ROUGH CUT (NO REPORTER NARRATION)
Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked details of massive U.S. intelligence-gathering programs, said in a U.S. TV interview he "was trained as a spy" and had worked undercover overseas for U.S. government agencies.
In an advance excerpt of his interview in Moscow with "NBC Nightly News" that aired on Tuesday (May 27), Snowden rejected comments by critics that he was a low-level analyst.
"Well, it's no secret that the U.S. tends to get more and better intelligence out of computers nowadays than they do out of people," Snowden told NBC news anchor Brian Williams.
"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."
Describing himself as a "technical expert," Snowden said: "I don't work with people. I don't recruit agents. What I do is I put system
