NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, wanted by the U.S. on espionage charges, now claims on camera for the first time that he was trained as a spy by the U.S. itself -- specifically, the CIA.
"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word," Snowden told NBC News anchor Brian Williams, "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 said he'd done this work at "all levels," as an agent on the ground and "all the way to the top," for the CIA, the NSA and Defense Intelligence.
Snowden, in a preview of a full interview to be aired Wednesday, was quick to point out that he didn't think of himself as a spy in the John le Carre mode -- "I don't work with people, I don't recruit agents," he said -- but that he was a spy for an age in which "the U.S. tends to get more and better intelligence out of computers than out of people."
The former NSA contractor described a deliberate attempt on the part of the government to portray him as a "low-level analyst" or hacker who didn't really know much about the details he was leaking. "They're trying to use one position I've had in a career here or there to distract from the totality of my experience."
Snowden has been accused of being a spy before -- most recently in a Wall Street Journal op-ed -- but the contention has always been that he was spying for Russia or China from the beginning.