National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is attempting to silence government officials who downplayed his role at the spy agency, classifying him as a low-level analyst, and is instead claiming he was “trained as a spy.”
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Snowden discussed his job within the NSA during a wide-ranging interview with NBC “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams, a portion of which aired Tuesday.
“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,” the NSA whistleblower said.
Snowden told Williams he had done covert work with both the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency, and worked as a lecturer in the counterintelligence academy at the Defense Intelligence Agency. However, the government, he said, will attempt to downplay his roles.
“The government might deny these things, they may frame it a certain way 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,” Snowden said.
The NSA whistleblower did acknowledge that he doesn’t “work with people” or “recruit agents,” and classified his work as that of a technical specialist or expert.
The Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed to NBC News that Snowden did work as a contractor and addressed three conferences. Additionally, sources within the CIA told NBC Snowden worked for the agency abroad in IT and communications.
“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,” Snowden told Williams.
President Barack Obama, though, classified Snowden as nothing more than a “hacker” and lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee argued the former NSA contractor “over-inflated his position.”
Since providing documents to The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and others, which exposed the NSA’s surveillance programs, Snowden is wanted on espionage charges and currently lives in Russia, where he was granted temporary asylum.
