Edward Snowden, former National Security Agency contractor-turned whistleblower said in a rare interview in Russia that he was trained to serve the U.S. intelligence community as a traditional spy and not a low-level computer technician, as some administration officials here have sought to portray him.
Speaking to NBC News’ Brian Williams in a Moscow hotel Mr. Snowden, who has won temporary asylum in that country after fleeing the U.S. last summer, said, “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.”
Immediately U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry struck back in an interview with Charlie Rose of CBS News, daring Mr. Snowden to come back to the U.S. to face justice for exposing the NSA’s mass global surveillance of Internet and telephone communications.
Mr. Kerry said, “The bottom line is this is a man who has betrayed his country, who is sitting in Russia, an authoritarian country, where he has taken refuge. He should man up and come back to the U.S. if he has a complaint about what’s the matter with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case.”
However Mr. Snowden appeared to use the opportunity to speak out against what he suggested was the administration’s misinformation regarding his past profile as covert agent of the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Snowden said, “What they are trying to do is that they are trying to use one position to distract from the totality of my experience, which is: I’ve worked for the CIA – undercover, overseas, I’ve worked for the NSA – undercover, overseas, and I’ve worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a lecturer at the joint counter-intelligence training.”
Media reports noted that the administration confirmed that Mr. Snowden had indeed delivered at least three lectures at DIA conferences, with some quoting unspecified sources confirming that he “really used to be a CIA IT and communications specialist working overseas.”
