stated that an electronic spying request was made by the State Department in 2002 for intelligence collection on the phones of Vladimir Kumarin, a St. Petersburg businessman and reputed boss of the Tambov crime syndicate.

“State wanted to learn whether there were any links between the St. Petersburg syndicate and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had been deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the mid 1990’s,” the document states. … The report did not disclose the results of the monitoring of Kumarin’s phones or whether it produced evidence of links between the mafia leader and Putin.

Putin, a former KGB intelligence officer, became president of Russia in May 2000 and held the post until 2008. He again became president in May 2012. Since taking over in 2012, Putin has adopted hostile policies toward the United States and the West. The Russian president has been widely linked to corruption during his time in St. Petersburg and after, and is believed by U.S. officials to have amassed an illicit fortune estimated to be at least $28 billion.

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  LIFE, NSA probed Putin’s alleged St. Petersburg connections, WorldTribune.com