Kerry demands Snowden toughen up, face justice in US
28 May 2014, 17:12 -- US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday that fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden should 'man up' and return to the United States to face justice for revealing the country's security secrets.
'This is a man who has betrayed his country,' Kerry told CBS News. 'He should man up and come back to the US.'
'The fact is, he has damaged his country very significantly. I find it sad and disgraceful,' he added.
According to AFP, Kerry's remarks were in response to Snowden's first television interview, broadcast by NBC, in which the technology expert recounts how he stole and leaked a trove of classified documents revealing the NSA's program of phone and Internet surveillance.
'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 says, in an excerpt of the interview released this week by NBC.
Snowden said he had worked covertly as 'a technical expert' for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, as well as a trainer for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Snowden, who has been charged in the United States with espionage, was granted asylum by Russia in August 2013 after shaking the American intelligence establishment to its core with a series of leaks on mass surveillance in the United States and around the world.
NSA whistleblower Snowden tells NBC he worked abroad undercover
Former American National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden who had passed documents about the NSA'selectronic surveillance programs to the media and who was granted asylum in Russia last year has rejected US authorities' assertions that he had been ostensibly an ordinary systems administrator.
'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 the NBC television network in an interview, the excerpts from which were shown on Tuesday.
Last year, when Snowden began to pass data on a global spying program being conducted by the American intelligence to the media, US administration officials, in an attempt to hush up the scandal, began to play down his role, stating that he had not held any high-level position in US intelligence. They referred to Snowden as a 'systems administrator' while US President Barack Obama told reporters in June last year: 'No, I'm not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.'
Meanwhile, according to Snowden himself, the assertions that he had been 'a low-level systems administrator' were 'somewhat misleading'.
Snowden related that as a specialist in the field of computer technology he had carried out assignments in US government interests at high levels, including as a secret agent of the CIA and the NSA, and also as a lecturer in a counterintelligence academy for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
'I am a technical expert. 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 from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top,' the now 30-year-old Snowden pointed out.
The interview with him, recorded in Moscow last week, will be shown in full by the NBC on Thursday, May 29, at 06:00, Moscow time. The interview, as the NBC's statement emphasizes, is the first one given by the former NSA contractor to an American TV network.
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