EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Tells Brian Williams: 'I Was Trained as a Spy'
Edward
Snowden, in an exclusive interview with "Nightly News" anchor Brian
Williams, is fighting back against critics who dismissed him as a
low-level hacker — saying he was “trained as a spy” and offered
technical expertise to high levels of government.
Snowden defended his
expertise in portions of the interview that aired at 6:30 p.m. ET on
Nightly News. The extended, wide-ranging interview with Williams, his
first with a U.S. television network, airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on
NBC.
“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,” Snowden said in the
interview.
Snowden described
himself as a technical expert who has worked for the United States at
high levels, including as a lecturer in a counterintelligence academy
for the Defense Intelligence Agency and undercover work for the CIA and
National Security Agency.
“But I am a technical
specialist. I am a technical expert,” he said. “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.”
Last year, when Snowden
began leaking details of NSA spying programs and left the country,
administration officials played down his work history, using
descriptions such as “systems administrator” to describe his role at the
agency. In June, President Barack Obama himself told reporters: “No,
I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.”
Snowden told Williams that those terms were “misleading.”
In the Defense
Intelligence Agency job, Snowden said, he “developed sources and methods
for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and
dangerous environments around the world.”
“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 said.
The Defense Intelligence
Agency confirmed to NBC News that Snowden, as a contractor, had spoken
at three of their conferences. Two intelligence sources tell NBC that
Snowden worked for the CIA at an overseas station in IT and
communications.
The CIA declined to
comment on Snowden’s employment or his role at the agency, instead
referring to the testimony of Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper, specifically his statement before the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence in January of this year:
“Snowden claims that
he’s won and that his mission is accomplished. If that is so, I call on
him and his accomplices to facilitate the return of the remaining stolen
documents that have not yet been exposed, to prevent even more damage
to U.S. security.”
The NBC News interview
was conducted last week in Moscow after months of preparation. Russia
has granted Snowden temporary asylum.
Williams has described
the interview as “months in the making and cloaked in the secrecy of his
life as a fugitive living in exile overseas.”
Snowden, now 30, left
the government and later worked later worked for private intelligence
contractors inside NSA outposts, including in Japan and Hawaii.
While working for the
contractors, he downloaded up to 1.7 million secret documents about U.S.
intelligence-gathering and partnerships with foreign allies, according
to U.S. officials, including some that revealed the extent of data
collection from U.S. telephone records and Internet activity.
The United States
charged him with espionage and revoked his passport. Snowden flew to
Moscow but was unable to continue to Latin America because he no longer
had a passport.
Among the revelations in
the documents taken by Snowden was the NSA’s bulk collection of phone
and Internet metadata from U.S. users, spying on personal communications
of foreign leaders, and the NSA’s ability to tap undersea fiber-optic
cables and siphon data.
Snowden documents
also were the basis for three exclusive NBC News digital reports, on
Jan. 27, Feb. 4 and Feb. 7, as well as a report on Nightly News,
documenting operations by British cyber spies to monitor YouTube and other social media services and to use an array of “dirty tricks” against nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers.
Obama appointed a review
board that criticized the domestic data collection. In March the
president recommended ending bulk domestic metadata collection, and last
week the House passed a bill to end it.
NBC News' Robert Windrem contributed to this report.
