EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Tells Brian Williams: ‘I Was Trained as a Spy’

Edward Snowden, in an exclusive interview with "Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams, is fighting back against critics who dismissed him as a low-level hacker saying he was trained as a spy and offered technical expertise to high levels of government.

Snowden defended his expertise in portions of the interview that aired at 6:30 p.m. ET on Nightly News. The extended, wide-ranging interview with Williams, his first with a U.S. television network, airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on NBC.

I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover overseas pretending to work in a job that Im not and even being assigned a name that was not mine, Snowden said in the interview.

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Snowden described himself as a technical expert who has worked for the United States at high levels, including as a lecturer in a counterintelligence academy for the Defense Intelligence Agency and undercover work for the CIA and National Security Agency.

But I am a technical specialist. I am a technical expert, he said. I dont work with people. I dont recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And Ive done that at all levels from from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top.

Last year, when Snowden began leaking details of NSA spying programs and left the country, administration officials played down his work history, using descriptions such as systems administrator to describe his role at the agency. In June, President Barack Obama himself told reporters: No, Im not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.

Snowden told Williams that those terms were misleading.

In the Defense Intelligence Agency job, Snowden said, he developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world.

So when they say Im a low-level systems administrator, that I dont know what Im talking about, Id say its somewhat misleading, he said.

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EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Tells Brian Williams: 'I Was Trained as a Spy'