May 28, 2014<\/p>\n
US fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden (pic) \"trained as a spy\" and worked \"undercover overseas\" for intelligence agencies, he told NBC News in excerpts of an interview aired yesterday. <\/p>\n
In his first interview in US media, Snowden hit back at claims that he was merely a low-level contractor, saying he worked \"at all levels from from the bottom on the ground, all the way to the top.\" <\/p>\n
Snowden, who has been charged in the United States with espionage, was granted asylum by Russia in August 2013 after shaking the American intelligence establishment to its core with a series of leaks on mass surveillance in the United States and around the world. <\/p>\n
In the interview, taped last week and to air in full today, Snowden defended himself against claims minimizing his intelligence experience before he stole and leaked a trove of classified documents revealing the NSA's program of phone and Internet surveillance. <\/p>\n
\"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 I'm not and even being assigned a name that was not mine,\" he said. <\/p>\n
He said he had worked covertly as \"a technical expert\" for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, as well as as a trainer for the Defence Intelligence Agency. <\/p>\n
\"I don't work with people. I don't recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I've done that at all levels from from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top,\" he said. <\/p>\n
\"So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading.\" <\/p>\n
Snowden, who left high school at 15 without graduating, made his revelations three months into his new job with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton as a systems administrator based at the NSA's threat operations center in Hawaii. <\/p>\n
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