NBC has released portions of Edward Snowden’s interview with Brian Williams—his first with a U.S. network—and so far, it has not disappointed. The former private NSA contractor, who is now living in Russia after leaking millions of documents outlining the American government’s broad spying efforts, told Williams that he was, in fact, an undercover spy. He also suggested that when President Obama and other officials referred to him as a “low-level systems administrator”, that they were being intentionally misleading. In addition to telling NBC that he had given lectures in counterintelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency and was a “technical specialist,” Snowden said he had gone undercover for the CIA: “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 CIA would not issue a comment to NBC about Snowden’s new admissions. The rest of his interview airs tonight …
