Snowden denies being used by Russian spies

WASHINGTON, Thursday

Former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden said he had no relationship with the Russian government and had given Moscow no intelligence documents after nearly a year of asylum there.

“I’m not supported by the Russian government. I’m not taking money from the Russian government,” Mr Snowden told NBC’s Brian Williams, in his first interview with a U.S. television network that aired yesterday evening.

Mr Snowden said he destroyed classified materials before transiting to a Moscow airport.

“I took nothing to Russia, so I could give them nothing.”

But former NSA Director Keith Alexander said earlier this month that it was likely Mr Snowden was under the control of Russian intelligence agencies.

“I think he is now being manipulated by Russian intelligence. I just don’t know when that exactly started or how deep it runs,” Mr Alexander said in an interview with the Australian Financial Review newspaper.

LEAKED DOCUMENTS

Mr Snowden is believed to have taken 1.7 million computerised documents. The leaked documents revealed massive programmes run by the NSA that gathered information on emails, phone calls and Internet use, in many cases, by hundreds of millions of Americans.

He was charged last year in the United States with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified intelligence to an unauthorised person.

Mr Snowden said he would like to go home, saying “If I could go anywhere in the world, that place would be home.”

But he added he would apply for an extension as his one-year asylum in Russia expires on August 1.

US officials said Mr Snowden was welcome to return to the United States if he wanted to face justice for leaking details of massive US intelligence-gathering programmes.

WORKED COVERTLY

US Secretary of State John Kerry invited Snowden to “man up and come back to the United States.”

“If he has a complaint about what’s the matter with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case,” Mr Kerry told the CBS “This Morning” programme.

In the interview, Mr Snowden defended himself against claims minimising his intelligence experience.

“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,” he said.

He said he had worked covertly as “a technical expert” for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, as well as as a trainer for the Defence Intelligence Agency.

“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,” he said.

“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.”