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Snowden Says He Was a Spy, Not Just an Analyst

posted by NCommander on Sunday June 01 2014, @11:24PM   
from the the-tangled-web dept.

mendax writes:

The New York Times is reporting:

Edward J. Snowden says he was not merely a "low-level analyst" writing computer code for American spies, as President Obama and other administration officials have portrayed him. Instead, he says, he was a trained spy who worked under assumed names overseas for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

Mr. Snowden's claims were made in a television interview to be broadcast Wednesday evening by NBC News. They added a new twist to the yearlong public relations battle between the administration and Mr. Snowden, who is living under asylum in Moscow to escape prosecution for leaking thousands of classified files detailing extensive American surveillance programs at home and abroad.

"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," Mr. Snowden told Brian Williams of NBC News, in an excerpt released in advance of the full interview.

• Re:Can't Speak for NSA, But the CIA is Cheesy(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Monday June 02 2014, @05:57AM

  by c0lo (156) on Monday June 02 2014, @05:57AM (#50098) Journal

  Going into the whole affair, I had spoken to a couple friends who were professors and had written dossiers for the CIA on Iran and such, who told me the reality of life as an agent was endless bureaucracy and paperwork. Makes sense, right? Also, I had the obvious question about how effective such a clandestine role could possibly be when the first thing I would do as a foreign counter-intelligence officer would be to watch absolutely everyone connected with an American embassy or consulate like a hawk.
  ...
  It wasn't two weeks later that I read an expose in Foreign Affairs by a former CIA covert officer doing that very role in North Africa who utterly panned the Agency's methods and 100% confirmed my own doubts about the place. About a month after that, there was a picture of the woman I had interviewed with on the cover of the New York Times, arrested by the Russian FSB for espionage.

  I seem to recall watching this documentary [wikipedia.org].

  --
  https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

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