In the interview, taped last week and to air in full on Wednesday, 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 Defense 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
Following the leaks, he proceeded to Hong Kong unaccompanied, where he checked into a hotel without a plan. <\/p>\n
On June 23 he headed to Moscow, two days after his 30th birthday, where he holed up in the Sheremetyevo Airport for days before he was eventually granted asylum. <\/p>\n
Snowden was \"profoundly at peace\" with his decision to leak national security documents, and even joked about the consequences, journalist Glenn Greenwald said. <\/p>\n
Meanwhile the US House of Representatives passed landmark reforms Thursday curbing bulk collection of Americans' telephone records, the first step toward restricting intelligence-gathering by the NSA since Snowden divulged the secret program. <\/p>\n
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