"I was working as a secret agent and living in foreign countries, pretending to do a job I didn't do and using a name that wasn't my real one."
Edward Snowden, the former consultant for the US National Security Agency (NSA) who caused an international uproar when he revealed the extent of the agency's surveillance of telecommunications, said in an interview with an American television network that he was "trained as a spy" and that he has worked as a secret agent in foreign countries on behalf of American government agencies.
In excerpts of his interview from Moscow on NBC Nightly News, which aired on Tuesday, Snowden rejected his critics' comments that he was a low-level analyst.
"It's no secret that the US tends to collect more and better information today from computers than from people," Snowden told the show's host Brian Williams.
"I trained as a spy in a way in the traditional sense of the word, which is in the sense that I was working as a secret agent and living in foreign countries, pretending to do a job that I wasn't doing and using a name that wasn't my real one," Snowden said.
He described himself as a "technical expert" and said: "I don't work with people, I don't recruit agents. What I do is put systems in place for the United States. And I've done that at every level, from the lowest to the top.".
Snowden said he worked as a covert agent overseas for both the CIA and the NSA and taught at the Counterintelligence Academy "where I devised sources and methods for securing information and people in the most hostile and dangerous parts of the world. So when my critics say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I would say that's kind of misleading," Snowden added.
His entire interview will be aired on NBC tonight.
Snowden fled to Hong Kong and then to Moscow last year. He is believed to have obtained 1.7 million electronic documents. The leaks revealed the existence of massive NSA programs to collect information about email addresses, phone calls and Internet usage of hundreds of millions of Americans.
The US has charged him with theft of government property, unauthorized disclosure of national defense information, and willful disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons.
Source: protothema.gr
