LONDON, United Kingdom?Russia is a virtual "mafia state" whose political parties operate "hand in hand" with organized crime, said a US memo revealed by WikiLeaks and published by the Guardian newspaper Wednesday.

Spanish prosecutor Jose Gonzalez told US officials that "he considers ... Russia to be a virtual 'mafia state'" where "one cannot differentiate between the activities of the government and organized crime groups," it said.

Gonzalez, who has been investigating Russian organized crime in Spain for a decade, also agreed with poisoned dissident Alexander Litvinenko's thesis that Russian intelligence and security services "owned organized crime."

The memo, sent in February of this year from the US embassy in Madrid, cited the senior prosecutor as claiming that "certain political parties in Russia operate 'hand in hand' with organized crime."