edward_snowden_head_shot_2Edward Snowden, "I am a real spy, not low-level system administrator"

Edward Snowden was trained as a professional spy and actually worked undercover abroad for America's biggest intelligence agencies, developing their IT security architecture, the whistleblower revealed in an exclusive interview to NBC News.

"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 told Brian Williams, anchor on NBC's on Nightly Newsю

"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 NBC News pointed out that once Edward Snowden started to leak sensitive information about the methods and scale of NSA global surveillance, the Obama administration tended to speak about him as small fry, a thievish hacker that happened to be a system administrator at the NSA quite by chance.

"No, I'm not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker," President Barack Obama said, shrugging Snowden off last June.

Edward Snowden specifically stressed that he did not "work with people," being busy securing IT data for the US intelligence.

"I am a technical specialist. I am a technical expert," Snowden told NBC. "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 the bottom on the ground all the way to the top," he said.

Snowden specified that he was not only involved in undercover work for the CIA and the NSA, but actually taught others the specific skills he knew.

"What they are trying to do is that they are trying to use one position to distract from the totality of my experience, which is: I've worked for the Central Intelligence Agency – undercover, overseas, 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 counter-intelligence training," Snowden revealed.

The agency confirmed to NBC that Snowden delivered at least three lectures at DIA conferences. Two unspecified sources also confirmed to NBC that Snowden really used to be a CIA IT and communications specialist working overseas.
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