NSA leaker Edward Snowden has agreed to his first U.S. television interview. The blockbuster interview with NBC “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams is scheduled for 10 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
A preview aired Tuesday evening. Williams flew to Moscow — where Edward Snowden fled to escape U.S. prosecution — and interviewed Snowden in an undisclosed location.
The NSA has declined to comment on the NBC report so far.
Edward Snowden trained as a spy
In the excerpt from the interview, Snowden highlighted that he was trained as a spy. “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.”
Extensive intelligence career
Edward Snowden also emphasizes he was not just “a low level systems administrator” in his career in intelligence.
He said, “Now, the government might deny these things. They might frame it in certain ways, and say, oh, well, you know, he’s a low-level analyst. But what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to use one position that I’ve had in a career, here or there, to distract from the totality of my experience, which is that I’ve worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, undercover, overseas.”
Snowden continued, “I’ve worked for the National Security Agency, undercover, overseas. And I’ve worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a lecturer at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy, where I developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world.”
He concluded the point by saying: “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.”
