'Edward Snowden, in an exclusive interview with 'Nightly News' anchor Brian Williams, is fighting back against critics who dismissed him as a low-level hacker — saying he was 'trained as a spy' and offered technical expertise to high levels of government.

'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 said in the interview.'.