Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden said he was “a trained spy.” He revealed this information in his first extensive interview to an American media outlet.
“I was trained as a spy, in the 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 NBC during an interview recorded last week in Russia.
He fled to Russia after revealing secret information about the NSA’s surveillance systems last year. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday called Snowden a fugitive and challenged him to “man up and come back to the United States.”
CCTV’s Jim Spellman reports.