Fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden is biting back at critics' claims that he was a low-level hacker, telling NBC's Nightly News, "I was trained as a spy."
The 30-year-old revealed his alleged undercover intelligence work for the CIA and National Security Agency in a newly released excerpt of his first-ever American television interview set to air Wednesday.
"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 told news anchor Brian Williams in a sit-down interview in Moscow.
The covert description follows the Obama Administration's previous downplay of him as a lowly "systems administrator," one not worth scrambling a team together to chase.
In contrast, Snowden, who has been hiding in Russia under temporary asylum while facing espionage charges in the U.S., called himself "a technical specialist. I am a technical expert."
"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 argued. “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.”
He maintained that he was further hired as a lecturer by the Defense Intelligence Agency for a counterintelligence academy before leaking national security documents.
The Defense Intelligence Agency indeed confirmed to NBC that Snowden had spoken at three of their conferences, as a contractor.
Other sources described him as having worked for the CIA in IT and communications at an overseas station.
That role was not elaborated on, however.
Snowden's full interview is scheduled to air Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on NBC.
ngolgowski@nydailynews.com
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